This series of articles will focus on free, and when possible open-source tools but not necessarily open source operating systems. The goal of this series of articles is to pull together applications that can be used on GNU/Linux, Mac OSX, and of course Microsoft Windows, so you can open, make changes, and save your data regardless of the Operating System.
Some of the applications you may not agree with so please reply and let me know what you think?
The operating systems used for these articles are Fedora 14, MAC OSX, and Windows 7.
What about security? The old argument of “my operating system is more secure than your operating system” is not going to be a factor in this series of articles. As a user of all three of the previously mentioned operating systems, I can assure you that at one time, or another, all of them have had security updates released, so keeping all of your operating systems patched, all of the installed applications up to date, and be sure that you are using a current version of the software are of the upmost importance.
So in our first installment let’s begin with web browsers because almost every computer user today connects to the Internet to find news, be creative, productive, or for entertainment, we felt this was obviously the best place to start. Most users will be familiar with Apple’s Safari, or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but neither of these run on Linux unless run under Wine, and that is a hassle. We need a web browser that will run across all platforms, so let’s begin.
First up is the newcomer from Google called Chrome, or on GNU/Linux it is known as Chromium.
In our experience, we find that it actually runs faster than Apple Safari on OSX or Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows 7. With the minimalist approach and the new Chrome App store this browser is gaining market share rapidly.
Another option is Mozilla’s Firefox.
Firefox has been around for a while now, and at one time was the darling of the Open Source community but now seems to be losing some steam and on top of that Firefox has become a little bloated, but if you like a well-established browser with more plugins than can be imagined then this browser might just be for you.
The last browser that I want to mention is Opera. The Opera web browser may actually be the best web browser that you have never tried out, but with Opera’s popularity starting to rise on mobile devices maybe more people will give it a chance on the desktop. Opera is a dandy web browser for all operating system platforms.
For more information on each of these web browsers see each link below.
References:
Google Chrome’s Wikipedia entry.
