The best web browsers
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Picking a web browser isn’t like picking an operating system or smartphone ecosystem. Unlike choosing MacOS, Windows, or Chrome OS, where your choices are mutually exclusive, switching between browsers isn’t quite so jarring. Picking the best browsers is comparatively easy — in fact, by the time you finish reading this paragraph, you could download each major browser on the market today.
Really. You can read all the stats, benchmarks, and speed tests, but the right browser for you is the one that feels right. The one that provides everything you want, where you want it. If you’re still undecided, or if you’re in the early stages of browser-curiosity, read on. We’ve broken down the best browsers on the market today and boiled them down to their bare bones.
Chrome is ubiquitous — and for good reason. With a robust feature set, full Google Account integration, a thriving extension ecosystem, and a reliable suite of mobile apps, it’s easy to see why Chrome is the gold standard for web browsers. Chrome even blocks some ads that don’t conform to accepted industry standards.
Chrome also boasts some of the best mobile integration available. With a mobile app available on every major platform, it’s easy to keep your data in sync, and so seamlessly browsing between multiple devices is a breeze. Sign into your Google account on one device and all your Chrome bookmarks, saved data, and preferences come right along. Even which extensions are active stays in sync across devices. It’s a standard feature you can find on other platforms, but Chrome’s integration is second to none.
Google just released Chrome 69, celebrating the browser’s 10th birthday with a significant visual redesign and some nice new features. The user interface has been rounded and smoothed out, losing all of its previous sharper edges and harsh angles for a gentler and more attractive aesthetic. Tabs are easier to identify thanks to more visible favicons, perfect for anyone who typically keeps open a large number of tabs.
In addition, Chrome’s password manager now automatically generates and recommends strong passwords when a user creates a new account on a web page. The search bar, or Omnibox, now provides “rich results” comprised of useful answers to questions when they’re typed in, calculator results, sporting event scores, and more. Finally, favorites are now more accessible, and they’re now manageable on the New Tab page.
What’s the bottom line? Chrome is fast, free, light, and even better looking. With a thriving extension ecosystem, it’s as fully featured or as pared down as you want it to be. Everything is right where it should be, privacy and security controls are laid out in plain English, and the browser just gets out of your way.
If you’re not sure which browser you should be using, you should be using Chrome.
Firefox comes in a close second — avery close second. Mozilla has been taking real strides in making its browser a truly modern way to surf from site to site, with efforts like its recent upgrade toFirefox Quantumand the VR-focused alternative, Firefox Reality. The latest version of Mozilla’s familiar old standby rebuilds the browser’s UI from the ground up, offering a cleaner, more modern take on what a web browser should be, even introducing a password-free browsing experience.
The changes aren’t just skin deep, though. There’s some impressive engineering going on behind the scenes. Firefox Quantum is designed to leverage multi-core processors in ways that its competitors just aren’t. It’s not going to make a huge difference in your day-to-day browsing, but the Mozilla Corporation hopes it’s going to give it an edge moving forward. By engineering for the futurenow, Firefox Quantum is in a better position to take advantage of quicker and quicker processors as they come out year after year.
Beneath those changes, it’s still the same Firefox we all know and love. It’s a capable browser, with a deep catalog of extensions and user interface customization. The new Firefox Mobile app also received the Quantum treatment, so it’s quicker and more streamlined than ever before. Grab the mobile Firefox app and you’ll be able to share bookmarks between devices, but you have to sign up for a separate Firefox account, and managing settings across platforms isn’t as seamless as it is in Chrome.
Even with the recent overhaul, Firefox is a comfortable, familiar standby. There’s a bit of a fringe benefit, too. Because it’s been around longer than Chrome, some older web apps — the likes of which you might encounter at your university or workplace — work better on Firefox than they do on Chrome. For that reason, it never hurts to keep it around.
As a primary browser, Firefox doesn’t offer much that Chrome doesn’t, but its latest update is making it a very compelling alternative if you’re in the mood for something a little different.
Also a venerable browser and popular alternative, Opera shares much of Chrome’s DNA. Both browsers are built on Google’s Chromium engine, and as a result, they have a very similar user experience. Both feature a hybrid URL/search bar, and both are relatively light and fast.
The differences appear when you start to look at Opera’s built-in features. Where Chrome relies on an extension ecosystem to provide functionality users might want, Opera has a few more features baked right into the browser itself. It also recently introduced a predictive website pre-load ability, and a new Instant Search feature isolates search results in their own window while the current page fades into the background — letting users more easily focus on the research task at hand.
As of Opera 55, you can also install Chrome extension from the Chrome web store. That means that not only can you run the same extensions as if you were using Chrome, but discovering and installing extensions is just as easy as on Google’s popular browser. If Chrome’s wide variety of extensions are important to you, then Opera becomes an intriguing alternative.
Opera also features a built-in “Stash” for saving pages to read later. There’s no need to sign up for a Pocket or Evernote account to save a page for later reading. Similarly, Opera features a speed dial menu which puts all your most frequently visited pages in one place. Chrome also does this but only on a blank new tab.
You can see that we’re well into hair-splitting territory, which is why it’s important to remember that your choice of browser is, more than any other service or app you use on a daily basis, entirely dependent on your personal preferences — what feels most right for you. Opera has a unique look and feel, and it combines some of the best features of Firefox and Chrome.
Edgeresembles Internet Explorer 11, though with even smaller borders, fewer icons, and a streamlined toolbar designed to mirror Microsoft’s new Windows 10 UI aesthetic. A solitary address-search bar also runs the width of the page, along witha trio of headline features that include excellent PDF capabilities, ebook reader support with Windows Store tie-ins, Windows Ink support, reading view, and Cortana integration.
It’s ultimately the next generation of Internet Explorer, in that it’s the default Windows web browser. With Edge, Microsoft continues to roll out new platform-specific features, like support for its AI-assistant Cortana. Rather than just leaving it to languish and tossing out an occasional security patch, Edge receives a lot of TLC fromMicrosoft, especially when it comes to efficiency. Microsoft often claims it’s the best browser for maintaining laptop battery life.
On the downside, Edge has relatively slim extension support, and it doesn’t allow for much customization. While quick, its pared-down interface can feel a littletoo bare-bones at times. Note that Microsoft has increasingly robust iOS and Android versions, and so keeping your bookmarks and passwords in sync while you’re on the go is finally a possibility with Edge.
If you’re looking for something a bit more experimental than Chrome or Firefox, just fire up Edge and see what it can do. You might be surprised. And with each major Windows 10 update, such as the recent Windows April update, Edge gains new features that are worth a look.
Vivaldi is unique. No two Vivaldi users will have the same setup. When you run it for the first time, you’re guided through a setup process that lays out your browser in a way that makes sense for you. You get to choose where your tabs and address bar go, and you get to choose if you want browser tabs displayed at the top of the page or in a separate side-panel. This is a browser built from the ground up to deliver a unique user experience, and for the most part, it succeeds.
This browser excels at customization, and you can choose from a variety of tasteful themes that don’t feel dated or out-of-place on a modern PC in addition to the aforementioned UI choices. It also has some stand out privacy-enhancing features, like a recent team up with DuckDuckGo, to make the non-tracking search tool the default option when in privacy mode.
If you’re tired of the usual suspects, and want to try a browser that takes a different approach to web browsing, then check out Vivaldi. We certainly enjoyed Vivaldi when we gave it a go.
That said, there is a big caveat: It’s limited to desktop use for the time being. With support on Windows 10, MacOS, and Linux, Vivaldi is currently only available on desktop platforms, or tablets running full versions of Windows. No mobile browsingmeans no shared settings, and that’s a problem for a lot of users.
It’s also meant for power users, so a lot of people might feel confused or let down by the browser. Vivaldi is unapologetic about this, but it’s hard to recommend Vivaldi when it can overwhelm first-time users with its wide selection of options.
All right, so you’ve seen our recommendations — but if you still want to know more, check out our test results below.
You’ll notice we’ve dropped both Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari web browser from our comparison. Microsoft’s aging browser has had some improvements over the years, but it’s no longer the default browser on Windows 10 and it doesn’t offer much beyond the bare minimum. It only exists today because some companies need it for legacy applications. And, while Apple’s Safari web browser is still used by many Mac users, it’s no longer updated on Windows, and so we’ve removed it from the list.
Most browsers are compatible with web standards and handle performance with relative ease. A casual user probably won’t notice a difference in the rendering speed between today’s modern browsers, as all six browsers are much faster and leaner than those ofa few years ago — and becomeeven more so with eachnew build. Below are our benchmark results for the sixbrowsers, with bold text indicatingthe winner for each category.
We ran the following benchmarks on a desktop with an Intel Core i7-4770K processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. All browsers were the most current production versions as of when the tests were run and all were at their default settings.
Google Chrome, currently at version 69, had long dominated the HTML5 compliance benchmark, but Opera caught up a few versions ago. Vivaldi is close behind in second, while Firefox and Edge are far less compliant than the leaders.
The Jetstream benchmark — which focuses on modern web applications — has a surprising winner: Edge, which has been well in the lead for months. Microsoft continues to work hard on optimizing itsnew browser, and it shows with this test at least. Firefox maintains its second place position, with Chrome and Opera fighting for third. Vivaldi manages only a last-place finish.
Two Javascript benchmarks, Mozilla’s Kraken benchmark and Google’s Octane 2.0,give us split results. Firefox takes a very strong first-place finish in Kraken with Chrome and Opera very close to each other in second and third place. In Octane, Chrome takes over the lead Opera and Vivaldi nipping on its heels in second and third place. Firefox and Edge round things out.
Finally, we also tested how much RAM each browser uses, both with no tabs open and then with 10 tabs open accessing the same popular sites. We made sure that each browser had no extensions running, and we let each browser settle in before looking at its memory use. For the test with 10 tabs open, we averaged memory use when all of the tabs were first opened and then five minutes later, to account for any variability.
It’s not a scientific test, but it should be sound enough to give an idea of which browsers are the most and least efficient in terms of taking up your RAM. We found Vivaldi to use the least RAM both when first opened and with a full load of tabs. Firefox used the most memory all by itself but was the second most efficient with all of the tabs open, whereas Edge used the second least amount of RAM by itself and the most RAM with all 10 tabs open.
The most valuable tool for secure browsing is user discretion, especially when you consider that every web browser has encountered security breachesin the past. In particular, Internet Explorer and Chrome’s reputation for protecting users’ security and privacy credentials is spotty at best.
Chrome, Safari, Vivaldi, Opera, and Firefox all rely on Google’s Safe Browsing API to detect potentially dangerous sites. Thanks to constant updates, Mozilla, Chrome, and Opera all make constant security improvements.
All browsers offer a privatesession option, too. Private sessions prevent the storage of history, temporary internet files, and cookies. Browser support for Do Not Track remains spotty, and it’s worth noting that a 2013 NSS studyshowed only Internet Explorer blocking trackers used on more than 90 percent of potentially hazardous sites.
Mozilla has made some strides to try and differentiate itself from the others with a real focus on privacy in recent years. It evenrecently debuted a Facebook Container to make it harder for the social network to harvest a user’s information.
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