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Choosing the best browser for Windows 10
Before you make a decision about what browser to install, take a look at what works best for Windows 10…
Edge, Windows 10’s default browser has Basic, Balanced and Strict privacy settings, and a customisable start page. You can see your most-visited sites on an otherwise blank page and enjoy new background photo every day. You can also get news, weather, sports and finance information personalised to you.
With the Collections sidebar you can soon drag and download your webpages, images and notes into Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word. Microsoft Edge will likely be second nature if you’ve had a Windows device for a while, and as it has been designed specifically for them, it’s a natural fit. IF you’re after something a little more specialist, read on to find the best one for your needs.
It’s no overstatement to say Google Chrome’s the most popular web browser for Windows 10, and one of the fastest around. With Tab Freezing, Chrome pauses what’s going on in the background tabs to focus on what you’re looking at, which uses less memory making things appear more quickly.
You can also have multiple Google News, Gmail and YouTube accounts accessed at the same time with the Multi-Login feature. This won’t affect your bookmarks or your favourites, as these are kept separate, giving you control over your own. There’s less you can customise on Chrome, but you can fiddle with your colours, themes and dark mode in Settings. Also security’s a key feature, which means you can find out if your email’s compromised, detect password leaks and dangerous content to block.
Even if you’re using older websites they’ll load much sooner on Microsoft Firefox than Google Chrome, which uses more memory despite being newer. From toolbar buttons to the colour of the window, why not jazz it up with Theme add-ons? If you’re sharing your Windows 10 device, more of you can be signed in at the same time on the websites you’re using – the Multi-Account Container even lets you manage your Favourites and bookmarks separately from each other.
You can save web pages to read later by clicking the Pocket button on the address bar or use the Share button, not something offered on all browsers. Reader View is yet another reason why Firefox is such a great alternative to Chrome. You can also get a distilled page view which strips ads, videos and all distractions away, so you can focus uninterrupted.
With a built-in VPN and a wallet for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Opera has some interesting features which mark it out from the rest, although it may not be for everyone. Most other browsers rely more heavily on extensions, even Mozilla’s Firefox, which is why Opera’s one of the best Windows 10 browsers. If gaming is more your thing, why not install Opera GX for Windows 10? You can have your fun with features for Twitch and find Razor Chroma support.
Or go to town, organising as many folders and subfolders as you want. You’ll see thumbnails of these bookmarks in a grid on Opera. And if you close your last tab by accident, don’t worry – unlike most web browsers, Opera stays open.
You can also pin your most visited websites as tiles on your home screen to keep them all in one place, which is more convenient than opening a fresh tab to see your favourites on Google Chrome. So you can have WhatsApp, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and preferred Personal News sources, ready to go with this quick-access side bar – all the services you use most often.
Vivaldi teamed up with DuckDuckGo to make the non-tracking search tool your default when you’re in privacy mode, but really, you’ll choose this browser for the customisation features – and with it you get more ways to personalise your set up than almost every other browser. The Windows 10 version installs in seconds. Open it for the first time, and you’ll be guided through how to customise everything. From your colour scheme (light or dark), tab-bar position (top, side, bottom) and Start page background.
You can also see where all your time’s going by checking your internet history graph. Another handy feature is that you can easily find the tab your looking for, if you’ve got loads open, as Vivaldi colour matches it to the website. Picture blue for Facebook, red for the BBC News for example. A simple idea, but one that will save you frustration in the long run.
Striking fear into the heart of the minimalists, this browser offers a bumper crop of features. Download videos, music and photos off any web page with Resource Snigger, manage passwords for multiple accounts with Magic Fill, grab a screen shot of the whole browser or select a bit of the window with Snap. Sync your bookmarks, tabs, passwords on all your Windows 10 devices and see what tabs are open on each, using SkyNote.
You won’t find a browser with as many cloud storage, syncing and sharing options as Maxthon Cloud Browser, which makes it rather unique now web browsers tend to look and feel more streamlined and simple. Adblock Plus and a safe URL checker are included here, and plenty more tools. There’s screen-capture, night mode, notepad, calculator and Reader mode. To take full advantage of the features, sign up for Maxthon Passport as prompted when you’ve installed it on Windows 10.
One of the newer browsers, Brave blocks all ads on every webpage making your browser feel even faster. But Brave’s Rewards program means you shouldn’t feel at all guilty that websites are losing out on advertising money. You’ll get Basic Attention Tokens, which you can give to more than 70,000 websites, including publishers such as The Guardian and Wikipedia.
It’s equally good news for your privacy. No one can track you on Brave, so you can choose from the 20 search engines it has and know you’re not being watched. And like Opera, there’s even a built-in cryptocurrency wallet included.
The fastest web browser for Windows 10
Chrome’s got everyone beat on desktop. By pre-downloading content on your PC or laptop, it’s able to load web pages faster – which explains why it’s so greedy for memory on your device, compared to the rest of the Windows 10 browsers.
Chrome’s so fast that most browsers are now borrowing its code – Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and more are quicker because they’re running on Chromium, which means you can use Google Chrome add-ons with these web browsers too. Though they need less memory than Google Chrome.
But for your mobile, Mozilla Firefox is slightly faster and more efficient when you have several open tabs. Opera Turbo compresses images and internet data to load faster on your mobile, but it’s not quite enough to catch up.
Bottom line: What’s the best browser for Windows 10?
For speed and security, you really can’t go wrong with Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. But when it comes to personalising your browser and organising your tabs, Vivaldi’s unbeatable for Windows 10 – if you have fewer than 5 open, stacking could be a time and sanity-saving feature.
Before you make your decision, also find out how well your new browser can sync and connect all your devices together. Unless you enjoy emailing links to yourself, losing your place on an article, and forgetting passwords for websites, you’ll want to use the same browser on your laptop, phone and tablet, so they can share your bookmarks, browsing history, encrypted passwords and more details.
Sign into Microsoft Edge, for example, and you’ll have an easy way to share websites to any of your Windows 10 devices. The browser can sync your data across your devices, while supporting Microsoft 356 and your free Hotmail Live account. Meanwhile on the Mozilla Firefox mobile app, you can be reading a webpage on your desktop PC and have it open on your Windows 10 mobile or the other way around. Forever unique, you can connect the Opera Touch app to your desktop by scanning a QR code, and use My Flow to send your notes and web pages from device to device.