Inspection Support Network

As Google begins a national campaign in an attempt to educate the world on what a Web Browser is I thought we could take a few minutes to describe what a web browser is and why it is important for the Inspection Support Network™.

Think of the Internet as a busy football game; where you are there with thousands and thousands of other people. Everyone at the game is a different place on the Internet, there’s Toyota.com over there in section 200 seat 5, Yahoo! over in section 300 seat 32 and that special site you like to go to over in upper deck section 400 seat 1. In order to view any of the sites in any detail you need to use a pair of binoculars.

A web browser is your pair of binoculars for the Internet. If you want to look at a web site; you tell your browser go visit (for example) youtube.com the web browser finds, locates and zooms in on youtube.com. Thus, the web browser is your view(er) at the Internet.

Just like binoculars there are a lot of different brands of web browsers to chose from, there’s the tried and true browser, the mobile browsers, and the browsers “the kids are using.” There are a lot of them to chose from!

Here’s a quick, down-and-dirty look at what brands of “Internet Binoculars” are available and our opinion of them. Now, like all opinions they are open for argument and conversation; but our team deals with these browsers all day long so I’ll dispense a little experience summary from our team of programmers to you:

Internet Explorer – Created by Microsoft and it comes with Windows, currently you’ll find versions six, seven and now eight out in the wild. Microsoft has made this browser for years and in the early days of Internet Explorer 6 it was the king of the castle. But, sadly, they rarely updated it while everyone else grew their own browsers. Today it is by far the worst browser you could chose to use; even Internet Explorer 8 is, candidly, horrible!

FireFox – a widely used open source project. It is a great browser that runs well, is highly adjustable and a good choice for browsing. (Download FireFox)

Apple’s Safari – a widely used browser for Mac users; it has a great “engine” under the hood but suffers from some of the overly simplified keep-it-simple “Apple-isms” but a great choice regardless. (Download Safari)

Chrome – a fast browser based on the “guts” of Apple’s Safari, but faster than Safari and frankly the fastest way to browse these days on a PC. Google has done a great job with it! (Download Google Chrome)

Opera – a quick little browser made by a collection of passionate developers; it just can’t seem to get a foothold and has never really taken off (the developers and community might argue, but it’s just not mainstream. (Download Opera)

Often we get the question “what browser do you use” — it is a two part answer, (1) when we “work” on the Inspection Support Network™ we use FireFox; and (2) when browsing or reading email: Google’s Chrome!

If you have questions about the browsers feel free to comment below!