Q: Whats the best Web Browser to use withEL Capitan?

Tthe one that comes with it and is integrated into the Opereting System and other built-in apps: Safari.

Safari, since it comes built into the operating system and best utilizes the advantages of the operating system.  Firefox is great, don't get me wrong, but I find it makes my computer run very hot, even when watching a 3 minute video on YouTube, and it also doesn't have the autocorrect feature I've come to rely on quite a bit, because I type extremely fast and sometimes misspell words.  Of course, you use what you want, it's your computer, but I think it would be wise to use the browser that comes with said computer.

Do you have a reason you don't want to use Safari?

I think it depends on what you want.  In my case, I use Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.  Safari has some great security features so I use it only for secure communications (banks and stuff).  The biggest weakness in Safari for me is that it is nearly impossible to control cookies.  This is another reason to only use it for specific sites that I don't mind getting cookies from (banks are about the only ones that don't have a slew of third party cookies that get dumped on your system).  Chrome and Firefox both have a great ability to control cookies.  A bit painful in that you need to know what cookies you want to accept and specify them.  Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it's not.  I think Firefox may actually do a little better job of keeping unwanted cookies at bay.  In all cases, I am a maniac about controlling cookies that I accept.  I probably should try Internet Explorer, once again, because it has the best control of cookies.  One can set it to prompt you about cookies and set to block or accept all cookies from a specific address or, you can block or accept on a case by case basis.  But, I'm not sure it works on Apple computers.  I also feel like Microsoft may have moved away from IE, so the versions are probably old.

Safari is fine for most of my needs, but there are Websites that will not work properly with Safari.  I find it best to have Google Chrome AND Firefox installed on the MacBook for those times.

My work often takes me to "closed" websites, meant for other professionals in my field, used to respond to questions I have, to configure products for my clients, and many other vendor-specific functions.  A number of vendors still restrict their support to Internet Explorer, and then it becomes a question of which of the three browsers I mentioned most closely appears to respond like IE does.

I do have Parallels on board here, with Windows 7 Pro -- so I can run the real IE, but I rarely do.

mrwheels

Why would Internet Explorer be available for Macs?  It's never been available for Apple computers, not ever.  IE is awful, if I may be so bold, and when I used PCs, from the time of my first one to my last one, I never used it.  I used Netscape and then Firefox once it became available.

pinkstones wrote:

 

Why would Internet Explorer be available for Macs?  It's never been available for Apple computers, not ever.

It was available for Mac for years but it never got past a version 5 I believe. On top of that it was actually not the worst browser, much better than Safari in it's early days.

If you never used IE, how do you know it is so awful?

I always have at least two browser open at all times. My main go to browser is FireFox, I leave the default browser set to Safari.

Might be more important to state Chrome seems to be the most resource intensive of them all, an not recommended.

You have to figure out our own workflow, but always advised to have at least 2-  this is your main app to reach out onto the web. If one app fail for some reason then your options become hobbled.

p.s. IE use to ship with Apple computers years ago. Thankful those days are gone.

I would suggest to continue using Safari as your main browser and install Firefox as an option if Safari has issues with a particular sites.

That's what I, and most of the people I know, do.

Why do you say Chrome is more resource intensive?  From a CPU%, Memory, and Energy, it seems quite sparing to me.  I can't say I've done a direct apples to apples comparison but...

... but... others have made the comparisons.

Heres one example with the key quote being "Safari lasts three and a half hours longer than Chrome."

http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/10/8381447/chrome-macbook-battery-life

http://bgr.com/2015/05/19/google-chrome-memory-leak-fix/