Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
Most people need no introduction to the search behemoth’s browser, Google Chrome. It has an attractive design and is quick to load pages. Most website codes now target Chrome, so compatibility is never an issue. Chrome is available for all major platforms, and the mobile version can sync bookmarks, passwords, and settings.
Chrome doesn’t have many unique browsing features, though the search company recently added a Google Lens panel for searching images on webpages and AI-powered tools to organize tabs by similarity and generate images for custom themes. These capabilities trail Edge’s Copilot features, but Google has more Gemini features in the works. There’s no built-in VPN, cryptocurrency locker, notes feature, screenshot tool, or reading mode.
After years of threatening to do so, Google is finally (and controversially) adopting the Manifest v3 extension standard, thereby removing the API function that allows ad-blocker software to function fully. All extensions, not just ad-blockers, must adhere to this new standard. There are some good things about it, however. It promises to lead to more efficient resource use and block online code from running extensions.
Chrome’s ill-fated Privacy Sandbox, which tried to cater to both ad targeting and user privacy but ran into regulatory issues, has been replaced by Ad Topics, Site-Suggested Ads, and Ad Measurement. These send info about you, your interests, and your visited URLS to advertisers, and all are active by default.
Windows’ default web browser, Microsoft Edge, uses Chrome’s web page-rendering code, Chromium. This guarantees broad site compatibility and frees up its developers to add unique features. And they have done that in spades. Edge runs on macOS and Windows desktops. Mobile versions for Android and iOS let you sync favorites, history, and passwords.
Edge’s optional sidebar offers Copilot generative AI features, including the ability to summarize the current web page you’re on, create an image or essay based on a text prompt, or simply find more detailed information. A feature called Copilot Vision lets you share browser tabs with the AI and discuss both the visuals and text aloud. You can also customize the sidebar with first- and third-party services for messaging, productivity, search, and social networking.
Edge is a leader in disk usage, performance, and thrifty memory management. Startup Boost technology reduces the time it takes to open the browser, and a sleeping tabs feature means those you’re not viewing use less memory. The browser’s Efficiency mode can also extend laptop battery life. Other focuses include privacy and a customizable start page. For enterprise customers who still rely on Internet Explorer to run legacy programs, Edge offers an IE Mode.
Edge’s Collections feature uses a sidebar onto which you can add images, notes, and web pages and then share the whole assemblage to Excel, OneNote, or Word. It’s great for research. The browser’s Immersive Reader mode not only offers distraction-free web reading but can also read web page text aloud using Neural Voices with surprisingly natural intonation.
Other notable Edge options include automatic coupons for shopping sites, an option to show tabs vertically down the side rather than across the top, a screenshot tool, a split-window mode, and timely themes to dress up your browser. Finally, it includes gaming features like Clarity Boost for sharper images in web games.
The default browser for Apple devices is a strong choice, though its interface has some nonstandard elements, and its web standard support trails that of Chromium-based browsers. Safari was a pioneer in several areas of browser features. For example, it was the first with a Reading mode, which cleared unnecessary clutter like ads and videos from web articles. That feature debuted in 2010 and has made its way into most other browsers.
The macOS Sequoia update added AI Reading mode features to Safari, including summaries and tables of contents for long articles. It also adds a Highlights option that summarizes business webpages with contact info, hours, and a small map.
Apple was early to bring awareness to fingerprinting, by which web trackers identify you from your system specs. Unfortunately, the EFF’s Cover Your Tracks test site only shows partial protection from these trackers in Safari, whereas some competitors get a result of Strong protection. The browser includes other privacy protections; for example, it’s the only one here that disables third-party cookies by default. And for iCloud+ subscribers, Safari’s Private Relay obscures your IP address, similar to a VPN. Uniquely, Safari removes those long strings of identifying characters in URLs for added privacy.
Other benefits of Apple’s browser include support for Apple Pay, Keychain, and the “Sign in with Apple” feature that replaces Facebook and Google account authorization. If you use an iPhone and a Mac, Safari’s cross-platform integrations are very convenient. Apple’s Handoff feature, for example, lets you continue your browsing session between devices.
Firefox, an open-source project from the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, has long been a PCMag favorite. It’s the only major browser that’s not from a giant tech company, and it uses an independent rendering engine, while most browsers today rely on Google’s Chromium. Firefox has pioneered many web capabilities, and the organization developing it strongly advocates online privacy. On that last front, Firefox can securely manage your passwords and offers a paid VPN.
Firefox is also notable for its wealth of available extensions. The unique Multi-Account Containers extension, for instance, lets you sequester multiple logins to the same site on different tabs. Without it, you’d have to open a private browsing window or start a fresh session on another browser.
Mozilla’s browser was among the first to support new HTML and CSS capabilities, and the company is working on open-source AR and speech synthesis standards. Privacy-conscious AI features, too, are starting to make their way into the browser, with a tab organizer, translation, link preview, and an AI sidebar.
The Reader View button declutters a web page so you can focus on the text. Picture-in-picture (PiP) video supports closed captions, along with HDR and AV1 video formats. The browser is very customizable, too. You can arrange buttons on the toolbar to your taste and select from many themes that change window border patterns and colors.
Recent additions include PDF editing and the Firefox View button, which is essentially a pinned tab of recent sites that syncs between the desktop and mobile versions of the browser. Mozilla is working on performance improvements, streamlined menus, and vertical tabs.
The mobile Firefox apps offer an excellent interface. You can send a tab from one device to any others that use the same syncing account. This is a slick and useful feature.
Best for Innovative Tools and Built-In VPN
Opera
Perennially hovering around the 2% usage level, the Opera browser has long been a pioneer in the segment. It invented basic browser features like CSS, the search box, and tabs. Opera is available for all major platforms, and the Opera Mini mobile browser saves data by streaming a compressed version of websites. It uses the Chromium rendering engine, so you aren’t likely to run into site incompatibilities. Performance is fast, too.
Opera can make one privacy claim that the other browsers here can’t: Its built-in VPN (actually an encrypted proxy server) protects and reroutes traffic from Opera to cloak your IP address. That’s in addition to its ad blocker, which blocks crypto-mining scripts and trackers. This is a benefit for both privacy and data usage.
Opera’s innovative Speed Dial serves as your start and new tab pages. Its quick-access sidebar includes popular services like Spotify and WhatsApp—Edge and other browsers have copied this. My Flow lets you send web pages and notes between devices easily. The browser has a Pinboard tool similar to Edge’s Collections, a video pop-out window, and a Workspaces feature that lets you create function-based tab views. Like Chrome and Edge, Opera provides generative AI capabilities (Aria) in a sidebar. And like Edge, Opera includes a cash-back feature for saving while you shop online.
Opera uniquely offers a music player and a cryptocurrency wallet that supports most popular tokens. The company intriguingly maintains a separate gaming browser called Opera GX; Opera Air, a browser designed for mindfulness; and Opera Neon, an agentic AI browser.
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Buying Guide: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, or Safari: Which Browser Is Best for 2025?
What’s the Best Web Browser?
For the last several years, Google has dominated the browser landscape. The same company that serves more web content than any other (according to Comscore) also claims more than 65% of the worldwide browser market share with Chrome, based on numbers from StatCounter and W3Counter. That’s for desktop use, but Chrome is still king on mobile, too. So dominant is Chrome that most other browsers now use its underlying Chromium rendering code. Firefox and Safari are the only ones that still use non-Chromium engines, with the former being the sole, top-to-bottom independent competitor.
Chrome might be leading in usage (except, of course, on Apple devices), but it’s not ahead by every measure or in a number of capabilities. Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Opera all have features not available in Google’s browser. That’s not to say that Chrome isn’t an excellent piece of software, but you should know that there are worthy alternatives.
Which Web Browser Has the Best Compatibility?
The web markup standard that underlies all web pages, HTML5, fully launched in 2014 after a decade of work, though it continues to evolve with new features. There have been murmurings around the web about a new HTML6 version, but that doesn’t seem likely. The rival W3C and WHATWG organizations that developed the standard have signed an agreement, and HTML now has no version number. It’s a “living standard.”
I used to check browsers with the HTML5test website, which evaluated their compatibility with the moving target of web standards. But the developer of that site now states that the test is finished, having served its purpose of pushing browser makers to support the new standard. “HTML5 is now generally supported, and there aren’t any truly bad browsers anymore,” writes the test creator, Niels Leenheer. Reinforcing that opinion is the Web Standards Project, which posted an article entitled “Our Work Here Is Done.”
If you look at the Can I use site that tells web developers which browsers support which features, Chrome does come out on top, though, with the other Chromium-based browsers close behind. Firefox and Safari are further behind, with the latter supporting the fewest features. The capabilities not supported by some browsers aren’t common, however. I haven’t run into incompatibilities in any of the browsers here, but that’s anecdotal. I have seen support forum posts noting Safari-incompatible sites.
One standard that I find important is support for progressive web apps (PWAs). These let you set up app-like websites (think Gmail or Spotify) to behave like actual apps, without extraneous browser interface elements. The Chromium-based browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Opera support this, while Firefox and Safari don’t. With macOS 26, Safari gets a proprietary way of turning sites into apps.
Which Web Browser Is Fastest?
At this point, you won’t notice much of a speed difference between browsers: They all feel fast and responsive. Nevertheless, thorough technology-testing outfit that we are here at PCMag, we put each browser through its paces with three synthetic benchmarks. We use the JetStream and Speedometer benchmarks from browserbench.org, and WebXPRT 4 from Principled Technologies.
JetStream “combines a variety of JavaScript and Web Assembly benchmarks, covering a variety of advanced workloads and programming techniques.” It takes the geometric mean of test results, and higher scores are better. Speedometer is a quick-to-run benchmark that simulates adding, completing, and removing to-do items in a web app. WebXPRT is the most time-consuming benchmark. It runs through several categories of operations to test performance, including AI photo recognition and encryption.
We tested on a Core i7-powered Surface Pro 8 running Windows 11 and a MacBook Air M1 running macOS Sequoia, shutting down unnecessary processes and reporting the geometric mean of five test runs. To see just one platform or the other, click on the OS names in the chart headers above.
Take benchmark results with a grain of salt since purely synthetic tests don’t necessarily translate to real-world experiences. Note, too, that the scores are similar across most of the browsers we tested because they use the same Chromium rendering code. Firefox has fallen behind on both platforms in most of the tests and starts up more slowly than the others on Windows, but it does well in the exhaustive WebXPRT test. Note that using the Enhanced Security mode in Edge lowers its scores drastically, though that extra protection doesn’t much affect everyday browsing speeds.
Which Web Browser Is Best for Privacy?
Of the browsers here, Firefox and Opera are your best options for privacy. If that’s your main concern, check out our other suggestions in our roundup of the best private browsers. To its credit, Safari is the only one in this group that blocks third-party tracking cookies by default, but the others all let you change a setting for this.
All browsers can now remember passwords for you and sync them (in encrypted form) across mobile and desktop apps. The same goes for bookmarks and browsing history. Chrome, by default, signs you into Google services like Gmail and YouTube, though that raises some privacy concerns. It also uses a proprietary ad tracking system that tells advertisers your interests.
Privacy mavens like to use virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide browsing activities from ISPs and any other entities that intervene between you and the site you’re visiting. Opera is the only browser here that includes a built-in VPN. Firefox offers a paid VPN, and its private mode not only discards a session’s history and cookies but also hides your activities from third-party tracking sites.
Firefox implements DNS over HTTPS, which hides your web address lookups from your ISP. In addition, Edge, Firefox, and Safari include some fingerprint protection, meaning they try to prevent trackers from identifying you based on your hardware and software setup. One test of this is the EFF’s Cover Your Tracks site, which reports the level of tracking protection. Some browsers also have built-in Content Blocking to fend off known trackers and cryptocurrency-mining ploys. And all support Content Security Policy (CSP), which mitigates cross-site scripting attacks.
Recommended by Our Editors
AI features, convenience tools, customization, and tab and start page tools are now today’s primary differentiators. These can all play a part in your decision. For example, Reading Mode strips web pages of clutter, such as ads and videos, so you can focus on text. Another is the Share button. With this era’s obsession with social media, it’s a nearly essential convenience.
Opera is alone among the popular web browsers currently in having a built-in cryptocurrency wallet (the Brave browser also has one). Opera also stands out for its Speed Dial, which consists of pinned tiles on your home screen and a toolbar for accessing services you frequently need, such as WhatsApp.
Microsoft Edge offers the Copilot generative AI assistant that can “see” web pages and provide background on them. It also has the ability to voice-read web pages with remarkably realistic speech, a helpfully customizable homepage, detailed privacy settings, a vertical tab option, and a Collections feature for research. Google continues to add Gemini AI features to Chrome, but you can also use Google Lens to perform visual searches on highlighted web page content. Firefox lets you edit PDFs, open a new Container for logging into the same site with two different identities, and translate web pages. It also has an excellent, configurable reading mode and quick-access sidebar. Screenshot tools are making their way into browsers, with Edge, Firefox, and Opera now having them.
What Should You Use Instead of Internet Explorer?
The browser wars continue, but one competitor is gone forever: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. As of June 15, 2022, the once-indisputable leader in browser market share and the one that paved the way for interactive web applications no longer receives support. Microsoft has shifted its focus to the new Edge web browser.
If you still need IE to run an old web app, you can still get it in Edge’s IE Mode.
Even More Browser Choices
If you want to go beyond the mainstream for your web browser choice, read about our favorite alternative web browsers, including Brave and Vivaldi. You can further change things up with an alternative search engine or even an AI search engine.
