By the way, here's a link to the website stats page which has browser info:

 http://www.treesandthings.com/stats/usage_200802.html#TOPAGENTS

According to that, almost 60% of us use Firefox, Mozilla, or some variant like Iceweasel, 16% still use IE 6.0 (probably because they're browsing from work and their company still hasn't upgraded, I'm guessing / hoping), 10% use IE 7.0, and about 4% use Opera.

Do we even have browser wars anymore?  I know that term was bandied about quite a bit when Netscape and IE were at each other's throats.  Now browser use seems to fall into two categories...those folks who are tech savvy or have a tech savvy friend using Firefox...or, most folks using whatever is present when they get their new computer, usually IE.  Personally, I hope that there isn't a Firefox/IE war.  If there is, we'll just run into the same old bullshit we saw when Netscape and IE were at it.  Then some huge media conglomerate will buy up Firefox seeing it as a MS killer and then turn it to shit.  

I use both IE and Firefox...but only IE for work stuff since that is the agency standard as well as the only browser many of our companies will work with.  i.e. Metlife does NOT like Firefox on the agent pages.  At home, it's strictly Firefox.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

I first encountered Opera on a 300 year old PC in my undergrad library. It was the worst browser ever, it made no sense to me and looked like shit. I literally hated it.

A few years later, I heard a lot of noise about Opera making their browser free. I tried it, and I have never looked back.

Opera is really a no-brainer choice for me. It has advantages both in usability and in performance over other browsers.

It's well known that Opera was the first browser to have tabs - it also has a great ability to restore sessions (I think FF copied it now). Overal, not only the concepts but the implementations are very well considered. For example, Opera's tab viewing sequence was very odd to me when I switched from FF, but having gotten used to it, I prefer it

(Let's say there are 3 links on a page. I middle-click each one to open them in different tabs. I then click the 3rd tab to read it. When i close it, FireFox would now show me the 2nd link I had opened (ie the 2nd most recently opened tab) while Opera returned me to the original tab I was at. This ends up being more efficient because sometimes I read a text (eg Wikipedia) and open tabs in the background for subsequent reading. Then I may encounter something I want to read right now. I open the link and switch to it. When I close it, I am back to where I left off, not in the tabs I had opened previously and wasn't ready to read yet)

Another great feature of Opera that had JUST made it into the latest FireFox is that zoom works properly. Opera for a long time has magnified not only the text but the images when you zoomed in or out using control-scroll wheel. Opera and IE just increased the font size without reflowing the format and made everything look like shit.

Yet another great feature - not yet in FF - is Opera's inteligent guessing as to what page to show next. For example, let's say I scroll down to the bottom of Google's results page and hit space (normally used for paging down) - Opera is smart enough to load the next result page. This works for many cases, including browsing through a galery of images.

There are many implementations of equivalents to Opera's "magic wand" (automatic form filler) but none I've seen work as well.

Mouse gestures are another thing. They work out of the box in Opera and seem smoother than in other apps.

One may respond that FireFox has extensions that make it do all of these.  I am sure that's the case, however in my experience with FF, adding more than a few extensions severely degrades the performance of the browser, and makes it feel clunky and less robust. Opera's goodness works very quickly and out of the box.

Although Firefox is quite performant on modern hardware (though less so in Linux than Windows for some reason), it does not come close to Opera. I have an old laptop with 128 megs of ram. Any version of Firefox (even going back a while) thrash it to hell, while even the newest version of Opera works quite smoothly on it. The ability to run a modern browser on older hardware is valuable. There's absolutely no reason why 128 MBs should not be enough for Firefox to do basic browsing w/o choking the machine.

Opera seems overall to be a better constructed, better directed piece of software.

IBM Web Explorer (OS/2 Warp) - Probably the worst, and most primitive graphical browser I have ever used. Slightly better than downloading every webpage and using a text editor to browse them with.

Mosaic (Windows) - Used this for a short bit, and decided on Netscape instead.

Netscape (Windows, Unix) - I liked this and used it for years. I later switched to Opera as Netscape was getting cludgy and outdated. Unix version was extremely fas- Oh, wait. That was a SPARCstation versus a x286 in comparison. Nevermind.

Internet Explorer (Windows) - Okay, but annoying as hell when web pages didn't work according to HTML standards. Later iterations became more insecure. I avoid using this browser as much as possible. Latest iteration reminds me of Opera.

Opera (Windows, Linux) - Polished, fast browser. Was adware/commercial in the beginning, and now available for free. Not as versatile or cool as Firefox.

Lynx (Linux, Unix) - Awesome, fast browser. Usually every webpage is work-safe, except for a few innovative works of ASCII. A little hard to figure out if you haven't used it in a while, though.

Opera Mini (Java/BlackBerry) - Reliable, but renders many pages poorly. Has some very nice navigation features.

BlackBerry Browser (BlackBerry) - Very good mobile browser, if it works. I suspect it uses RIM servers as a proxy, and haven't gotten around to seeing if this is truly the case. When it's actually connecting to websites, the web pages look pretty much like how they should.

Safari (OS X) - Opera clone. It's okay, but not exciting.

Firefox (Linux, Windows, OS X) - My favourite browser, and available on every system I currently use other the BlackBerry. Customizable, can be made fairly secure, but not bullet-proof. Great for ransacking websites or whatever else you may want to do through its available add-ons. The browser works very much the same on every system I have used it on, but some plug-ins may not be as universal (hello, Flash!).

- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson

To me it's always been about two things - speed and compatibility.  Back when I first got online I used Netscape (ver. 3, I think) because it was, at the time, the best of both worlds. IE 3 just didn't cut it in many areas, although it was somewhat faster.  When IE 4 came out it was pretty much all over for Netscape.  IE 4 just looked better than Netscape 4, it "felt" faster (mainly because MS set it up so half the binary would pre-load when you booted Windows, while Netscape had to load from scratch each time you started it, but still...), and it seemed to do a pretty good job of rendering pages in a nice looking format.  I switched almost immediately.  As IE moved into 5.0, then 5.5, then 6.0 things started to get a little slower as more and more bloat got added into the program, and with all the security holes it became nearly impossible to browse the web without picking up all sorts of malware.  The Mozilla project seemed like it might be a solution, but the early Mozilla browser was so slow (based on crappy old Netscape 4 code) that it just wasn't the answer.  I tried Opera, but I found that while it was fast, it just wasn't that good at rendering web pages (and I've never cared for Opera's UI).  

When Firefox first came out (what was it called then, Phoenix, I think?) I was all over that, even before it got out of beta I was using it as my main browser.  It was more secure than IE, faster to load, and it had tabs!  Tabs changed everything for me - I know they were already in Opera, but for whatever reason the way they worked just wasn't a good fit for my habits (the Opera UI in the early versions was far too cluttered, in my opinion - they've gotten better in recent versions, but there's still too much going on, I think).  The Firefox implementation just works perfectly for the way I browse the web.  I've been very happy with Firefox so far, and I'd say it's the superior browser out there right now.  IE7 is alright, but the UI just doesn't do it for me - if MS had just added tabs to the IE6 interface, that would have been fine - instead they took what I saw as many of the bad elements of the early Opera interfaces and ran with them.  I like Safari for the most part, but I just find Firefox to be a superior product in terms of compatibility and customization.  My wife has Mac laptop, but she uses Firefox almost exclusively in place of Safari.  

My one fear has been that Firefox seems to be bloating up a bit - I think most people will agree that Firefox 2.0 was a bit of a disappointment.  Most of the things that were fixed in that release were the sort of behind the scenes things you don't really notice, and a consequence of fixing some of them meant that the browser just plain slowed down a bit, especially on older machines (I don't notice it much now on my dual-core, but on my old Athlon 1800+ I definitely saw a performance hit when the upgrade rolled out).  I'm definitely looking forward to Firefox 3.0 going live - supposedly they've done a lot of work to speed up load times and rendering times, which will address most of the concerns I've had.  Since I'm now using Linux full-time (with a Gnome-based desktop) Firefox is pretty much my main realistic choice, but that's fine by me as long as the devs keep up the good work.

On Windows: Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari.

On Linux: Firefox, Opera*, and Konqueror.

But never mind that. I have a product recommendation: The PicLens browser plugin must be seen to be believed. Install it, do a Google image search, and a little play button will appear when you mouse over one of the preview images on the search page. Click it and behold! *

   The Opera I have on Linux is a 64-bit beta. It crashes faster than any browser on earth.

  * * Try the scroll wheel and click and drag a blank part of the page.

On Linux: Firefox 3.  On Windows: Firefox 3.  On Mac: Firefox 3.  Is there a reason to use anything else?

There are lots of browsers out there but there's only one Firebug.  Like any sane person, I choose that platform that runs my applications the best, and Firebug is the application I need.  I have no idea how people develop Web sites and applications without Firebug.  Badly, probably.  I can either use Firefox with Firebug and find out exactly what error I am getting on exactly what line of my program, or I can use MSIE which helpfully informs me that "Property or object is null at line [null] of file [null]"  Wow, thanks Microsoft, that's really helpful and infuriating!

I have other extensions to Firefox such as Console2, HTTP Live Headers, Venkman, and others, but the feature they all have in common is they make my job easier.  The feature that IE6, IE7, and IE8 Beta share is they make me want to stab someone.