Google has also led the way in adopting such security features as letting you confirm your logins at sites with USB security keys, although Safari, Firefox and Edge now support them, too.īut in day-to-day use, your bigger risk is not your choice of browser among those four but in ignoring its automatic security updates. Edge now using Chrome’s open-source foundation should boost its security.
Google’s Chrome browser, however, has compiled an outstanding record at resisting hacking attempts, thanks both to a solid architecture and frequent updates – it was the only browser among the big four to escape unscathed at last year’s Pwn2Own hacking competition. On an older Mac, I didn’t need to consult the macOS Activity Monitor: An hour into that 10-page test, Chrome had locked up and no longer responded to any input. Windows’ Task Manager app showed Firefox the most efficient, with Edge in between – even though Microsoft’s browser is now built on the same open-source framework as Google’s.
Computing power has increased exponentially over the early-1990s machines that labored to run NCSA Mosaic, but we still see browsers burden computers – just not equally.Īfter an hour leaving Chrome, Firefox and Edge on a Windows 10 laptop open to pages on 10 popular sites (USA TODAY, Google, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Reddit, Wikipedia, CNN, LinkedIn and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Chrome was the worst offender in processor and memory use.
