What's the Best Internet Browser to Surf the Web?
Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari... We rate the Big 5 of the Internet browser brigade to help you decide which should be your window to the cyber-world.
Feature Set
There are not many extra features in Safari that other browsers
don't have. The usual set includes tabbed browsing a smart enough
bookmark manager, and history management. We didn't find the search engine
integration very impressive with only two search services provided. Adding
more search service providers was not that easy. But it did have a good
password/ form manager that was easy to use. There was also no support for
add-ons. All-in-all it didn't fare too well in comparison with the others
in terms of features and here too Safari was at the bottom.
Fast Track
The only area where Safari gave the other browsers a run for
their money was in the Speed and Performance section. In the browser
startup time test, Safari was close behind Chrome, even beating it in the
warm start test. And in the CSS test, it beat the other browsers hands
down clocking only 47ms. Content-heavy sites brought out Safari's ugly
side as browsing became quite sluggish Compatibility is not an issue with
Safari as it passed the aCID2 test and got a reasonable 75 in aCID3. the
browser did use quite a bit of system memory though.
Safe Passage
The security options in Safari are very limited and we
couldn't find some essential security features like anti-phishing, malware
protection, and automatic updates. But surprisingly, it has a private
browsing option similar to IE8's In Private and Chrome's Incognito
feature. There is not much to talk about here except that it at least has
support for encryption and content blocking. In this section also, Safari
came last.
Net Worth
It's evident why Safari came last in our comparison. We really
feel that to be in contention, it needs a complete revamp.



