Internet Browsers, Evaluations

Some people prefer one web browser over another. Because so many pop-ups occur when using Internet Explorer, we at SLO reference, spent a great deal of time each morning running AD-Aware so we could quarantine and junk the stuff our computer downloaded each day.

About a year ago we tried Firefox as our Internet browser and have been using it ever since.

This Spring 2005, the University of Pennsylvania Computing Department did a comparative study and report on browsers. This is part of their report (which can be found in full at www.upenn.edu/computing/eval/2005/webbrowser/rec-sup.html)

Summary:
On the Windows platform, the team recommends Firefox and supports Internet Explorer.
On the Macintosh platform, the team recommends both Firefox and Safari; a majority of testers preferred Firefox.
Opera receives an honorable mention on both platforms.

Informational Caveats:

1. Some BEN Financials users will need to use Internet Explorer on a PC (or via Virtual PC) to perform some specific actions.

For sites requiring IE on Windows, Firefox has a Windows-only extension that allows you to "View this page in Internet Explorer" or "Always view this page in Internet Explorer." Using this extension will launch the active window (or specified link) in Internet Explorer. If you choose to "Always view this page in Internet Explorer," any time you go to open that page (or click on a link for the specified page), it'll launch it in Internet Explorer.

2. Midway through the testing process, Mozilla froze its suite development to focus on Firefox. The team decided the Mozilla Suite browser should no longer be supported or recommended in favor of Firefox.

3. For Linux users, Firefox and Opera both run on Linux.

4. The team decided that Netscape version 8.0 released too late in the evaluation to merit much testing or discussion. Given that Mozilla is developing Firefox on it's own and it has begun to gain wide acceptance, the team decided to not to evaluate Netscape 8 further.

5. Both Safari and Opera announced significant upgrades at the end of the testing process; we should keep a collective eye on the development of these two products.

Gwen/OO-Ref