So chances are if you're surfing the web on your Mac you're doing it with Safari which
is the builtin web browser and that's what most people use.
It's what I use.
But there are other options.
The browser wars are still going on.
There are two major browsers that other Mac users use.
So we have Safari and that just comes with your Mac.
Another browser you can get is called Chrome.
So Chrome is from Goggle.
It shares a lot of the same code that Safari does.
The open source part.
The part that renders web pages and things like that.
So you're going to find that pages look very similar if not identical whether you use Goggle
Chrome or you use Safari.
So what's the advantage.
Well, the advantage to using Chrome is if you're using the Goggle Ecosystem, in other
words you're using Goggle's cloud services.
Maybe you also have an android phone.
Maybe you've got a Windows machine and you're using Chrome there since it's the most popular
browser on Windows.
You can then share things like passwords and bookmarks and all of that using your Goggle
account.
So if you want cross platform compatibility then you might want to use Chrome on each
operating system.
You can't use Safari on Windows anymore so you're kind of stuck using something like
Chrome across.
You can, of course, just use Safari Mac and Chrome on Windows.
That's fine.
But if you want to have information available across those platforms using Chrome might
be the way to do it.
Another browser that you can use is Firefox.
Firefox has been in the news recently because they just came out with a new version of the
Firefox browser.
You can get that for Mac as well.
It has a similar advantage in that you can get Firefox on Windows and on Mac but it doesn't
have quite the market share that Chrome has.
Chrome has really become the dominant browser at least for computers in general.
Although, of course, the dominate browser on Macs is clearly Safari since is comes preinstalled
on your Mac and most people won't move beyond that.
Now both Chrome and Firefox and Safari all have extensions.
But different extensions are available for each.
So if you're a developer sometimes Firefox can have an extension that you want or need
to be able to develop and the same thing with Chrome.
Now Firefox is going to sometimes look a little different than either Chrome or Safari on
your Mac because it's rendering things with a little bit different code.
But today, in 2017, things look pretty much the same as standards have been around for
a long time and the browsers all kind of render the HTML on each web page in the same way.
One big reason you may want to have multiple browsers available on your machine is that
every once in awhile you run into a website that doesn't work with Safari.
Safari is probably the strictest in terms of security.
So it's not giving access to some apps that may want to be able to access things for video
conferencing say or, you know, special security things or downloading things from certain
websites, viewing things using certain plugins.
It may not be available in Safari.
So having Firefox and Chrome is a good way to have a backup.
I've run into a few situations, usually in some pretty select environments, where I've
needed to have Chrome available so that I could view a webpage or download some content.
Now both Firefox and Chrome are free to download and easy to download.
They can live right along side Safari in your Applications folder.
It doesn't hurt to have them sitting there just for such an occasion.
Getting these apps is pretty easy.
For Chrome just go to Goggle.com/chrome or just search for Chrome Mac.
Firefox is the same kind of thing.
Mozilla.org is where you want to go and then there's a download link right there.
You can also just search for get Firefox and you'll find it as the top link.
So you can just download either of these for free and have them available.
Both also have mobile versions that you can get for iOS.
So you can add Chrome and you can add Firefox as alternative browsers to have on your iPhone
or iPad as well.
Now for the typical Mac user you're not going to need anything but Safari.
If you do use Chrome or Firefox on your Mac I'd love to hear why you use it.
So leave a comment here at MacMost.com and let me know why you prefer or why you sometimes
occasionally have to use Firefox or Chrome.