best browser

I use an Acer Aspire One Netbook to surf the net and it is Linux based and comes with Firefox 2. I wouldn't go back to IE or Windows for surfing,they seem to suck the life out of even the fastest machines and security software makes them even slower.I have had 'zero' security issues without running any security software and given the spec. this little machine does all internet tasks almost instantly.It only has the Intel Atom chip,64mb! of graphics memory and I boosted the ram to 1.5gb.Firefox runs great and fast on this meagre setup!

Dreamlander

Firefox 3 running on Ubuntu Intrepid - yeah I'm a tooled up geek
The Adblock and Imagehost grabber addons are a godsend!

ie7: is the most popular if a little insecure, well quite a lot realy.
firefox: is a long way behind in popularity 6% market share but is much much more secure, with the addons like no script it does a great job of blocking malware java scripts
opera: another good browser that is making an impact has addons and is fast.
safari: relativley new to the scene and is ganing support

personaly i use opera or ie7 as firefox feels clunky to me with to many options that you can easily forget about then wonder why somthing as simple as a gif dosent animate.

The best addon for firefox is DownloadHelper. It can save most types of media files that you are viewing in a player on the internet. It saves normal flash movies, tubestation, youtube stuff etc, ok but not the sexstation live feed.

Hexit Wrote:ie7: is the most popular if a little insecure, well quite a lot realy.
firefox: is a long way behind in popularity 6% market share but is much much more secure, with the addons like no script it does a great job of blocking malware java scripts
opera: another good browser that is making an impact has addons and is fast.
safari: relativley new to the scene and is ganing support

personaly i use opera or ie7 as firefox feels clunky to me with to many options that you can easily forget about then wonder why somthing as simple as a gif dosent animate.

Interesting figures, I'd dispute them though and the fact that Opera has many addons (widgets are different) or Safari is new

they are pretty accurate red but are about 6months old. widgets addons same difference to me you gota download em seperatly from the app that uses em.

just did a check and yeah my numbers are out of date. its aproaching sumwhere near 20% guess word of mouth on how good it is seems to have worked for em.

must admit my fave is Avant browser. all the good bits of IE but works faster than IE

Hexit Wrote:just did a check and yeah my numbers are out of date. its aproaching sumwhere near 20% guess word of mouth on how good it is seems to have worked for em.

I'd dispute 6 months ago that Gecko (Firefox and other related browsers based on the same engine) only had 6% penetration as well. Firefox has been around a fair amount of time and to see growth jump that rapidly at a global scale on a mature product is extremely unlikely without mitigating circumstances.
Unfortunately due to the properties of the web itself nobody can give real figures. My own totally random guesstimates would be:

20% would seem about right for Gecko the major share of the rest being Trident (split mainly between IE 6 and 7) with Webkit (Safari/Chrome), Presto (Opera) and others probably totalling less than 10% put together.
Notice I base figures on rendering engines, not browsers as these are more important to websites as it denotes how a site will display to the person viewing it, in other words Safari and Chrome should render exactly the same (well as long as they use the same WebKit revision)

IE isn't as insecure as the press make out, or should that be maybe it is more insecure but not as insecure in comparison to the competition. Forget the media hype. Use real security vulnerability assessment companies to advise you of threats not only in browsers but other applications you use. Make sure you have plenty of Aspirin to hand though and a handle on technical terms as they are not in the habit of phrasing things for the average home user. Even without the technical knowledge though it will help point out where security issues might be even if you aren't sure what they are exactly

As for Avant, errrr. The worst bit in IE is Trident, the rendering engine itself, so Avant has all the bad bits of IE as well

BTW for those really interested in the boring bits Avant isn't a browser but a shell as it requires IE to be present, it just builds on what IE provides into a new interface meaning it suffers all the same browsing and security issues so if you are using Avant don't think you are more secure than using IE

i'm worried to admit that i like IE8, runs nice, smoothly and fast on my PC, but i use Safari just for facebook, dunno why, i just prefer it.

Didn't like Firefox when it hit version 2, dunno why, just went right off it, my pc hated it too.