Browser wars

Woot! It looks like wysiwyg editing is back on Blogger!

Anyway, as I mentioned last post, I recently installed Chrome on my PC. Up till then, I had been using Internet Explorer - something which you might not have known or guessed unless you had seen the stats on wikipedia which mentions that approximately 90% of people in China use IE. Wow.

Recently, I had a friend who expressed surprise, and not a little disgust, to hear that I was using IE. What I told him at the time was that I couldn't be bothered downloading a new browser just for the sake of switching. Furthermore, I'd always heard that some websites are only optimised to work with IE which means that even if I installed a new browser, I would still have to keep IE around just in case. Admittedly, this is based on just hearsay as I don't have any actual experience of this.

And then Microsoft released their latest version of IE. Which meant I had to download a new browser anyway. At this point, I also started to question whether it was really the case anymore that some websites only worked with IE.

So with that seed of doubt in my mind, I also downloaded and installed Chrome. And overall, I have to say that I like it. I don't know if this is a problem with the latest release of IE but the new version of IE doesn't look particularly great in terms of its color scheme whereas Chrome actually looks quite nice. In terms of functionality, both seem fairly close although I haven't started to play around with any add-ons yet so I'm not sure how big an impact that would have. And more importantly (from a functionality point of view), I have yet to encounter any website that didn't render properly in Chrome.

Another criteria people often use to compare browsers is speed. However, I don't have any tools to measure this myself so have to rely on other websites which seem to indicate that Chrome is faster than IE.

In short, this blog post brought to you via Google (Blogger and Chrome).