Primary browser?

Most things… like where? IE8 is not the disaster that IE6 was but I’ve never heard anyone call it more secure than Firefox.

As for the poll, I’m still using Firefox which is fast and stable on my system – perhaps because I’m not using any plugins.

I like Chrome for it’s speed and it’s simplicity. I’ve used FF but it crashes on me daily and I don’t need all the apps (and I can’t figure out to use them anyway).

At work we use IE6 (I know, I know).

iCab on iPad.

Back to Firefox after trying Chrome for a few weeks. It still just seems wonky to me, and I hate hate hate its find functionality.

I have. I have neither the links nor details to hand, but it’s about how IE runs in (insert handwave here) protected mode or something, so that if there is an exploit, it has less capability to do stuff.

They can call me on my iPhone to bitch me out…

But you’ve got that iPhone wirelessly connected to your Zune, right?

Firefox. Chrome and opera might be a bit faster, but nobody compares to firefox in addons and userscript support. Also rock solid stability on extreme tab browsing.

Opera.

Super slim interface, the best mouse-gestures I’ve seen, general prettiness, and good performance.

I would like to use FF, but it locks up, slows down, and crashes at least once a day. And then when I bring it back up, all my old tabs are gone, even though I have it set to restore tabs. I use Chrome now, only Flash crashes on it once a day, and that doesn’t require me to actually run Chrome again, just refresh the pages.

Chrome. I’d rather be using Firefox, but there are some things that Chrome does that vastly improves my browsing experience and haven’t been properly replicated by Firefox’s superior extensibility:

Things I have trouble doing without after using Chrome
[ul]
[li]Speed - I know, all Chrome people say this. But it really, really shines through when you’re using a Netbook half the time. Particularly in Linux, Chrome is hell on wheels for netbooks. Startup is smoother, browsing to pages is faster, scrolling is smoother and with less janks. It’s just a much friendlier experience, and that really comes out when your hardware is limited. Incidentally, it actually uses slightly more RAM than Firefox, contrary to popular belief. I know this because you can enter about:memory in the address bar to see current memory usage of every browser (Chrome and others)[/li][li]Bookmarks synced over Google Docs - I’ve tried some of FF’s syncing extensions and they just don’t compare. Between home and work I use enough computers that being able to seamlessly sync them all via my Google account has been wonderful. You just go to the menu, choose “sync my bookmarks,” log in, and it will remember you. Your bookmark configuration will be merged everywhere and since it’s on Google Docs you don’t have to keep track of yet another account and server for your various computing functions. If you’re like me, account/server creep is a pain in the butt.[/li][li]Incredible multi-search engine support - There are extensions for this, but they mostly rely on keywords and preconfiguration, and i hate keeping track of them on multiple computers (home and work). In Chrome, when you go to a page and search it a few times, Chrome will eventually make a note of it (you can also force the issue and assign keywords if you really want to). Then, if you enter the first few letters of its URL (enough to distinguish it from any others saved) and hit TAB, you can search right from the address bar. For wolframalpha, I hit “wo” and then TAB. For google, it’s just ctrl+k. For wikipedia, en+TAB. For imdb, im+TAB. Etc. They’ll go away if you clear your history, but you can always make them permanent by right-clicking the address bar and editing the search engines. This is by far the fastest way I’ve ever seen of searching the internet for things, and this way I don’t have to maintain configurations on multiple computers or keep track of a bunch of keyword shortcuts![/li][li]Screen real estate - Again, awesome for netbooks, which is what won me over, but even on a regular computer, other browsers look downright wasteful after continued Chrome usage. There are skins and extensions like Littlefox, but they somehow manage to be less smooth (visually and behaviorally) while still taking up more space.[/li][/ul]

Oh yeah, and

Bad things about Chrome
[ul]
[li]Adblocking extensions are less secure - okay, so in Firefox if you use Adblock, it stops the ad from ever getting to you - the browser doesn’t even render it. Because of the way Chrome’s renderer works, Adblock and Adthwart only kill the ad after rendering. Not only is this slightly inefficient, but if there is a hostile script in an ad there is still a slight chance it could get to you in the short window before it’s killed. The Chromium devs are working on this, though.[/li][li]It looks like a toy - well, it does![/li][li]Less robust extensions - this much is obvious, and it will improve as the community grows. But part of what makes Chrome run so well is how tightly its processes are controlled. This is at odds with extensibility, so in Chrome you’re sacrificing some of the nigh-infinite extensibility you get in Firefox for better performance. Because of this, I actually keep both browsers installed on any machine I’m using regularly. This is actually what causes my first real problem with it. And it leads to the next one:[/li][*]I miss Greasemonkey![/ul]

Wow. Now there’s a blast from the past. iCab was by far my preferred browser in my pre-OS X Mac days. Tons of features, the ability to fake out sites that rejected non-IE browsers. Cool stuff. And then they went pay and that was the end of that for me.

Right now I use Chrome because it’s fast, has an intuitive and very usable UI, and I vastly prefer searching directly from the main bar instead of a sidebar, especially with the refinements Google has made to the process like being able to tab into searching Amazon or whatever. But because Chrome Adblock isn’t as powerful as Firefox’s, I’ll occasionally open something in Firefox. Mostly streaming videos from Viddler, which has an awful tendency to play unskippable 30+ second long ads directly before and after all videos on their service (not always, but enough that I just put it in Firefox as a matter of course), even if the video is actually shorter than the damn ad. Firefox Adblock stops those cold.

I have to use IE7 at work and hate every second of it.

Did you try the latest version? FF used to have a real problem with its session saver feature being useless and losing your session when it crashed, but these days it is pretty good.

Stability has also improved a lot. Before opening 40 tabs at once would be chancy, but these days it is no problem.

Oddly, in this poll, compared to 2 months ago, Firefox is losing ground. Chrome, I get, but Opera? Really?

Last time 10 people voted for Opera. This time, 8 people did. It’s just that you have fewer overall votes in this one. Fewer votes always favors the cultists.

I suppose we could just ask Stusser, you know.

When someone’s opening 40 tabs at once, I believe that qualifies as a canonical example of PEBCAK.

It’s not hard to open 40 tabs just reading QT3, on a day when there are lots of interesting threads. This is a very normal thing to do.

You’d be surprised how easy it is. Looking at a lot of things at once and/or having a number of tabs open that you want to come back to, but not enough to bookmark since you only plan to view them once.

or going through some sort of list (such as a forum) and quickly middle mouse clicking a bunch of interesting sounding items to open them in new tabs in quick succession.

Use it or not, the ability to browser 40 tabs in an organized manner is there should you need it. When i close firefox done with 40+ tabs up and then restart firefox, it loads all of the 40+ tabs without crashing, something that certainly can’t hurt. I haven’t tried chrome too recently, but in the past, chrome would just die with even a medium number of tabs and tabs would take forever to change to.

And trying to figure out what the hell each tab is in Chrome when you have more than about a dozen (and I’m on 1680x1050 here) is ridiculous, especially when you are opening a bunch of tabs from a site that likes to append its domain name to every sub-page on it.