Which is the better internet browser?

Firefox is the generally-accepted “best alternative” (measured by market share).

Almost all alternate browsers beat IE in terms of security, but what puts Firefox ahead of the rest is its expansive set of available add-ons.

I love Firefox. I have never looked back after leaving IE.

Chrome is a very speedy browser, so if that’s your primary concern go right ahead, however I recommend Firefox. The reason: immense amount of add-ons that let you customize your experience, powerful bookmarking tools to keep track of your favourite sites, good security but most importantly great support for web standards for a great viewing experience.

That said, Firefox 3 can be a bit of a memory hog while running a lot of extensions so watch out for that. Some people adore Opera, but personally I never got used to it.

I like Google Chrome, but Firefox usually supports some pages Chrome doesn’t. I would try both for yourself and see which one you prefer.

But run as far away from IE as possible. It’s just plain terrible.

Firefox worked great for me until it spontaneously decided to freeze up my computer everytime I tried to start it. I now use Opera, and I love it.

Firefox.

@Les- What type of computer?I am having similar problems with one of mine.

@Dog – Dell Inspiron E1505 with XP. I went to Firefox help sites and the whole shebang, and nothing I tried fixed it. I still have no clue what the problem was. All I know is it angered me, so I had to change. And I refused to go the IE way…

I have a PC and use Firefox and Chrome interchangeably, and really either one is great. I have had issues watching Netflix movies on Chrome though (just one example of some things Chrome just won’t support), but other than that it’s pretty solid.

I love Firefox.

I’ve tried FF. I seem to keep coming back to Safari. I use a Mac.

I prefer Firefox over Chrome, but I do use Chrome every once in a while, and it definitely is an improvement over IE.

Firefox is great because of its customizability, there are thousands of addons for various purposes. Chrome is great because it’s speedy and simple.

I’m with amaris—I use Chrome most of the time, but have Firefox ready in case something isn’t compatible.

@Les Mine is an iMac. Maybe for me it is the fact that I am maxed on ram. I wonder if Firefox requires more memory to run.

Firefox and Opera

Firefox. //Be sure to get Ad-Block//

I use many useful firefox add-ons everyday. If I wasn’t a person who used add-ons I’d definitely use Google Chrome

I love Firefox. I cringe when I visit a webpage without adblock plus and flashblock. And Firebug is fun.

@Dog – Maybe… I don’t think that was the issue for me. I am doing pretty well, RAM wise. I hope you can fix the problem…

Alright so what I’m understanding is I can download Firefox, Chrome and still have IE as a choice? My husband loves IE and he’s the only reason I haven’t changed to Firefox. But I can have all 3 and choose the one I want to use whenever?

@ShanEnri Yes you can :-)

@ShanEnri – Absolutely.

firefox for heavy duty browsing, and chrome just for speed

Firefox, Safari, Opera.

IE shouldnt be used by anyone, if MS cant get it right after this many years then its time to move on.

I love Chrome, but then again I have a huge crush on Google.

When Chrome was still new, some pages don’t work so great on Chrome, but I haven’t had that problem in a long while (several months ago I couldn’t use the bumper sticker app on Facebook, but its cool now).

@gggritso RE Chrome vs. Firefox in terms of speed:
If you’re after a speedy browser, but still want the extensibility of Firefox, you might want to check out this blog post on getting your Firefox to run faster.

Firefox for the add-ons. Opera has some great built-in features, and i’m looking to try it out again once Opera Unite gets better. They say Google Chrome is faster and it has that separate processes feature but the variety of add-ons in Firefox trumps chrome imo. Also, Chrome for me sometimes acts up on some flash-embedded sites. Safari for the Mac is standard and pretty simple to use.
Oh, and open source is a plus.

I use Firefox because it is generally secure, regularly updated, and has tons and tons of plugins to help me accomplish pretty much any task.

I used Chrome for a bit, but to be honest I really need the plugins I’ve gotten used to. Since Chrome can’t use Firefox plugins, using Chrome is not an option.

Firefox, Firefox, Firefox. It’s where it’s at.

I’ve used Firefox for a few years now and when I go to use IE every once in a while it just feels too solid and clunky. Firefox is so fluid and light. You can customize just about everything with it, especially with the plethora of add-ons.

@dUc0N That’s an interesting post, but it’s a bit like swimming against the current. You can take a donkey, shave off its fur and give it a helmet, but it won’t be as fast as a horse. Firefox is speedy enough for me as is :)

Too cool! I want to thank everyone for their responses! I’m going to try firefox! I’ll let you know!

On firefox now! I was able to login to facebook! I’m going to try a few more websites, but looks great so far! Thanks to all! Lurve!

@gggritso Too true… but nothing wrong in making it faster, amirite? Sort of akin to performance tuning a perfectly good Lamborghini.

Some more notable links I should post, while my mind’s on it… check out the addon collections. These are the ones I use:

Must-have:
Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, Tab mix plus (all included in the Lifehacker must-have pack), FireFTP

Nice to have:
Lifehacker ‘better’ pack, Personas, SkipScreen, and FoxyProxy for my Portable Apps version, which lives on my thumbdrive and thus needs to use proxies sometimes.

@dUc0N You really hit the nail on the head there, in more ways than one. Sure, if you can squeeze out a bit of extra performance out of anything you should go for it, but the flip side is that the tinkerers don’t know the product as well as the engineers, and something is bound to go wrong. For example, this morning, running the Skype extension caused problems with accessing localhost, which makes web development impossible for me.

That said, here are the Add-Ons I use:

Adblock Plus
FireFTP
FireBug
Personas
Ubiquity

Thanks for suggesting all the add-ons. I just downloaded Adblock Plus and Flashblock.

@gggritso – Dang… Ubiquity looks awesome. Just nabbed it for a test drive!

You raise a good point about tuning… a good reason to try and be safe by trying out only one tweak at a time, and then testing it. It makes it easier to go back and reverse what went wrong.

Firefox is the best in terms of customization and usability due to the addon infrastructure.

Chrome is the best in terms of javascript performance and stability. With Chrome, each tab is in it’s own thread and so one bad website will never lock up or crash other tabs.

I use Firefox because I have come to love vertical tabs (See: Tree Style Tab Add-in).