Poll: What's your favorite Web browser?
Thursday December 14, 2006
A friend of mine and I were talking about browsers the other day - he's very pro IE and I prefer Firefox. I had a similar poll around 6 months ago where around 50% of the submitters preferred Firefox.
But now that we have another version of IE and another version of Firefox, I was wondering if attitudes had changed.
What is your favorite Web browser?
- Firefox 2 and Safari 2 Any version 2 of Mozilla-based browsers
- Firefox 1, Mozilla 1, or Safari 1
- Internet Explorer 7
- Internet Explorer 6
- Internet Explorer 5
- Netscape 7
- Opera 9
- Opera 8
- Something else
Comments
SeaMonkey 1.06!!!
Previously known as Mozilla Suite…
SeaMonkey 1.5a (nightly builds) Getting even fancier the last month or so.
Ask me what my LEAST favorite browser is. I’ll give you a hint: It starts with IE and ends with 5.
It was interesting to see that you included Apple’s browser, Safari.
However, you only had version 1 listed when the current version is 2.0.4. So I voted for “other” also.
ie7 rules, we saw all these newbies comin up every now n then but IE burried em all
When I first came on to the web about two years ago I only knew about IE6, when I discovered Firefox it blew me away!
When IE7 came with its tabbed browsing I thought I might end up switching back, but I found I was missing my Firefox. When Firefox 2.0 was released I started using it and now I have no plans to ever use IE again.
firefox 2
George M: Thanks - we only have room for 10 entries in our polls, and I meant to include Safari 2 in the Firefox 2 block and just forgot it. I’ve added it in there.
Isn’t safri forked from the konqueror (unlisted here!) code base, not the mozilla one?
SeaMonkey :: Childhood memories relived, I’d say..
Nothing beats IE and 7’s tabbed browsing is better than FireFox, it just seems to work smoother; I also hate they way many pages don’t display properly in FireFox – JavaScript problems abound.
Because of my job as a web developer I am forced to test web pages on the three main browsers, (Netscape, FireFox and IE), and only IE usually has no problems with the code or formatting, Netscape always has formatting issues (slightly different point sizes, etc.) and FireFox often does not run the JavaScrip properly or at all. And frankly it’s really, really annoying having to write pages that conform to three slightly different standards.
I think the main reason many companies stick to IE as an internal standard is to avoid cross browser issues – it just takes too much time making these systems work together, at least that’s why they standardized with IE here. Of course public web pages still have to be compatible with all of them.
I took a pole in our IT department and all the developers voted IE the best and FireFox the worst and all the Technicians voted exactly the opposite; and no votes went to other browsers.
MS is not supporting w98 anymore so if you are using it you can not use IE 7. That leaves FF2 way better than the IE6.
hey pat
“pages don’t display properly in FireFox – JavaScript problems abound.”
Dont you have your browsers around the wrong way?
“I think the main reason many companies stick to IE as an internal standard…”
Out of pure laziness. It’s installed on their machines already, which means they have to support it. But it’s far buggier and less likely to render W3C spec, so developers hate it. It’s a bigger target for security and privacy breaches, so support staff hate it. In mixed-platform environments, IE isn’t even an option for many (end-of-lifed for Mac and not available for Linux).
YMMV, of course.
We’re running WinXP Home, SP 2, and I have both IE 7 and Firefox 2. In the real world (of users, not developers), I find that IE 7 is abominably slow, does not run many necessary scripts on my favorite pages, like interactive ticker scripts, and also wants to be my constant nanny and overrides my control panel settings, forbidding me to download many programs regardless of my security settings. Firefox does not have these issues, but has some issues of its own, with overactive security settings that will not allow me to sign on to my online banking, or at least I have not learned how to override it yet. In general, I much prefer Firefox.
“…will not allow me to sign on to my online banking…”
Usually, this is your bank’s software at work. And usually, there’s no technical reason they’re doing it. Luckily, it’s fairly easy to trick these sites into thinking you’re using IE. Check out the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox. It’s like having doors magically opened again for you!
yahoo is the largest web browser
I like Firefox best, but I think most sites work on IE. Each time something doesn’t work on Firefox, I have to switch to IE and visit the page.
I was wondering why safari and firefox are together on the poll? I know they are all mozilla based but wouldn’t be easier to distinguish between the two if they were a separate result?
The strangest thing is that once, I was using Hotmail, and it said that my browser wasn’t compatible (I was using Firefox). Then, I pressed my browser’s back button, and Hotmail worked perfectly. I wonder why.
Firefox because of all the available extensions. Opera is also a favorite for it’s speak feature and other things.
I love Firefox because of it’s extensions, compliance to the W3C standards. There should come a day when people will have to choose their browser based on its cosmetics, security and possibilities. If only IE and Netscape would behave better.
As a website developer for C2 Global Technologies, I code almost 100% of the time in Web 2.0 thinking. Nothing ruins the party faster than checking out the latest embroidery / shirt designing web application that we developed in another browser. As a principle, we code for firefox, then we adapt to lesser browswers such as ie7.
Anybody ever been to IE7.com ?