Daily Dose of English 59
Web Browsers
Daily Dose of English 59
Intermediate
Hey everybody. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about web browsers. Web browsers. I use a web browser every single day, and you probably do too. They are integral parts of our lives. Integral means that they are integrated and incredibly important. No, excuse me. Integral means that something is almost impossible to live without. It's a little bit exaggerated to say that you can't live without a web browser because you literally can, right? It's not like it's needed for life. However, that's how we use the word integral. We typically wouldn't say that food is integral because that's like required and a necessity, like a basic human need. And so that's a little bit different. Integral is something that is really integrated and just such a part of our lives that we almost can't think about living without them. because the internet has changed humanity. I think that's pretty safe to say. And web browsers are the primary way that we interact with them. First off, if you don't know what the word web browser is, those are things like Google Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Safari. Those are web browsers. They browse the web. The word browse is actually a good word. To browse something means to look at or to read or to explore, but not super in depth. So you would never say, if you're sitting down reading a book and somebody goes, oh, what are you doing? You wouldn't say, I'm browsing this book. Because that sounds like you're in a bookstore and you just picked it up off the shelf and we're going, huh, hmm, that looks kind of interesting. Yeah, I'm just browsing. Or if you're in a store and you're just looking around and someone comes up and says, hi, do you need any help? You go, oh, no, thank you, I'm just browsing. And so browsing the web is what we use web browsers for. And there's a lot of different web browsers out there, and there's a lot of history to them as well, which is, again, pretty interesting. I tend to talk about things that I find interesting on this podcast, so I hope that you'll come with me on this little journey about web browsers. A lot of people use just one web browser. They just have one web browser and supposedly about 60% of the world of people that use web browsers use Google Chrome. And that's it. That is the only web browser that they have. That's the only one that they use. Google Chrome has been the big player or the big web browser for quite a while because the internet has now been a mainstream thing for a couple decades. And Google Chrome has a very large market share. Market share is the percentage of people that use a product within all the people that want that kind of product. So everybody that uses a web browser, approximately 60% of them use Google Chrome right now. And so Google Chrome has about a 60% market share, give or take. I don't actually know what it is literally right now. And if you're listening to this in the future, it's probably going to be different. So maybe you look it up and see what it is. It might be interesting. But there's a lot more web browsers out there. which often are better. And this is something that I find really interesting because web browsers have this thing about them where they're sticky. And sticky, what I mean, not as like actually like it's something where you stick your hand to it and it's hard to take away, but it's hard to switch between web browsers for a lot of people because they've gotten used to using their web browser. So for example, Google Chrome or Safari, those are the two really big ones that people don't switch off of. And so getting somebody to use a different browser can be kind of difficult, just because they have their habits, they have their bookmarks, they're logged into everything. And so telling somebody that you should switch a browser is like telling them that they should grow a couple inches taller. They're like, what, why would I do that? That's not possible, that's crazy. However, there's a lot of reasons to switch and I'm recording this episode today because I actually finally switched off of Google Chrome for work. So a bit of my, I guess, web browser habits. I actually use a bunch of different web browsers. I have, let's see, I have one, two, three, four, four and a half-ish web browsers that I use regularly. I have Firefox, which I use for my personal things. That's what I use for uploading these videos. That's what I use for anything that's sort of my personal stuff that I want to do. And then I have a web browser for everything that I do in Spanish, for my Spanish learning, my Spanish accounts. And for that one, I use Brave, which is another good browser. And then I have one again for my Czech learning, because I like to have everything separate. And it's really nice to be able to just open my web browser and have everything ready to go for my learning. And so for Czech, I use what's called Chromium, which is basically Google Chrome, except for it's not the Google version, right? It's got everything that's googly about it taken out. And then for work, I was using Google Chrome because for work, we use a lot of different Google products. We use Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Meets. And so I was like, okay, I should probably just use Chrome because that's what Google makes. And so all of the Google stuff should work better, right? However, I just switched off of Google Chrome because it was so annoying. It was really annoying me. I'm not a person that is very attached to a browser, right? I just listed out four that I was using, and I have other ones downloaded. I actually use Edge as well to record some videos for the Refold YouTube channel. I use Opera for some projects. I've got a bunch of web browsers on my computer for very specific tasks. But I always kind of thought of Google Chrome being the default option for Google stuff. But recently, I've been having more and more issues with Google Chrome just being annoying. It signs me out of my accounts very often, especially my Google accounts. The YouTube studio, which is where I have to upload videos and change things for the refold YouTube channel, it just doesn't load a lot of the time. And I don't have these problems with things like Firefox. because Google Chrome has what's called bloat. Bloat is when there's a lot of extra something on something. And so in the case of computers or web browsers, it's like ad software, tracking, extra features that you don't use, just like stuff that you don't want is just bloat. And a lot of things these days are bloated in terms of the internet. Bloat and bloated can also be used for like a person. However, actually you wouldn't say bloat. You would just say bloated. Somebody is, I feel bloated. And that's what somebody says when they feel like sort of fat or like puffy and they're usually in their stomach and their belly. Maybe from eating too much or they're feeling sick or something like that and it's like a bad kind of like oh I just feel like Too large right now. I feel bloated it kind of gross And so that's what bloated is for a person not a very pretty word. It's kind of gross, but that's what it's used for however, it's it's very common on programs and apps and things like that on the internet and And so Google Chrome just has a lot of bloat. It's fairly slow. It's pretty annoying, like I said. And so I decided to just say goodbye. And actually, I installed a very unknown browser called Waterfox, which is like Firefox, but different. It's water. It's a similar idea, it's very privacy focused, it's a whole different system under the hood. Under the hood is actually a really good phrase. It means like how something functions and it refers to cars. So on a car, you can look at the outside and that's just how it looks. But what's under the hood is where the motor lives, the engine. The hood is the thing that covers the motor. So if you pull up the hood, you can see where the engine is. And so we say for things like websites, browsers, programs, apps, we talk about under the hood as being the technology that makes it work. And so Firefox and Waterfox are totally different from Google Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Edge, because those are all different. They're called Chromium-based browsers. And so I switched to Waterfox, and it was actually very easy to do. It's a pretty uncommon browser, and so you might not have as easy of a time as if you want to try it. But if you do want to try it, I recommend trying Firefox. It's a little more user-friendly for most people. But I really liked it. I'd like it now because it's very fast. It feels a lot faster and it works better with all of these Google products that I have to use for work like Google meets and calendar and all these things. And so I was just sort of annoyed that Google Chrome was so bad for for Google products, like it's just annoying. So I switch my browsers and you might find it easy too if you want to find a new browser to get out of this bloated web browser that you might be using. If you want another suggestion and you don't want to use Firefox, I definitely recommend Brave. Brave has been very good to me and I like it, but there's plenty of other options out there. You can do a little bit of Googling. If you use a Mac device, you can also check out the Arc browser and see what that's like. That's a pretty new one, but it's only for Macs. So if you're a Windows user or a Linux user like me, then you should look for the other ones. However, I've been talking about web browsers for a very long time, so I'm gonna say goodbye. Thank you so much for being here today and listening to this episode where I talk a lot about technology. And I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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