Web Browser of Choice
Here at Keyclicks Towers, most of us are PC users as opposed to Mac users. It’s nothing personal: it’s just the way we’ve been brought up. Notable exceptions to this ‘norm’ are our graphic designers such as Kathryn and Dimitri, who like most creative designers have being using Mac computers all their working lives (the design industry is traditionally a Mac stronghold).
Still, we don’t think any less of them!
So, like most of the PC populated planet (which includes just about all of our clients), we tend to use the products of Microsoft which includes the ever popular web browser Internet Explorer. This ships as standard in some version or other with Windows XP and Vista: as of writing version 7 (IE7) is the available format with version 8 waiting in the wings in beta format.
It’s worth pointing out at this stage of this article, that some of the Keyclicks team, remember when Microsoft were the ‘new kids on the block’ and IBM Lotus products such as Lotus AmiPro (word processing), Lotus 1-2-3 (spreadsheets), Lotus Freelance Graphics (presentations) and Lotus Approach (desktop database) dominated desktop business software back in ’94 and ’95 well before Microsoft Office took a grip.
Debbe even suggests that the current version of Microsoft’s Excel still doesn’t have some of the useful features that Lotus 1-2-3, its spreadsheet equivalent; had back in the mid 90s. Still that’s progress for you!
However, don’t get the wrong idea. Just because Microsoft dominates our desktops as it does yours, we’re not blind to other alternatives (and neither should you be).
When it comes to web browsers, I think there’s only one or two of us that has Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) set as the default web browser on their machines. The rest of us have Mozilla Firefox which started featuring stuff like tabbed browsing, changeable skins, RSS feed reading and third-party plug-ins, well before our friends at MS started to play catch-up with IE7 and from what we’ve seen so far continue to do so with IE8, currently in its beta format.
For Mac users, the Safari browser has been the tool of choice for web browsing for many a year so it was only a matter of time before someone at Apple suggested releasing a PC version which is what they’ve just done.
So being open minded to alternatives, we thought we’d give it a go and download the now stable version of Safari for the PC for a spin around the park (previous versions were found to be full of ‘bugs’ and not worthy of comment).
First impressions are good. The interface is clean and simple, but isn’t pretty and you can’t customise its look and feel with ‘skins’ as with Firefox, but hey; what it lacks in looks it makes up for in speed with page downloads much quicker than IE7. There are some nifty tools too with some good features built in as standard including the ‘tabbed browsing’ feature now familiar to IE7 and Firefox users, direct searches using Google from the browser address bar (although we couldn’t find a way to change the default search engine, which was a bit of a shame).
New is a feature called ‘SnapBack’ which allows you to instantly jump back to where you started browsing from. “What’s the point of that?” we first thought, but once the concept becomes familiar it’s a very useful feature, especially if you end up getting lost in a large and poorly constructed site, some 50 levels down from where you started off.
So, if you spend a lot of time surfing the web or simply want two good alternatives to Internet Explorer, why not download the two web browsers mentioned in this article:
Both are free to download from the links above. If nothing else it keeps Microsoft on their toes with some healthy competition.
Tags: apple safari, ie7, ie8, internet explorer, mozilla firefox, web browsers
