All Browsers are not created equal

Today while updating my husband’s family in my Family Tree Maker program, I realized that all browsers are not created equal.

I was looking at the Ancestry hints that FTM displays for one of my husband’s ancestors. When I click on the link to open in a new window, the program defaults to Internet Explorer even though my preferred browser is Chrome. My computer is set up to have Chrome as my default browser. Before today, I never realized that there was a difference when I was looking at the “view printer friendly” version.

The first image below shows how it was going to print via Internet Explorer. Notice that the Household members take up two lines per person and thus could produce a 2^nd page if the household size was greater than 6 members.

The second image below shows how it was going to print via Chrome. Not only do the household members only take up one line each, I now can view the entire Source information, all on one page. Since I like to print out direct line documents to share with non-genealogy members, I find being able to print it on one page is very useful, especially since I like to print the image of the census page on the back side of the same page.

Another thing I noticed was when I selected the item to print in Internet Explorer and then right click to print, I can select either print or print preview, while Chrome takes you directly into print preview when you select print.  Plus the two print previews are very different.

In Internet Explorer you see the image as it will print on the page and then you need to select print to get to the printer setting. 

While in Chrome you have the printer settings on the left and the image on the right. Everything is at my fingertips and I like that. If I change from portrait to landscape, the image in Chrome will adjust to reflect my printing change.

Lesson learned, if you find a browser you like and it works the way you want, remember to always use it even when other programs might default to another browser. It might take me a little longer to type in my search criteria into Ancestry to get the same list of hints as FTM does, but for me, the little extra steps give me the printed and saved digital images in the format that I want.