Web browsers are probably the most commonly used piece of software on our computers, after the operating system itself, essential for navigating us through the Internet. The good thing is that we have a lot of options to choose from too, and most of us have our own preferences. Even so, the debate about which browser is best – be it Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari or something else – has been going on for as long as the interwebs has existed, but can we at least get a definitive answer about which browser is the most reliable?

Many will immediately slam Internet Explorer for being the most unreliable. Few will disagree that IE kind of sucks; Microsoft’s unfortunate browser being the butt of numerous jokes in many gag sites.  Most people you ask will say they prefer using Chrome or Firefox, while Mac lovers almost invariably get excited about Safari.  But seriously, is IE really the worst browser in the bunch?

To answer the question of which browser really sucks the most, researchers at Sauce Labs conducted some tests to determine which browser experienced the most errors, comparing the results of each different version of IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari that’s come out since 2011.

Error rates

Looking at the main browsers, Sauce Labs determined that IE7 was the most problematic browser with an error rate of .29 percent, followed by Firefox 7, IE8, Opera 11, Safari 5, Firefox 5, Firefox 3.6, Firefox 6, Chrome 9, Safari 6, IE 9 and last, or the least to experience errors is Safari 4.

The problem with this comparison is that it is unfair, since some of the browser versions, like Firefox 3.6 have long been unsupported.  So Sauce Labs compared the latest versions of the browsers to get a more definitive picture.

It was determined that of the most recent browsers, Safari 6 experiences the most errors at .12 percent, followed by Opera 12, IE10, Chrome 27 and Firefox 22.

Still, this is also an unfair comparison, so Sauce removed unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged browsers from the equation and discovered that Safari 5 has a .51 percent error rate, which makes it the worst in the bunch.  This is quite surprising as many were betting on IE, any version of it, being the worst performing browser.

Sauce labs came up with a few ideas as to what might have affected Safari’s performance:

“At first we thought the high error rate could be the result of the fact that we always run Safari on Windows, while it’s made by Apple. That’s easy to dismiss, because earlier versions of Safari were fine. Then we explored the possibility that the errors were caused by always running Safari 5 in proxy mode (for arcane Selenium reasons). So we looked at the average error rate for non-Safari jobs run in proxy mode, and it put things back into perspective,” Sauce stated in a blog post.

So Sauce Labs ended up gathering data while in proxy browsing mode, and used this to determine that IE 6 is the worst browser overall, though Safari 5’s error rate was unchanged. In other words, Safari 5 really is a buggy browser when compared to the rest.  As for Firefox, Chrome and Opera, these three browsers are the least error prone of the bunch, which goes some way to explaining why so many people choose to use them.

Surprisingly, even though IE is the most hated and one of the buggiest browsers around, with each new version released it seems to be getting better and better.  With Safari, the fourth version was the most stable and with every new release, it only seems to get worse.

Chrome is now the widely used browser in the world, and the bugs in IE may have been one of the factors that caused so many users to turn to Chrome.  Question now is, even if IE gets better and smoother with every release, will it be able to take back the crown from Chrome or are it doomed to kiss Google’s ass for all eternity?

Questioning the method

Though it may seem like Sauce’s methods in attaining the results looks infallible, some Mac users were quick to question them, stating that by using Selenium, the tests did not yield results applicable to real-world usage.

Sauce used OnDemand, a tool for automating real browsers, and it hoards metadata about millions of browser sessions by Sauce’s customers who test their own sites.

“As everyone knows, sometimes your software doesn’t work. Maybe it crashes or maybe you had a bug. Sauce OnDemand is no different – almost 100% of the time, nothing goes wrong; our reliability in the last few months is at least 99.94%. In fact, as you’ll see later, we’re now more reliable than modern browsers. But sometimes there’s an error that we think may have been our fault. When there is, we refund the customer and work to fix it. We also record that there was an error,” Sauce Labs explains.