A side effect of doing a lot of work on the Inter-Tubes is that I tend to have a lot of browsers installed and use them all frequently, just to make sure things are behaving. I do a lot of dev-type stuff, so the built-in tools and available extensions are also pretty important to me, although admittedly most people aren't going to care much.
Since I'm a few drinks into the evening, here's where I give my picks along with why. I do realize that with the uber-frequent release cycle on Chrome and FireFox, this is all going to be irrelevant in a month, forward your hatemail to Google and Mozilla if none of this makes sense by the time you read it.
The Duke of New York, A #1 is still Opera. I am not a patient man, when I click a browser icon, it's because I have Shit to Do. Opera starts up a hell of a lot faster than anything else, and hauls screaming ass when loading sites and pages that aren't written by morons. Right-clicking and hitting Inspect Element on anything on a web page gets you access to the fantastic Dragonfly tool, and if you've ever needed to debug some CSS, JavaScript or network issue, this thing is indispensable.
There are a good chunk of sites that don't work quite right, but the keyboard shortcuts and overwhelmingly awesome performance keep Opera as my favorite day to day thing I use.
The number 2 spot is a tie. Chrome and Internet Explorer 11, to be exact. If anyone wants to talk shit about I.E., go get a modern version first. I started using the thing back when Netscape Navigator was the new hotness, and fucking Lynx was the installed browser on the terminals at my college's C.S. lab. The latest version of I.E. is robust, and has an overhauled and surprisingly sexy set of onboard tools for the dev kids out there. The current team working on I.E. knows all the cool kids hate them, and they're kicking some serious ass to make all those people look pants-on-head retarded.
Chrome is a solid piece of work, and I don't really hate anything about it, but there's nothing that makes me love the thing. It performs well, shit generally "just works", and there's not a lot I have to complain about. On the other hand, I loathe most Google stuff, and the UI never, ever fucking puts stuff where I can find it quickly since Google Knows Better. I imagine Apple kids would be right at home with this one, it's just not a great fit for me.
#4 is FireFox. When I installed FireFox 1 point something-or-other, I thought it was the coolest fucking thing ever. 2 was good as well. When 3 came out, it started feeling sluggish and bloated, and by then tabbed browsing was no longer the shiny new reason to lose 3 hours on wikipedia. For the last couple years, FireFox has limped along by having a kick-ass set of extensions (Greasemonkey! Firebug!) to let me get shit done, but the UI changes in the last few versions have started to hobble even those benefits. Mozilla, if I wanted a shitty version of Chrome, I would use Chrome. If I wanted to be a hard-core open source hippy, I would use Konqueror or Ice Monkey or any of the dozen other shitty versions floating out in Linux-land. These days, I ain't got much time for FireFox.
Everything else? I don't care. Safari is hot garbage. Lynx is old and busted. wget is used by Stallman and like 5 other people. I kinda miss Off By One, but only after a lot of drinks and I can't configure Opera to do the same stuff even better.
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