I thought it was about time someone started this poll

Which web browser do you use and why?
If you are planning to change web browsers, what are you gonna change it to?
Which is best for reliability?
Which is best for speed?
Which is best for pop-up control?

And finally, which is the best allrounder?

I voted for mozilla although i use galeon which is based on mozilla

I'm currently using Mozilla 1.4 for my day to day browsing, but check the Firebird nightlies every 5 days or so and it's progression as a browser is really impressive. And when using the Phoenity theme it also wins as the most beautiful browser. My favoured Mozilla theme is Pinball, which is nice and clean, but still pretty.

dev0

I also use Mozilla as my default browser. Both in Linux and Windows. I think it is the best browser right now. Quick rendering, excellent standards support, I like the antispam/antipopup tools and it has never crshed on me and is very secure.

I just installed Mozilla 1.4

So far no crashes, but why is it so slow when compared with internet explorer? I have broadband 1Mb and its like I have a 56k modem.

I hope its got something to do with incorrect configuration

internet exlorer 6
does everything i want, is stable, supports everything, doesn't have display problems like netscape and opera has on some sites (maybe this is because the programmer only tested his sites with IE but anyway it looks good with IE and thats what counts)

no need for me to use opera or mozilla

Why I use Mozilla 1.2.1: 101 things that Mozilla can do that IE cannot.

I just finished a little speed comparison test between IE6 and Mozilla1.4

Findings

On most web pages, IE6 was able to finish loading about 2 seconds faster. On a small percentage of the tested pages (about 5%), IE6 finished quicker by about 5 seconds. On an even smaller percentage (about 1%) of pages tested, both finished at the same time. So, overall IE6 is faster than Mozilla1.4

IE6 tricks the eye

While I was doing this comparison, I noticed a little trick that IE6 was playing. Let me try and explain that I mean.

Once Mozilla has started loading a page, it shows the images loading up 1 by 1 straight away. However, with IE6, when it starts loading the page, it does not go to the new page straight away, it keeps displaying the previous page and hides some of the loading, so when it does switch over, it tricks the eye into thinking it loaded the page much faster. The truth is, it only loads (on average) about 2 seconds faster.

Conclusion

Given that IE6 keeps crashing, I don’t think its 2 second speed advantage is enough to beat Mozilla’s solid browsing. Therefore, I think I could get used to Mozilla 

However, I would definetly stick with IE6 if it didn't crash so much

Sorry about the statement I made about Mozilla1.4 before, I think it might have been a little exaggerated

I've had good luck with MSIE 5.5 SP2... it rarely (if ever) crashes, but the number of service packs & updates borders on the insane. Probably I'll go with IE6 if I have to reinstall Win98SE at any time in the future (except there are a few niggling annoyances with IE6 -- I can't remember what, only that I've tried it and was very annoyed by some behaviors that aren't there with v5.5).

My only complaint with Mozilla is that there's "too much" MSIE optimization on the web, and things just don't look right sometimes with Mozilla. My view is that I don't care as much about following strict standards as I do care about a pleasant and "correct" presentation of websites.

When I was messing around on my friend's cable-modem-connected computer, I installed firebird for him, and wow! Mozilla's progressive loading is so much nicer, and lets you browse faster. I don't care if IE loads faster overall, the progressive loading lets me move faster.

I say this from personal experience!

DO NOT upgrade to IE6, I found that IE5x is a lot more reliable. Even with sp4, IE6 is still not as reliable as IE5x.

Also, you will be missing out on the small differences, which make IE5 much better then IE6.

Yes, I also noticed this with Mozilla Firebird, but I am not using that. It has so many things missing. This is why I am currently testing Mozilla 1.4, to see if I can get used to it or not. So far so good

I use Mozilla 1.4. I'm rather happy with its features, especially the pop-up remover. I've only installed the browser and not the email client and the html editor.

But actually, my first choice would be Mozilla Firebird because it is "lighter" and also easier to use. Unfortunately it still has a few bugs, only a few but sometimes quite annoying. I experienced crashes when filling forms or some problems with the bookmarls menu. I guess they'll be fixed with the next release.

Like everybody, I guess, I've been using Internet Explorer 6 for a long time before changing to Mozilla. Maybe I'm lucky because I never had a problem. IE6 + The Proxomitron always did work well. But the problem with The Proxomitron is that its language is not very clear and absolutely not user friendly. And acting as a local proxy, it seems to tend to slow the connection. That's why I thing Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird can be a better solution.

I've also tried other browsers such as Avant Browser, MyIE2 and Crazy Browser. It looks like they are just different skins for IE. But they do add some interesting features.

edit:typo

I agree... I probably won't ever upgrade. However, look at this -- 14 updates since I installed it (and that's just some of them... others didn't register in the About box). Sheesh!

Firebird is nice, netscape 7.1 is too.

Unfortunately, the Google Toolbar is only availible on IE.

Without getting into the rest of the browser debate (besides, most of what I'd say is already covered in that 101 point thing linked to above), I'd have to disagree with this.

IE5x/win32 is a rather horrible browser. It's "standards" support is a joke, CSS in particular. IE6 isn't loads better, but it's at least it's enough of an improvement for standards concerned web-developers to create CSS heavy sites that look fairly uniform across the 3 major browsers without too much of a headache (ie. hacks).

I've never had any reliability problems with IE6 on any of the computers I've ever worked with (quite a few).

Edit: What some people don't seem to realize is that there are a significant number of technologies out there that are not supported by older (or even current) versions of IE. Refusing to upgrade only makes it harder for developers to offer new features in their websites and take advantage of exciting new technologies, which in the end hurt the same end user which thinks their browser is "good enough."

Mozilla, for the popup blocking, and image/ad blocking capabilities. I also use Mozilla Mail for the built-in spam filters.

Likewise. I have been using IE6 for about a year. It has never crashed on me. I suspect that for the others, IE triggers some bug in a third-party component, or perhaps a hardware error.

I'm currently using Mozilla 1.4. It's rock-solid. The process-lingering-after-close bug seems to have been fixed.

Mozilla Firebird.

-It's fast
-Reliable
-Standards Compliant
-Fast Development
-Built-In Popup blocking
-Ad blocking with UserContent.Css trick
-Tabs
-The Phoenity Theme

I don't think I'll be switching browsers soon.

Doh! Hit the wrong selection. Had mouse pointed over 'Other' and clicked instead of scrolled. (Mods?) Oh well.

I have used IE6 for a long time. Not many crashes I can think of. It's very good (stable) with XP. Wasn't as good when I used 98SE.

Also use Silly Dog version of Netscape 7. Loads pages slower though. And it has a problem when clicking on an ftp link occasionally.

what is the mozilla firebird? another browser from the mozilla group?

Firebird is the cream of the crop (if you find it's missing key features that you've become accustomed to, chances are you can find them in the form of an extension or plug-in here: http://www.texturizer.net/firebird )

Now if only I could rid IE from my machine.

I love Opera. Good UI, very good features, fast, stable, good e-mail client... Only problem I can think about Opera is that it's not free.

Konqueror 3.1.1

because it's part of the wonderful KDE projekt. it's fast, flexible has a good pop up, cookie and cache handling. png support, you can change the browser identify, it has a integrated download manager (KGet), it's also a filemanager, you can archive webpages as an .war archive for offline reading (tar.gz archives), wonderful ftp client, a amazing fish:// protocol and a lot of other features the other browsers do not have. and the KHTML parsing engine are used in the new safari browser on MacOSX.

BadHorsie

Internet Explorer is the best.
most websites and programs run smooth on IE 5.x up.
i've never found website that cannot view on IE.

but Mozilla is my choice, it has pop-up blocker.
Mozilla sometime has conflicts with download managers or java

Interesting enough the pages that make IE6 up and kark it are always the (fairly) bleeding edge ones. At one point IE6 wasn't even able to render the w3.org CSS level 1 recommendation page properly (they have changed the layout since though, so it works now afaik)

Take a look at this one with Mozilla and then with IE6.. http://www.phoenity.com/newtedge/

Have fun.

Yes, Mozilla Firebird is a different browser based on Mozilla, just like Galeon, K-Meleon and Camino. It used to be known as Phoenix. It has no email client and no web editor. The menus have been simplified too.

Website

MYIE2
Think it is the best Multitab Browser around

OMG

I used to use IE for a long time, then I switched to Mozilla which is great but I found it to be not stable enough; it seemed to crash a lot on me. Now I use Opera and I have never been happier, IMO it is superior to anything else. The interface is really clean, very easy to navigate, and it is very stable. Startup times are slower than IE but thats not fair since it is built into the OS but it still starts up fast, definitely faster than Mozilla did on my machine. Although, I must admit I have never used Mozilla Firebird maybe I will give it a try too.

Awsome. It looks like total crap in IE6. In Opera 7.1 it looks almost correctly, even caused it to crash. And as expected it works great in Mozilla.

When I got internet back in 1998, I started out with Internet Explorer 3. Then I upgraded to Internet Explorer 4. Then it crashed a lot, and I tried Netscape Navigator. This worked. In sometime 2000 I think, I tried IE5, which was a lot more stable than IE4 on my computer. A few months later I upgraded, but stayed with IE5. Time went by and IE 5.5 came, later IE 6.0.
A month ago, my IE 6 began to run unstable and crash frequently. Within the last week, it has been driving me mad, and caused me to try Opera and Mozilla.
Of these two, Opera 7.11 just got me hooked instantly. So now I'm using Opera 7.11 and I expect to stay with it, because I just love the interface and speed.

If you found regular Mozilla to be too sluggish, make sure you give their separate Firebird browser a try. It's more efficient than Mozilla due to it being a bit more stripped down (but still more feature-packed than IE)

I use to be a full-time Netscape user but now switched to Mozilla Firebird for browsing and keeping Netscape as a mail client (I think its the best). Mozilla Firebird is small, snappy, and amazingly stable. Once feature that they should put back in is the Helper application controls.

To get the best network performance from Mozilla Firebird (Netscape and Mozilla have this in preferences), turn on 'http pipelining" in the about:config window. I've found that on site with lots and lots of images (like www.icq.com), it makes a tonne of difference.

I don't feel hurt in sticking with IE5.5 SP2. If I'm hurt, I certainly haven't noticed it in browsing the day-to-day sites I normally visit -- including this one, of course.

Then again, I'm very admittedly a throwback -- I'd be happy enough with 1997-ish web pages, and even just plain text (except in cases of secure credit card transactions). The information itself has 100x the importance over the presentation to me. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but -- exciting new technologies? Sounds like a commercial for "the new AOL Broadband."

If it's harder on the developer, then I'm truly sorry. Having done some web development (and also general purpose programming) in the past, I'm well aware of what a thankless task it is.

MyIE2 is the best browser around. It's updated regularly, is based on the IE engine so it loads pages properly, and if you check their forums they have all kinds of useful plugins for it (like a one click image url copier). Other than that, I use Mozilla some

ahahahaaaaaa.. nice joke there!

i tried mozilla 1.4 for a few days, and keeps crashing a lot. i load a page, wait a few seconds after it finished loading, and then boom mozilla crashes. i do have ATI rage video card, and i read on the release notes that this could be a problem. the thing is, it's not an issue with earlier versions of mozilla, such as 1.31, which is what i'm using right now and it works very well. ahh well i'll test 1.4 again soon. i just hope this doesn't mean i can't use future versions of mozilla just because i have an ATI card

my first choice on the windowis box is Opera 6.06, with Opera 7.x and Moz 1.4 as a backup.

I use IE6, it's fast, reliable (it's never crashed on my old PII350 XP box), and loads pages correctly. I've had a look at Mozilla 1.4, but I found that a number of pages don't load correctly. I'm interested to try Firebird (might get round to it in the next week).

Wow. You may have made a convert after seeing this. SD version of netscape renders this corrrectly. IE6 cannot open the 32 bit png. Great link, thanks.

EDIT: After seeing this I tweaked some of the settings in Netscape Navigator and it is almost as fast IE now as far as loading pages. I think IE has an edge because of the way it's integrated and maybe how it caches webpages. But that's only a guess. I'm sure many of you know more about this then what I'll ever want to know. Anyway, certainly makes me think a little about how IE will be used from now on.

IE doesn't render pages correctly!
Otherwise my life as a webdesigner would be much easier!
IE's rendering engine is a buggy mess (CSS box model etc.), which fails to render pages designed according to Standards of the W3C correctly. The only reason some pages fail to display in Mozilla as the author intended them to is invalid HTML,/CSS which has been designed to be displayed in IE only.

dev0

Mozilla Firebird 0.6 is the best web browser out there on Windows platform. The only web sites that I have ever had problems with is Windows Update (since it uses VBScript and ActiveX) and a few sites who used FrontPage to write them. Firebird is fast, renders standards-based code practically flawlessly and non-standard code pretty darn good usable, easy-to-use, and extremely powerful (extensions and about:config) only when you want it to be.

Opera is alright (pretty fast!), although it still has problems rendering standards-based code (maybe the next version will get it right). Get rid of the freakin ads and I might even try it again.

I saw Safari the other day on MacOS X and I was impressed with its speed and rendering. Still seems buggy and not many advanced options for the power users though.

Now that IE won't have any new standalone versions, maybe people will go to alternative browsers...well, we can wish. There are still people out there who use Netscape 3 for gods sake!

i use myie2 and firebird, firebird is usually only a second opinion on the html iam writting at that moment.

with the latest firebird i dont remember any borken pages, any (smart, non java-script) urls where firebird will fail?

The Google Toolbar is available in Moz Firebird as an extension. There's is a ton these for FB. Some sites work great with FB (such as HA). Others (such as JRivers' Interact forum) are speedier with IE. While IE6 is still my default browser, FB is superior in almost every way. Considering that it is as good as it is and still beta, it's future is so bright that I've got to wear shades!

xen-uno

I use IE6 as my default browser but I have Opera 7.11, K-Meleon 0.7, Mozilla 1.3 (yeah, I haven't bothered downloading 1.4 yet) and Mozilla Firebird 0.6...

I would probably switch to Firebird if I could find better ad-blocking extensions, ones that block before downloading the banners, saving my meager 56k bandwidth. I am just too used to running IE with AdShield.

I believe Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird will be merged in the future. When Firebird reaches the 1.0 milestone it'll probably be the best browser for Windows available.

why don't you just use the HOST file trick?

I use Mozilla. If you use the newest beta (as they always seem to urge you to do) I think it runs slower due to extra crash/bug reporting hooks. Pretty zippy on a 2.5 ghz
p4 in any event. It is noticeably slower in starting up on a 1.8 ghz laptop which also has
a slower bus and hard drive. On my 166 mhz Opera is much faster in starting up, but
doesn't seem much different (maybe slower) once it is going.

The problem is that the background and floating text is actually kind of annoying and distracting. I much prefer the text-only page that displays in IE.

Standards compliance isn't really a factor when choosing my default browser. I use Mozilla Firebird as my main browser because of features like tabs, pop-up blocking, etc.

Rob

Right click on banner, check "Block images from this server".