Browsers

I looked at Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and a little bit at Seamonkey and Sunrise.  Safari and Firefox both have an address bar and a search bar,  while Seamonkey and Chrome have a combined address/search bar.  The difference between Safari and Firefox is that in Safari you cannot type a search into the address bar.  It will just bring up an error message.  Chrome has independent tabs (I heard somewhere that this is called "sandboxing," but don't quote me on it!), which means that if one tab crashes, it will not crash the whole browser.  I think Chrome uses very little memory on the computer while you are using it, so it doesn't slow things down.  My experience with Firefox has been that it uses a lot of memory on the computer, and can really slow things down if it has been open for a while.  However, I think Firefox has some built-in privacy/filtering options, which can be very useful.

I found Seamonkey just generally unattractive and kind of bulky compared to the other browsers.  I think that most browsers are kind of going for a minimalistic look these days.  I didn't get to play with it for long, so I am not sure about its benefits, but I know if I had downloaded it I would not have been happy about its looks!  One plus was that it had a print button right in the toolbar.

I also took a quick look at Sunrise, and one thing I really like was how favorites showed up in a sidebar with large icons-- it was very visually pleasing, and easy to use!  I loved that there was a screen capture button in the toolbar, and it was easy to save to the desktop.  After looking at Sunrise, I really think I will download it and give it a try.