What Web Browser to use - the short version

For a variety of reasons, clients often come upon the need to ask the question: which web browser should I use? It's a complicated area with a long and storied history, but here's the short answer, for now.

With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft deemphasized Internet Explorer (IE) and began pushing its replacement, Microsoft Edge. Unfortunately, Edge wasn't quite ready for prime time at that point, and this allowed Google an opening, which they took. This, along with improvements in Chrome, meant, and still means, an increasing number of web pages aren’t even tested with IE anymore. With that, more and more pages don’t work well, or at all, with IE. Because Edge is still “new”, some pages don’t work with it, either. Guess who we’re left with?

Google has a dominant share of the browser market now. Most web pages work well with it, and since it's available on both Windows and MacOS, it's a good cross-platform browser for both Windows and MacOS. Firefox and Opera and other web browsers have their following, but their market share is in the low single digits. There are lots of arguments for and against Chrome based on other factors than usability, to be sure, but a browser you can't use might as well not be there at all.

So, for now, Chrome.

Microsoft continues to do things with Edge to make it competitive, and they've demonstrated with iOS their direction to provide software for Apple devices, so Edge could become more competitive as time goes on