I’m curious as to what the people of black mesa consider to be the best web browser out there. I’ve used Firefox for years and have loved it, but I’d love to hear what people have to say about the others. So lets try and keep this to civil arguments rather than petty name calling or anything like that, but just present facts and logic based arguments about the five. (firefox, IE, Chrome, Opera and Safari)
Firefox: Safe, Secure, Fast, Uses as much system as an OS
Opera: Lean, Clean, Very fast, Limited Addon Support, Less secure than Firefox. Uses almost no system.
Internet Exploder: Slow, Unsecure, Unsafe, No Addon Support, Uses as much system as crysis.
All of them, except IE, actually have reasons to be used. I personally use FF, but Opera is very good too.
Firefox is the most versatile. The ease and design of add ons make it less secure over all, but you can make it do what you want with ease.
Chrome is the fastest ( Web kit is the fastest, and it seems to run better in chrome than safari )
Opera is the lightest on the system, but could be called stripped down so far as customization.
IE is a mixed bag with a bit of everything, but is a bit of a mess.
I like Chrome because I have never had it die because one of the tabs become nonresponsive.
However, what I dislike about Chrome is it’s unorthodox interface. Compare:
https://chrometricks.net/images/chrome_keyboard_shortcuts.png
with
https://tech.arulns.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/ctrl-tab-extension.jpg
I prefer the latter interface. Why the difference, Google?
ill admit, IE has gotten alot better in recent years, but it still has a long way to go before it catches up to browsers like Firefox and Opera.
I mainly use Safari, because it’s just the best browser on OS X.
Firefox is a close second, though it seems to crash/lockup more often (again on OS X)
At work I mainly use IE because more than 60% of the people still use IE and designing websites should always have IE in mind. But it’s slow, ugly, chunky, not secure and illogical (though I guess that’s a Microsoft treat).
I don’t like Chrome because I’m wary of any software by Google, and because it just looks and feels unnatural in terms of browsers.
I disagree with this. How much market share you have shouldn’t dictate how website designers design their websites. There is coding standards for designing websites, and rendering for how browsers display them. IE is the least compliant major browser. That means you have to compensate for IE fucking up.
Run this in different browser and see how well IE does in properly handling websites. There is standards for a reason. If you have a product most people use, you should be the MOST compliant.
Recently IE has surprised me on this front - I’m a web designer / developer and I build sites up in Firefox and then switch to IE for testing. Back in the days of IE6/7 I’d have loads of little tweaks to make to get it to look or act correctly, but with IE8 it’s been almost spot-on every time!! MS are getting better with each release!
The only problem with this is I have to test sites in IE6, 7 AND 8 - why won’t people upgrade 
Chrome. Although there are still a few glitches that I would have expected to be fixed by now.
Of course it shouldn’t, but the reality is different. IE -is- the weakling child of the nest and it does seem to do everything wrong, but when I have to design webcontent for my company, I keep IE in mind because the statistics still show that a massive chunk of our visitors use IE (hell, we even get about 15-20 visitors per month who still use IE5, though we don’t keep those in mind).
I work for an international company that is active on every continent but Antarctica. We’re pretty much the same as Adobe, apart from the fact that we deliver software solutions for packing prepress, rather than design. We have a massive amount of clients and all those clients -need- clean, optimal access to our websites and support. So yes, we should keep IE in mind if your audience asks for it.
Edit: teehee, I tried your link in IE, Firefox, Chrome and, Safari. Only Chrome and Safari went to 100/100. Firefox to 93/100, IE to 12/100. (this is on Windows, btw)
I got 100/100 in Chrome. The count-up wasn’t totally smooth (it counted up into the thirties, paused for a split second, counted up to the sixties, paused for another split second, then continued to 100) but I’m not sure if it’s the browser or my computer.
Firefox IMO. At work, we design websites to function properly with Firefox and then iron out the cross-browser issues later.
IE is the bane of my life.
Try it in IE.
@chrisp: My site still doesn’t look exactly right in IE6, it’s okay, but I’ve stopped caring.
@bolteh: I never have to worry about ff, chrome, or safari. For testing I always have to tinker things for IE. Website designers HAVE to do this. The point is, they shouldn’t HAVE to.
Which version? Each one behaves nothing like another :meh:
EDIT: Touche my friend… touche…
Doesn’t matter. It’s a whole line up of fail.
i will never go back to internet explorer, firefox is fast, reliable, safe, easy and simple to use and packed with extra features for you to pimp it out with. Opera comes a close second, with its torrent downloader, its speed and realibilty. Chrome is much like a Michael Bay film, super speedy and slick, but lacking any real content. And I cant comment on Safari because I’ve never used it, I would however if I bought a Mac. As for internet explorer I’ve created much finer software in my toilet, dont ask me how, its just fact…
Chrome.
I always have a million tabs open at once, and the new window tab drag is useful for organizing. I’ve also never experienced Chrome crashing (or if I have, it was so insignificant that I can’t remember it).
You can drag a new window to the tabs of another window in Firefox as well, though.