Browser Wars Heat Up... See Videos, Link & Poll

[tomh009]

IE8, Firefox and Chrome.

IE still is needed for some applications, and it's far better than it was. Almost good enough for me ...

Firefox was my standard for several years. Fast, flexible and secure. Love the rapid history search in the URL edit box. But it now has lots of its own security holes. Performance has gone way downhill and memory usage is bordering on atrocious. While IETab addressed the IE compatibility issue, these days IETab crashes the browser far too often (as do other unexplained things). And font sizes just aren't quite right at 120 dpi. But in the end the unacceptable pauses at random times sealed it for me.

So ... Chrome. It's a bit raw ... clever in other ways, unfinished in others. No plug-ins as such, but user scripts (a pain to install!) allow you to do at least basic Flash blocking, which was the only critical thing for me. The lack of RSS support almost killed it for me (going to a web page to check the feeds is not an acceptable option for me) but I now do those with Outlook 2007, which is not so bad. The UI has some nicely done parts but not quite all the flexibility is there. And the history search in the URL box is nowhere near as good as Firefox's. But ... it's stable, fast and uses significantly less memory than Firefox.

So Chrome it is for me. At least for now -- haven't tried Firefox 3.5 yet, though, to see whether it works better.

[tomh009]

I run Chrome under Linux, and it's an awesome browser, but I cannot use it full time because of its beta status. Certain things don't work on it still, which will be fixed when they release the official version.

Of course some Google products stay in beta for years and years and years ...

[SkiBunny]

FF mostly (but I preferred netscape navigator to IE a decade ago)
IE6 just a tiny bit when necessary, such as for windows update
Found chrome a little too buggy for my liking.

[GomJabbar]

Opera 10 beta 1 (Windows), Opera 10 beta 1, QT4 build (Linux). 'Nuff said!