Choosing the Right Web Browser For Best Web Surfing Results

The one piece of software you probably use about as much as any other software is your Web browser. Some users take their choice very seriously while others probably just use whatever is pre-installed on your system. If you are not making an informed choice, you could be suffering from a less than optimal browsing experience.

For the sake of this discussion, I will only be talking about browsers for your computer. There are certainly choices to be made on mobile devices and I hope you look at the options closely. While I could probably come up with a very long list of browsers for your computer, I am going to limit the list to the top 5 in terms of browser traffic to the Graphics Unleashed Web site. These five browsers make up more than 95% of traffic to our site and much of the rest comes from mobile browsers. In order of traffic to our site: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera.

It is fairly common that Windows users choose Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mac users choose Apple Safari as those are the default browsers installed with the operating system. Traffic received to our site from Safari is only 4% and I don't remember hearing of anyone having issues using it. For that reason, I can't give you any good reasons not to use it. Internet Explorer is the most commonly used browser at 38% and it can be problematic on our site as well as other sites. I believe part of the reason for problems is that Microsoft doesn't always want to follow the established Web standards. Therefore Web developers have to include workarounds just to make things work right in Internet Explorer.

Recently a user said the drop-down menus on our site were working fine on some pages and not on other pages. As I tested the pages in various browsers, everything worked perfectly. That is except in Internet Explorer 9 where it did fail as the user described. I've also seen recent notes from users who were having trouble using the coreldraw.com forums using Internet Explorer. If you truly have a good reason to choose Internet Explorer, I will accept your choice. If the only reason you use it is because it was pre-installed on your computer, please choose another browser! I think you'll find a much better browsing experience awaits.

I've tried the various other browsers and have settled on Mozilla Firefox for the majority of my browsing. Therefore I would recommend that Internet Explorer users give it a try first.

Another issue that users have brought to our attention relates to the links we provide for purchasing CorelDRAW and other graphics software. Either users are unable to follow the links at all or we have not received credit (in the form of a commission) for the purchase made by a user. Obviously we want you to be able to follow the links and we really like it when we get a commission. Most of these links (for Corel and Adobe software) go through a company called Commission Junction who manages the affiliate program for hundreds of companies (such as Corel and Adobe). They provided us with the instructions below for making sure the proper cookies are enabled in your browser. Instructions were provided for both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer (they didn't give us instructions for other browsers) and we have included the instructions below. If you could please take a minute to follow the instructions for your browser, we'd appreciate it.

For Firefox: To enable cookies in your browser go to Options > Options > Privacy. On the drop down next to "Firefox will:" select "Use custom settings for history." Be sure the "Accept cookies from sites" and the Accept third-party cookies boxes are checked. You may also want to try adding www.cj.com and members.cj.com as an Allowed Site by clicking on the Exceptions tab here.

For Internet Explorer: Go to Internet Options > Privacy you should see a Sites button, click on that. It will bring up a pop up box 'Per Site Privacy Actions', you would need to enter www.cj.com and members.cj.com to the website you always allow the cookies to be used. Enter each website into the address text box and click the 'Allow' button. Then click Okay on that pop up, then the Apply and Okay buttons on Internet Options.

For either browser, to ensure that the change went through, refresh or reopen the browser.