It's often useful to have two different web browsers installed on your computer, this can help if one stops working, doesn't display a page correctly or you just need to browse privately and need to clear the cache and history at the end of your browsing.

Occasionally, you might come across a website that doesn't quite display properly in one browser and having another immediately to hand means you can open the site on that browser and carry on. Luckily, this is increasingly rare but can still happen with older sites.

Here you can see that the BBC site hasn't displayed correctly.

​Using a different browser, the site displays as expected.

You may also want a browser that you can set to automatically clear the cache and cookies at the end of the browsing session. This can be really helpful if you have a website that you make a lot of updates to, by clearing the cache at the end of each session, you can be sure that you're always seeing the latest version when you next load the browser.

Firefox is very good for this and can easily be set to clear all this as soon as you quit the browser, so you don't even have to remember to do it manually.


If you regularly have to log into two different webmail accounts on the same platform (Gmail, iCloud, Outlook.com) then having two browsers can be really useful as you can have both accounts open at the same time rather than having to log in and out of each account.

If you're using Windows, we would recommend having both Firefox and the new Edge as your browsers. Firefox is very privacy aware and is very good at blocking trackers and cookies that could otherwise result in you seeing more targeted adverts as you browse around the Internet and the new version of Edge (which is based on the same browser engine as Google Chrome) gives you all the speed and compatibility of Chrome but with more privacy and tracking protection than Chrome itself offers.

If you're using a Mac, then we would recommend Safari (the default browser that's installed already) as your main browser as it's the fastest browser for the Mac and again very privacy focused and then Firefox as a backup which still offers lots of privacy protection along with the ability to clear all cookies and cache when you quit the app.