Browse & Search

Modern web browsers are so good these days, that it really comes down to personal preference and what you are used to, unless you want the extensions and applications unique to Chrome.

Google Chrome certainly has the most bells and whistles. Useful extensions include:

• Awesome Screenshot
• Feedly effectively replaced Google Reader
• Gmelius to tune Gmail's web interface and remove adverts
• Google Keep a useful note-keeper sync'ed between desktop and Android devices
• Google Translate
• TransOver hover over or select text to translate
• YouTube Video Downloader

But they can use quite a bit of memory, which can slow down your computer.

Some Chrome Apps (click on image to enlarge) are great, like the Music Player, others handy, and others I have not tried yet.

MS Internet Explorer has improved dramatically in the last few years, and is a very usable browser for Windows based machines, if sometimes intrusively cautious because of security risks. They now prefer their new simpler and sleeker Edge browser, which of course defaults to Bing search,

Mozilla Firefox is also excellent, but I really only use it to check compatibility, and to handle the odd Chrome problem site.

Safari As I use Chrome on both PC and Mac, I cannot really comment on Apple's stylish browser. A frustrating omission is its inability to print selected parts of web pages

Search

Like most of the world, I use Google for most of my searching. Google Cheatsheet can help narrow down your searches.

I set my home page to google.co.uk restricted to UK in the last year, which suits many of my searches. I can still use the navigation bar to do worldwide unrestricted searches.

I occasionally use Bing in MSIE, but not enough to see if it worth switching allegiance. Sometimes I prefer their maps to Google's.

There are tens of other search engines listed in my Chrome | Settings | Manage Search Engines, presumably added by sites I have visited, but I haven't tried them out yet.