Internet Browsers

[ugly_bob]

Which browser do you use and why?

I currently use Firefox, mainly due to the pop-up blocker and tabbed browsing (which you can have on IE now), but just remembered Netscape that I used to use a few years back. Any +s and -s for any browsers would be good.

[jenstar]

Firefox here too. Basically, it's very customisable, very fast, much more secure than IE, and there's any number of little things I like about it too, such as the fact that you can change text size on a whim with ctrl+ and ctrl-.

[cherrybomb]

I use Opera and I can't fault it. It is also very customisale, very fast and like ugly_bob and jenstar I like the tabbed browsing, pop-up blocker and the fact that you can instantly change the text size from a drop down box on the toolbar. The best thing about it though is when you highlight a word, sentence or address (handy for ebay) you can right click and copy to operas own notepad and go back to it later just by opening the notes in a new tab.

[fo3nix]

You can't beat firefox.

The next closest rival on a windows machine is Opera. This has excellent standards support, perhaps better than the gecko rendering engine in firefox. It's also fast as lightning, and had many "firsts", and still does some cool stuff (such as zooming in on a page -- much better than IE's or firefox's attempts).

However, firefox is free software (I mean free as in speech here, as well as beer). This is a huge advantage in so many ways. It also has some excellent extensions that I don't know how I could peruse the web without.

On a mac Safari is a little more useful in many ways as it's built with Cocoa so integrates more into the system than firefox does. Firefox consequently looks a little ugly here, and doesn't have great access to the keychain etc. like Safari does. Camino is like an early firefox for the mac, made natively so it looks and feels better.