A volume snapshot if you're technical enough to split up OS and application data volumes on your local drive can potentially help but you still have registry or other issues.
The best way to handle backups, from the perspective of a backup company CEO, is to backup your critical data, and that could include application configurations.
Browsers support exporting your profile, good backup software let's you run a pre-backup job script and post-job script, so you can export your browser profile, lock certain files or folders during a backup, etc. to get a good recovery point while minimizing risk of data corruption.
Way longer topic than a comment here. If you do want full system state, pick a hypervisor (Parallels, etc.) and then backup the full VM each time you power the VM down. It'll make for much larger backups so restores are slower and storing all the recovery points will cost you a bit more too.