Browsers play an integral part of our everyday lives. With the recent surge in digital lifestyle, we all depend on the internet for pretty much everything in our day-to-day lives.

What shapes the internet experience is the tool with which we access it – browsers. A good browser is very important to make the most out of your online experience.

In this article, we have listed some of the best browsers for Windows for a great browsing experience on the Microsoft operating system.

Google Chrome

Chrome uses more RAM than other Windows browsers, but some of that is for speeding up operation by preloading content. It also creates far more program processes than the others, to ensure stability by isolating not only tabs but also plug-ins and frames from other domains on the page.

Google is constantly working on security and feature enhancements, but, as with all software, bugs happen, so make sure you stay updated. Another benefit of using Chrome is that you won’t have to dismiss those messages urging you to switch to Chrome every time you visit Google News, Gmail, YouTube, and so on.

Chrome can no longer boast any unique browsing features: There’s no built-in VPN, no fancy tab organization tools, no cryptocurrency locker, no Reading mode, no Share button, and no screenshot tool.

There are loads of features in Chrome that are only available to web geeks who feel comfortable tinkering in the settings. Examples include password leak detection, a distilled page view, and forced dark mode for websites.

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox has pioneered many web capabilities, and the organization that develops it has been a strong advocate for online privacy. It’s also notable for its wealth of available extensions.

The unique Multi-Account Containers extension lets you sequester multiple logins to the same site on different tabs—without this, you’d have to open a private browsing window or another browser to sign out of all your web accounts and start afresh session.

Mozilla’s browser is in the vanguard of supporting new HTML5 and CSS capabilities, and the company is working on open-source AR and speech synthesis standards.

The organization now offers a full password management service called Lockwise, which can generate complex passwords, sync them between devices, and secure everything under a strong master password. That and the organization’s VPN offering are paid extras.

The mobile Firefox apps offer excellent interfaces, and you can send a webpage tab from any device to any others that are logged into your syncing account.

If that’s not enough, Firefox has a Pocket button in the address bar, letting you save a page for later viewing anywhere with one click.

The Reader View button declutters a webpage loaded with ads, promos, and videos, so you can peruse it with no distractions.

It is also ultra-customizable, letting you select and arrange buttons on the toolbar to taste, as well as select from numerous theme add-ons that change window border patterns and colors.

Microsoft Edge

The Microsoft developers in charge of Windows’ default web browser decided instead to switch to using Chrome’s webpage-rendering code, Chromium, in the Edge browser software. That freed them up to add unique features instead of putting out compatibility fires.

Notably, Edge now runs on Apple macOS and earlier Windows versions, in addition to Windows 10.

The compatibility is certainly now there in spades: Its result from the HTML5Test measure of supported web standards is near the top. What pushes Edge over the top is support for Dolby Digital, ObjectRTC, and the Screen Capture API.

You won’t run into the kind of site incompatibilities that users of the previous Edge occasionally encountered.

It’s also a leader in performance as well as thrifty memory and disk usage.

What new features have the Edge team been working on, you ask? The initial focuses have been privacy, the customizable start page, and the intriguing Collections feature for web research.

For enterprise customers who still rely on Internet Explorer to run legacy programs (and we still run into these at places like insurance and doctors’ offices), Edge offers an IE Mode, but this won’t be available in standard consumer setups.

Immersive Reader mode does offer distraction-free web article reading, stripping out ads and nonessential eye poison, and can also read webpage text aloud using lifelike Neural Voices. This is really something to try: It reads with sentence intonation, rather than simply word-by-word, as we’ve come to expect text-to-speech audio.

The Collections feature, still in beta mode, presents a sidebar onto which you can drag webpages and images, write notes, and then share the whole assemblage to Excel or Word.

Edge offers four Home page options: Focused, Inspirational, Informational, and Custom. Focused is a blank page with search and buttons for your most-visited sites; Inspirational adds the gorgeous Bing photos that change daily as backgrounds; to all this, Informational adds customized news, weather, sports, and finance cards.

The browser offers three preset privacy levels: Basic, Balanced, and Strict, increasing privacy but possibly disabling site features. The private browsing mode, like that in all browsers, doesn’t save any history from a private session.

Mobile versions for Android and iPhone with syncing smooths moving from desktop to mobile, plus the password management works more reliably than in most other browsers, though it’s still a good idea to use a separate password management utility.

Tor Browser

If you are big on privacy and would like to access blocked/blacklisted websites without leaving a trace, then Tor Browser is the way to go.

Tor browser keeps your internet traffic anonymous using the Tor network. This in turn helps you keep your identity safe on the internet.

Note that Tor is legal for most people reading this but some countries, governments especially authoritarian regimes have declared using the browser illegal. This is because Tor enables anyone to anonymously read, write, and communicate which they don’t like.

Tor browser is completely open-source and safe to use.

Brave

In a short span of time, Brave has earned a reputation as a privacy-focused web browser. It comes with inbuilt blockers for advertisements and website trackers.

Developed by JavaScript creators Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy, this open-source browser has also introduced a pay-to-surf model that promises to share part of Brave’s revenue. Brave Browser also announced that users would get 70% of the ad revenue.

The browser provides an option to choose from a long list of 20 search engines. In a recent update, the developers also added an option of Private tabs integrated with Tor to ensure extra privacy. Furthermore, there is a privacy-focused newsreader called Brave Today that uses its home-grown CDN.

Chromium

It is light-weight and gives fast browsing experience.

Chromium is a free lightweight and open-source Google-sponsored browser project that aims to provide a faster, safer, and more stable way for all users to experience the web. This web browser has fewer features than Google Chrome due to reason that it is being built to be lightweight (cognitively and physically) and fast.

Features:

• Auto-update capability
• API keys for some google services.
• Sync between devices.
• Do not collect any of your information and deliver it to Google.
• Features that are later updated on Chrome can be experienced earlier on Chromium.

As a web browser, Chromium is less stable than Chrome but, it is the best browser to have a simple, and easy-to-go browsing experience.

Opera

Perennially hovering around the 2 percent usage level, the Opera browser has long been a pioneer in the segment, bringing us innovations as basic as tabs, CSS, and the built-in search box.

It has a built-in VPN that works well and quickly. Some consider Opera’s VPN to actually be an encrypted proxy server, but the only real difference between it and a standard VPN is that it only protects and reroutes traffic from Opera itself, rather than from any internet-connected app on the computer or smartphone.

Opera uses the Chromium page-rendering engine, so you’ll rarely run into site incompatibilities, and performance is fast. Opera also takes up far less drive space and memory than Chrome.

Opera also has its built-in ad blocker, which also blocks crypto-mining scripts and trackers. Note that Opera added crypto-mining protection more than a year before Firefox did. (Google is still mulling adding similar protection to Chrome.)

Adblocking also means less data consumed, especially of interest for those using metered connections or mobile plans with data caps.

Opera includes other features like Speed Dial start and new-tab page, its quick-access sidebar of frequently needed services like WhatsApp. The latest controls in this quick toolbar are for Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. The browser uniquely offers a cryptocurrency wallet, which supports Bitcoin and Tron.

Opera offers a gaming version called Opera GX, and the company recently bought a gaming engine, moving into that specialty even further.

On mobile, Opera Touch is a beautifully designed app that connects (via quick QR scan) to your desktop. My Flow is the result of this connection, letting you send webpages and notes between devices easily.

Vivaldi

Best for people who work on a number of tabs at the same time.

Vivaldi is a free PC Browser with some unique features and gives a fast and secure browsing experience to its users by blocking ads and trackers. The browser is available for Android, Mac, Linux, and Windows. It supports 53 languages.

Features:

• Group tabs in a stack.
• A built-in ad and tracker blocker.
• Custom keyboard shortcuts for everything.
• Add any website as a web panel.
• Multiple colored themes to pick from.
• Notes
• Screen capture
• View multiple pages at once, without switching tabs.
• Most informative browsing history.

Vivaldi has a positive aspect in that it is light on RAM consumption when compared to other browsers. Thus, it can prove to be the best browser that falls short of RAM.

Maxthon

Maxthon, existing since 2002, started primarily as a web browser for Windows. The developers have promoted it as a cloud browser. However, it doesn’t seem to be exclusive anymore as almost all the top web browser apps now support data sync over the cloud.

The free web browser comes with tools to capture videos from web pages, built-in Adblock Plus, night mode, screenshot tool, email client, password manager, note-taking tool, etc. It also provides access to common Windows tools like Notepad, Calculator, etc.

Maxthon poses itself as one of the fastest browsers by housing two rendering engines: WebKit and Trident. However, this might not convince some users, as the Microsoft-designed Trident has gone out of development in favor of EdgeHTML. Still, if you are looking for a good Firefox alternative, Maxthon is a fair choice.

Torch

If you’re a fan of the BitTorrent world, you will start loving Torch Browser because it comes with a built-in torrent downloader, making it a strong contender for the best browser for Windows 10.

Torch’s media grabber tool can be used to download streaming videos and audio files from web pages. It also includes a download accelerator.

The browser can also play partially downloaded videos and torrents, and also includes a music player that sources content from YouTube. It also has a Torch Facelift feature, which can be used to change the theme of their Facebook profile.

It looks almost the same and also a fast web browser like Chrome and Firefox. Furthermore, it supports your Google account login to sync browsing activity and other data between devices.