Schvenn.net

This is Apple's aesthetically pleasing and very competitive entry in the ongoing browser wars. It uses WebKit, which is one of the most stable and compliant browser core engines. I love the simplistic aspects of this browser and next to Opera, it's one of my favourites. I truly believe that we as PC users have neglected to embrace the visual aspects of our systems and really should put our video cards to work more, even in our daily desktop application usage. Safari's take on the website thumbnail gallery is one way that they do this. It's very cool.

After a while, reading your favourite blogs and news sites can become less like entertainment and more like work. Plus, if you don't have an excellent organizational system, you can forget about some. That means you can miss out on giveaways, contests and sales, too. That's no good. That's where news readers come in. Now, news readers have been around forever and some people say that RSS is dead, but I think that's a very uneducated way to look at the world. Blogs are rampant on the Internet and weeding through them can take hours, unless you use something like an RSS feed to simplify the process. I've tried many and FeedDemon is the best of the bunch. Using Google Reader to manage my feeds and using this program to synchronize my collection has greatly improved my reading habits. The only drawback to this program is that it uses the IE9 engine for it's browser and that's not something I'm thrilled about.

I'm not a huge fan of Chrome, but it is the sleekest and simplest browser. It's extensible as well. Most benchmarks show it to be the fastest browser, but it's actually too simple for my tastes. Well that and I'm a die hard Opera fan.

Firefox is the most popular and extensible alternate browser to Internet Explorer. I don't like it. It's become bulky and slow. Give me Opera or Chrome, instead.

Opera is quite frankly the best browser in existence. While it remains under-appreciated and under-utilized on personal computers, it has quickly become the only logical browser to use on most portable devices. It has been my personal favourite for nearly a decade, because of it's speed and power. It has a password manager, settings synchronizer, Torrent manager, built-in mouse gestures, speed-dial, file-server and an e-mail client. In fact, it has offered most of these before there were even plug-ins to add these types of functions to its competitors. Yet, even with all these extra features, it consistently tests faster than the competition in almost every category.

In order to get the same functionality out of the other 4 browsers, you'd have to install at least 2 or 3 other programs, each of which degrades the performance of the program. So, I laugh when the so-called experts run their browser speed tests and find that "Ooh, Mozilla beat Opera by 1/10th of a second in this category!", because they fail to realize or at least, choose to ignore the fact that they're testing a bare-bones application against a full-featured suite.

People who download browsers like Firefox and Chrome usually grab a handful of add-ons in order to increase functionality. In doing so, their once fast browser now springs memory leaks and compatability issues and starts to slow down. A true life speed test would be to beef up the other browsers with even one or two add-ons in order to increase the functionality to the level at which most users are accustomed and then compare the results. Opera would no doubt come out way in the lead, everytime.

Needless to say, Opera is my only choice for browsing the Internet. I use the others only for testing cross-browser compatibility of website designs and the occasional functionality glitch you get with a website that was designed with certain non-compliant web standards or proprietary functions in mind. As you may have noticed, I've also made the screenshot of this browser larger, just so that you'd notice it quicker, not that this lengthy review shouldn't have the same effect, but still the more Opera converts I can make, the better.