uber.la

So for me on the Mac, it's FireFox. Why, because just to recreate my favorites tool bar would take me a long time. Not to mention the passwords that are saved DEEP inside FF.

So I love some things about Chrome on the Mac and I admit Safari and Chrome do seem faster than FF. BUT… Is that just because I have so many plug-ins and extensions running on FF?

And what about GEARS? If you are reading this, you are most likely pretty techie. And probably you run a blog of some sort and understand what Google Gears is. If you don't that's okay, this will be quick.

First Chrome says:

And then Safari says,

So Google Gears is major caching for applications. And it works great with WordPress to speed up every part of the process from writing to managing your blog by keeping some of the data files locally on your hard drive. So that it doesn't have to go to the cloud every single time you have to do anything. It really works. So how is it that Google's one Chrome browser doesn't support Google Gears? I don't know.

On the PeeCee side I've been having the same issues, which browser to use. Of course, you swap out Safari for the grand daddy of old school browsers, the browser everyone loves to hate because they do it sooooo bad, IE. (pick your flavor 5, 6, 7 or 8)

On the Windows side, and I'm using 7, IE had a lock on anything that deals with Microsoft code. If your company uses SharePoint, you will have to run WIN and IE to make use of anything beyond remedial access.

It didn't have to be this way. And back in the day, when IE and Netscape were duking it out for supremacy they would often leap-frog each other in terms of speed and features. Then IE 3 happened and the wheels fell off the browser race. Much like Windows does today, Microsoft likes to play with others, but often does not play fairly. Microsoft began to bloat IE with features that nobody wanted, and in the process slowed the browsing experience and gave Netscape (then owned by AOL) a glimpse of hope, and they also started making website built with their programming tools work great in IE and not-so-great in everything else. They are still doing this.

So what do you have running your daily web? As my needs get more and more extensive I have come to a cross OS system that is way to complex and at the moment creates more slow-downs rather than efficiencies. But here's what I run.

Mac FF for 95% of my web work. And WIN7 IE 8 for the other 5%. That's Windows 7 running on a Mac under Parallels, of course.

It's far from a perfect world. And add into the mix my business computer (provided by my employer, WCG) and my personal computer. And my browsing experience is less than ideal. In fact my whole GTD thing is pretty bad at the moment.

Well, this week I came to believe in one quickening process. I do email almost exclusively on my Blackberry. (Try that on you iPhone!) So I can be running whatever on my laptop, on either laptop, and my email and calendar run on my phone. What's really cool about this is, brevity. If I have to type it on my BB I am going to get to the point.

I guess if I had an iPhone I'd have to tell everyone, "excuse the errors –i'm so frakin cool– i'm using my iPhone."

Now… change that to an iPad and I'm seriously considering yet another system integration. Oh joy!

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/browser-war

–this post edited using Chrome on a Mac–

Tags: AOL, browser war, chrome, faster than FireFox?, firefox, IE, IE bugs, IE sucks, IE3, internet explorer, iPad-iWay!, iphone, microsoft, my favorites, netscape, perfect world. if I had an iPhone, poor Opera, safari, sharepoint, stuck with