Firefox is, if given the option, the browser I'd use all the time. In some cases (public or facility based computers, for example) this isn't possible, as they've only got Internet Explorer on them, so I tolerate it. I honestly can't see any real reason why someone would choose IE over FF, though, the latter having far more features and customisability than the former. Sure, it uses a little more memory and hogs a few more of the CPU's cycles, but when the machine I use for high-intensity gaming and so on is the same one I use for web browsing (and I don't tend to be doing both at once ) it handles fine. On slower systems I could understand the reasoning behind making that a fairly important negative factor in weighing up the two, but I can't really comment on that aspect.

One comment I should add is that I've never actually used Opera or Netscape (or pretty much any other browser you care to mention), so I'm not even going to try to compare what I hear about them to my first-hand knowledge of FF and IE.

Perhaps the most important aspect of FF to a web developer is the fact that it renders pages as the standards tell it to. While there'll always be a few minor discrepancies between the exact conversion of CSS to pretty pages, FF does have a damned good go at it, whereas IE says something along the lines of "web standards? They're the things all the other browsers stick to", promptly shreds all copies it has of them, ignores what every other browser is doing and then - and only then - decides to make its own mind up about how things should work and look. For some reason (perhaps the whole "it being distributed with every copy of Windows" thing ) it's commonly used, so developers have to deal with the mutations it can suddenly decide to make to the page you've designed that looks just perfect in FF, Opera and Safari.

From that perspective, as all the pages I make are "personal" (i.e. designed for a select group of people that I at least vaguely know) I can choose to say "tested in Firefox, any freakouts IE has with it aren't my problem", which is a luxury a vast majority of developers lack.

So anyway, overall I honestly can't see any reason why I would use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, although I understand the memory and CPU requirements argument that people take. Of course, saying that is perhaps similar to saying that you play a game that's not as good as another one, but requires less in the graphics department: your system can't handle it, so you can't upgrade.

Since my last post I've installed the latest Opera (non beta) and have enjoyed it. I know that firefox has been annoying me lately because I like to leave my computer on with the browser almost always open with multiple tabs. In firefox this spells an enourmous amount of ram being used within a day or two if you don't retsrat the browser on occasion. As far as I can tell opera is keeping ram usage to a reasonable level which is something I've been hoping for. I think I'll be trying the opera beta out soon to see what kind of changes they've made.

Yeah, Safari is weird about the fonts, I don't see why they replace the Page Set font to begin with, but other than that I still install using Safari to browse. Also, it looks like I'm going to have to try out Opera, it seems like it might be worthy of a good browser. However, my Upstairs computers are only running on 1 GHZ Pentium 3 Processors, so, if it is a bit of a memory hog it wouldn't be practical for them to use.

I have never had any problems with Opera's rendering engine. Only pages that are written extremely bad (ie. frontpage websites) don't show up properly, but hey ... that's not Opera's fault .

@Jeigh: don't forget to try out Opera 9.5 beta

I mainly browse with Opera, it's always running when my computer is on, if we're talking about Windows and as I am used to it I like it, never browse with IE, the only thing I do with it is test some webpage or go to a page which only works with IE, but usually I leave those pages for someone else to watch and of course it's used to update windows..

I agree that Safari is a great browser, on Linux I prefer Konqueror above all, but on Windows version of Safari, I just test the page, because of the GUI, I never really like Apple GUI, I rather see a webkit browser with a GUI written with QT that it would look like Opera or at least like Firefox..

Firefox 3 beta is really promising, because it's so fast, just hope it will stay so fast when the final version will come, because the more features and add-ons and stuff it has, the slower it is.