What web browser do you use and why?

[Oliwerko]

So, I don't want to steal the topic below, so I'll make another one here, only about web-browsers. I haven't found any so far, so don't kill me if there already is one.

Onto the topic:
Why do you use the web browser you use? Why do you prefer it? What are pros and cons of it? Share your thoughts, opinions and recommendations!

I personally use Opera, cause it is much more sophisticated than Firefox, it handles everything easily, and it is...how to say...neater and more to my taste. I find it better than Firefox. (I did not like the poor RSS support in firefox along with the IE-ness of it) It is also more "all-in-one" software. You have everything nicely in one program. Torrents, RSS, mail, etc etc. I guess you have most of this stuff also in FF, but it seems to me that in Opera it is taken more seriously and into greater detail. It is simply very well-arranged and I am totally Operish. I consider FF a half-step between IE and Opera.

[zabnat]

I use K-Meleon. It's fast and fits like a glove for me (after customizing it). Besides, it's cool to use something that most people don't use

[BOYD1981]

i too use Opera because it doesn't need a load of addons to do things that Opera can do by default. it does occasionally annoy me though because some sites just seem to act stupid in it, and i don't like the way it handles url history, but overall i like it.
i only ever use Fireflops if something won't behave properly in Opera to the extent it is either unusable or unbearably difficult to do so.
when i first started using the internet i was a big fan of Netscape 2, it had the neat feature of each instance of it being able to use a different folder for downloading files, which they removed in subsequent versions.

[hedgefield]

I use Firefox. I have a bunch of plugins, including the IE render engine, an excellent sidebar rss reader, the web developer toolbar (very useful), Foxmarks which keeps a backup of all my bookmarks online, and morning coffee which opens all the sites I check on a daily basis at once in seperate tabs. So I'm happy with it. It works well and it's pretty fast. I never want to go back to IE. Or any other browser probably.

[Tuomas]

I too use Opera. It all started when my father was using Opera instead of IE because of safety issues, I grew fond of it by time. Alongside I use Maxthon2.

I don't use Firefox for some reasons. First off, the tab function seems to be a lot better in Opera, with handy clickable icons and all that. And secondly, I changed my secondary browser to Maxthon because Firefox wouldn't work on my computer anymore, it kept failing due to some misfunction of the quicktime plugin, which I tried to fix several times, nothing worked.

What I don't like about Opera is its tendency of downloading torrents by default, so in order to get them on my utorrent I have to save target as and then later open them. Also Opera seems to reset most of my settings when updated.

Maxthon... well, don't you just hate it when you have people around, and you decide to watch some youtube videos. And then they type www.y and the browser suggests youporn.com? And because of my 7 tabs open all the time from startup system, I can't go deleting my internet history. So all the porn keeps popping up

[Maz]

I use mostly firefox, but there is times when lynx is handy

I have also tried konqueror and opera, but somehow I never really liked them. Perhaps I just tried them for too short period to get used to them.

[Radiant]

Firefox all the way. It's the smoothest-running browser I've ever encountered.

Also, Lynx, because I sometimes run in pure text mode.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I used to use IE until the day before yesterday, because I got fed up of everyone talking about this Firefox, so I gave it a whirl. I still have IE installed, and occasionally use one or the other indiscriminately.

I DID notice that whenever Firefox crashes (which it did twice in as many days) it takes everything along with it - I can't close any processes anymore and have to shutdown.

Despite that, which hasn't happened today as of yet, I'm not displeased with it.

[LimpingFish]

I get that Firefox problem too, Rui. Only seems to happen since version 2.0, though.

Never liked Opera, and I haven't used IE in years.

[TwinMoon]

I DID notice that whenever Firefox crashes (which it did twice in as many days) it takes everything along with it - I can't close any processes anymore and have to shutdown.

Hm, I use Firefox and it never did that.

However, in the 12-15 months I've been using Firefox I did lose my bookmarks three times. It crashed and when I restarted they were all gone.
Since then I export my bookmarks occasionally (and of course it hasn't happened since).

Apart from that it's all I'd ever want for a browser.

[Domino]

I have been using Firefox for many years now.  I don't think i could live without the tabbed browsing, even though i think the newest version of IE does have it.

I did use IE a long time ago, but for some reason it would always freeze up on me, so i had to find an alternate browser, and i couldn't stand Netscape, so i eventually came across Firefox and would never use any other browser now.

Yep, Firefox. It's wonderful.

[Evil]

IE, bitches. Who needs firefox anyway?

"But you'll get viruses, and spam, and firefox doesn't do that!"

Seriously, who cares? They're no different, and you know it. Shut up.

[TwinMoon]

Seriously, who cares? They're no different, and you know it. Shut up.

Firefox has a beautiful warm icon. IE hasn't.

[InCreator]

Firefox. About 2-3 years already--? I'm radical anti-IE from the days it messed up webpage I had to make for a cafe and delayed me and made my work look bad because in cafe, they had only IE. Which showed everything I made as a big, misaligned, buggy mess. So I spent weeks to straighten out bugs that were there not not because the webpage, but simply a product of idiocy of Microsoft corporation and it's retarded employees.
F-king stupid IE. Hate it. Forever.

But Firefox is quite good.
I added nice load of add-ons to make it prettier and FireFTP is quite handy too.

All this talk about how nice Opera is have strongly shaken my faith and I'm a bit pissed about it.
Until today, I though I'm using best browser out there. Now... I have this urge to try out Opera. And I feel guilty.

EDIT: RSS feeds? They do THIS? Those cool things? I, living in an Internet world since it was created didn't know this?
Morale:Even most pointless thread at AGS Forums could teach you something new.

[Khris]

I'm currently running Firefox 3 beta 4 and I love it. The only downside I've encountered so far: when using Imagezoom to take a closer look at pixel art, the pic is scaled up using a filter instead of bigger pixels.
I've occasionally used an older version of Opera some time ago but I always considered it a bit irrelevant. Haven't tried the new version though. Yet.

[Snarky]

I use Firefox at work, Opera at home. In my experience and opinion, Opera is much better designed, more usable and more stable than Firefox. It is also highly configurable (without lots of hard-to-maintain plugins), allowing you to define and redefine any kind of keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture you might desire.

There are tons of things Opera does right by default, which Firefox doesn't. You might be able to modify the FF behavior, but I've found that to be a non-intuitive process. For instance, the up/down arrows scrolls the page in Opera, which is perfect for reading forum threads or news articles online. In Firefox it does something strange (move the cursor?) instead. In opera, if you open a group of bookmarks they all open in new tabs. In Firefox, they open in whatever tabs you already have open (so I lose the pages that were up in those tabs). When I close Opera, it remembers all the tabs I have open. Firefox doesn't. When you download a file in Firefox, it doesn't let you choose where to save it to. (Opera does, and actually starts downloading the file in the background while you're navigating to the right folder, so that no time is wasted in the process.)

However, Opera does have problems with some sites (and my company's proxy, which is why I've resorted to Firefox in the office), which makes it necessary to keep a backup browser. The only other minor gripes I have with it is that it insists on opening torrent files in its own built-in client (as already mentioned), and that when images are stretched from their native resolution, it resizes them with a bicubic filter as opposed to the nearest-neighbor used by IE and Firefox: while this looks much better in most cases, pixel art gets all blurry.

[Privateer Puddin']

when images are stretched from their native resolution, it resizes them with a bicubic filter as opposed to the nearest-neighbor used by IE and Firefox: while this looks much better in most cases, pixel art gets all blurry.

go to opera:config, then Multimedia and turn off Interpolate Images, you can do this without having to restart Opera, so you can quickly change it if you want to look at some pixel art.

You should be able to stop Opera opening torrent files aswell, I have it so it asks me what I want to do, like other downloads.

[Domino]

When you download a file in Firefox, it doesn't let you choose where to save it to

Under tools, options, then downloads. It gives you the option for FF to ask you where you want to save files.

[Stupot]

I use Firefox... Although it might as well be any other.  I use it for browsing and nothing else.

[Nikolas]

firefox here as well. Smooth as... whatever really...