I felt like opening a discussion on the state of the web browser wars? I'm curious to what browsers people are using, and if anyone is following the development of IE 9 and Firefox 4. I personally have used Firefox as my primary web browser since 2003 in version .7x. I was immediately drawn to it for its speed over IE 5/6, but most notable its web browser plug-in "Ad-block," which many sites that need the ad revenue hate. I have since tired browsers like Chrome, but was unhappy with it because of the lack of... you guessed it, ad-block. Now that Chrome is getting ad-block (slowly but surely), I'm not sure the switch will be so simple because of the various Firefox plug-in's I have come to use over the years besides Ad-block. I haven't even considered using IE, although IE 8 was a huge leap forward in terms of rendering tech for IE, its still not anything I would consider for a primary browser. But don't think I'm some kind of Firefox zealot. Firefox 3.6 was a huge let down for me and many others. It was just, super slow compared to 3.5 and even 3.0 (which I would consider the fastest of the 3 series browsers). Firefox needs 4.0 to be a huge leap to get back in the game, because Firefox's biggest competition isn't IE9 but Chrome. If people have switched away from IE once, they are more then likely going to be aware of other alternatives as well. I've been running various Firefox 4.0 nightly builds for quiet awhile, but this newest beta 5 is simply outstanding. Its using the Direct2D accelerated interface by default now, and the browser speed improvement over 3.6 is... light years. XP and OSX users won't see a big difference (OSX has had OpenGL acceleration in FF for a long time now), but Vista and 7 users will see a huge leap in performance, not only from the optimized javascript engine, but from the Direct2D onscreen rendering engine. I can't say anything about IE 9 until the beta comes out later this month, but I really can't wait to see what Microsoft has in store. They need a big, worthwhile upgrade to get users off IE 6 and on the path to more secure browsing. With Firefox and now Chrome eating away even more market share, it will be interesting to see what a year of hush hush development has done for them. Now if only the plug-in developers for Firefox would get off their butts and finish porting the plug-ins I use everyday. Ad-blocker is good to go, but the rest are lagging. This might stop people from migrating away from Firefox 3.6 right away, but I highly doubt they will migrate to chrome when their plug-ins have become such a huge part of their browsing lives.
Opera 10 is bomb. Aurora convinced me to try it back in 9, liked it, love it now. Mostly due to the interface, but Opera Turbo is one of the coolest things out there, and the one letter search function is awesome.
I use chrome. I dislike firefox because it somehow fills half my screen with toolbars and additional toolbars. I dislike Internet Explorer because it is fraggin slow. I use chrome because I just wanna look at sites I know. Never tried opera or safari.
I'm actually forced to use IE on occasion; my college website is for the most part non-compatible with other browsers. Other than that, I only use Firefox.
I use firefox. Disliked Chromes interface for some reason. However IE and firefox are so much alike now i sometimes use IE without meaning to >>
I use Firefox and IE about equally. IE on my laptop, Firefox on my work computer. To be fair I haven't had time to really invest into exploring either of them. I think I would probably lean towards firefox though, which just seems to have more accessible and useful user addons. @OP: Out of curiousity, did the latest issue of CPU spark your creation of this thread?
Opera's great on an internet dongle, especially with the turbo feature! (Makes browsing lot less painless while on the go!) Recently started using Chrome at work.. Good so far, some alright themes to play around with.
GAH!~ I knew i was forgetting something.. I can't edit the poll to add Opera 10 ~_~ my bad. I would switch to Chrome on the drop of a dime, but without a fully working ad-blocker (which will happen eventually), my biggest issue with it is the fact it sends information back to Google. While Chrome 6's installer addresses this by giving you the option NOT to, I feel the option needs to be removed completely so no users are being monitored. Otherwise Chrome 6 is simply very elaborate spyware. I have never liked Opera, no matter how many times I try it. I suppose I will have to give it another shot again.
Added Opera for me and Aurora Chrome's coolish. It's kidna lost its edge (the whole speed thing) and I have a lovehate relationship with the tabs. It's cool that it runs them each as a seperate process, so if one tab crashes, the rest don't, but at the same time, it uses more RAM than I'd like. Plus the lack of good themes (not just recolours) bugs me.
Firefox 4 will support independent processes for tabs. FF4 beta 5 is giving me issues after installing it over Minefield (Minefield is the nightly build of Firefox). Firefox 4 has the speed for me to not want to move to Chrome, but the plug-in updates need to start coming. The differences between Beta 3-5 haven't been extreme enough, and some of the better plug-ins should have been migrated by now (TwitBin doesn't count because its upgrades have all revolved around the new Twitter big brother crap). Firefox 4 has also been WAY faster rendering for me vs Chrome 6, probably because of the new Direct2D acceleration.
