Chrome

After many years as a happy user, I switched from Chrome to Firefox. How did that go? Astonishingly well! Here are some notes I took in the process. My History of Changing Browsers Netscape to Internet Explorer I think I started out with Netscape Navigator on Windows 95. My first change of browsers happened with Windows NT 4 and Internet Explorer 4. That was a great browser! Everybody switched to IE in the following years. Microsoft’s domination of the browser market (yes, that was a reality for many years) started right there with IE4. Internet Explorer was successful not only because it was bundled with the operating system, but also because it was a good application.

An architecture overview of current browsers on Windows: Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. In case you are wondering: I did not include Edge because it is currently being transitioned to the Chromium rendering engine, which might change a few things. I did include Internet Explorer because it is still the default browser in many enterprises.

How do popular browsers differ in compute footprint when running animations? In this article I am comparing the CPU as well as the GPU utilization of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. To make things more interesting I tested GPU performance on Nvdia and Intel.

A while ago I wrote about the dangers of using unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. Right now I am connected to such a network and trying hard not to give away authentication cookies or passwords - information that would make it trivial even for amateurs to take over one or several of my accounts.