I'm curious to know... (Firefox VS IE VS Opera)

[Midgar]

I personally used IE through Maxthon, which was like a Firefox on steriods, because for whatever reason, Firefox was very very very slow for me. I used it up until recently, when I started using the robust code of Opera.
My question to you all is this:

What you currently use
What exactly do you want in your browser
What makes your browser better
What do you love the most about your browser
What would make your browser better

I like Opera because it is so fast, and it fixes minor issues (like accidental tab delete)
So far, Opera is the fastest for me
I like the minor convienience that it gives me
Some stuff from Maxthon (built in AD block, drag and drop links, highlight links to tab, non-standard opera engine for BT, and IRC)

[Jari]

What you currently use

Firefox 2 with plethora of extensions. 13 to be exact.

What exactly do you want in your browser

Many things. Adblocking, tabs, good download manager with the option of harvesting all the links from a page and other cool features, ability to display clocks of several timezones, ability to run user Javascript, ability to use IE specific sites (like Windows update), ability to automatically convert valid text URLs into clickable links, ability to control what my browsers sends as the referrer on per site-basis, ability to assign custom styles to pages, mouse gestures, ability to display EXIF-data from jpegs just by right-clicking them and ...stuff. I want it to be standard compliant.

But most of all, I want my browser to be extensible. I don't want it to have all that by default, bloating it up. I want an ability to choose what kind features I want and how much performance I'm willing to give up in exchange.

What makes your browser better

Because it does what I described above.

What do you love the most about your browser

Extensibility.

What would make your browser better

It's great as it is.

I like Opera because it is so fast, and it fixes minor issues (like accidental tab delete)

Opera might still be the fastest of them, but Firefox 2 is actually very fast, too. And it seems to consume much less memory than FF1.5. Not entirely sure if that's due to the browser, or non-memory-leaky-version of Adblock, though. As for re-opening closed tabs, at least Tabmixplus - and most of the tab-extensions - have that feature.


EDIT: All your typing skills are belong to us.

[Kashmir]

What you currently use?
Firefox

What exactly do you want in your browser
- ease of use
- smart loading of page e.g. load pictures last, text first
- quick
- page tabs
- download manager

What makes your browser better
all of the above

What do you love the most about your browser
doesnt cost me a cent

What would make your browser better
If it came with free microwave oven and a fridge.

Opera
I tried it first before firefox, was kinda impressed till i tried firefox. which to me is much better & without the quirks of opera. I cannot remember what it was but there was one particular thing about opera that used to give me the shits every time i used it.

[James]

What you currently use?
Firefox

What exactly do you want in your browser
I want something that I can, like Jari, add extensions to. I want one that allows someone who is HTML literate but hasn't made a webpage for years to be able to view source code to see somethnig specific. I want a browser with an efficient download manager and I want the ability to pause downloads when I wish. Sometimes between classes I find myself unable to complete a download; I don't want to have to close up shop, go to a classroom that has the internet disabled by proxy, and have to begin my download all over again. I also want a browser that allows me to hit up any popular search engine with great ease. The ability to search any search engine within the browser, without navigating to a new page is sheer brilliance, IMO (and the Google Toolbar for IE attempts to emulate that). I can search Wikipedia, Uncyclepedia, Google, Altavista (why, I don't know, but I can), Torrentspy, Yahoo!, E-Bay, etcetera, all with very little hassle.

In short, I want a browser that comes out of the box, so to speak, extremely versatile, that can be made even more versatile by downloading and installing a few plugins (right now I have one that allows me to see what the weather is like on campus, so for those few short minutes before I head off to class I can see what shitstorm I'm running into).

What makes your browser better

IE is all cluttered up, IMO. Firefox seems more down-to-earth, and it would appear that a lot less space is wasted on bars and so forth, with the majority dedicated to content, which is what I'm paying x amount of dollars a month to see.

What do you love the most about your browser

Just it's versatility, in short. I have the feeling that I can do anything with my browser. It's more secure than IE, etcetera, but the other main point is that Firefox can do essentially everything that IE can do, but IE can't do everything that Firefox can do, which is the main problem. Firefox is like IE +1.

What would make your browser better

Beats me.

[halkun]

You should ask Qhimm what he uses.

It's pretty obvious ^_^

[stormmedia]

Hehe halkun I'd be funny to see what's he got to say about this  .

Well I'm currently trying the super new internet explorer 10 from microsoft.... haha ... funny to see how much they are no match for firefox or opera... well to be honnest I didn't realy tried firefox long before I noticed that it was not realy fast(well for me)... so I in my opinion Opera is better because it's faster and I liked the downlaod manager, that it suport torrents, that when you close it, it keeps all the tabs and all the history of the last navigation you made.  One thing though is that I couldn't find a way to choose the behavior when opening torrents... for exemple if you want to use azureus instead of the browser I think the only way is to save the .torrent to the HD and then open it with azureus.... but beside that I think that's the best browser for me.

[ChaosControl]

Wasn't Qhimm part of the developer team that created the Opera portable browser?
meh.

Anyway I use FireFox, it rocks because it does everything I want so I wouldn't know of any reason why I should get another.

The best thing about it is I guess;
the bookmark bar and the option to adjust the entire browser. (Like i have all the buttons and url-bar all in the uppermost bar).

[stormmedia]

Wasn't Qhimm part of the developer team that created the Opera portable browser?

Yeah that's why it'd be funny to see all he have to say about this.

[Covarr]

I refuse to use Internet Explorer. I absolutely refuse. I'm currently working on a web design project, all the code is completely valid, and it looks like absolute crap on IE, because IE doesn't know how to render CSS very well. Nonetheless, I'm gonna keep my design as is, and just add a message for IE users that explains why they need to get a GOOD web browser. The page, though hideous, is still usable on IE so I am not bothering to rewrite it.

I use Firefox 2 for most things, as well as Opera for a few things, and I make a habit of testing my own design on all three. I also test in Safari when I have access to a Mac computer.

Firefox has StumbleUpon and Download Statusbar, which are the very most important to me but Opera doesn't support them. I prefer the speed of Opera, but those two FF extensions are vital to me.

[Qhimm]

All you heathens need to seriously shape up your browsing habits. Maybe I'll make the forums Opera-only? 

What you currently use

Opera 9.02 (or 8.5, 9.1 or 10.0, depending on what I'm doing).

What exactly do you want in your browser

First and foremost, usability. The actions I do most frequently need to be quick, easy and responsive, and more importantly they need to be present without having to search through huge lists of extensions which may or may not work in a stable manner. Extensions are fun and useful for that extra little rare task you need to do that you'd otherwise have to spend an hour of tedious work on, but everyday stuff I want working right out of the box.

What makes your browser better

Because it also pays my bills.

What do you love the most about your browser

Usability; it's made to be quick and easy to use, without you having to spend lots of time tweaking and trying to figure out what "easy to use" really means.

What would make your browser better

Being more generic, customizable and extensible. Not necessarily in a plugin in sort of way, a deeply rooted scriptability would work better for me. I would also love for web authors to realize that supporting Opera is usually as simple as removing "if (window.opera) redirect('error.html');" from your site's stupid goddamn browser detection script. But why bother even testing on a browser that only has something like 1% of the desktop market? Bah.

Wasn't Qhimm part of the developer team that created the Opera portable browser?

No, not really. I'm part of the team that helps develop and maintain one of the versions of the Opera portable browser. The Opera browser exists in many different incarnations on many different kinds of devices.

[RPGillespie]

The Nintendo Wii will be using a version of Opera for internet browsing I hear  ...

[ChaosControl]

The Nintendo Wii will be using a version of Opera for internet browsing I hear  ...

Yeah, Nintendo are Opera groupies.

@Qhimm: what do you mean by "maintain"?
Do the portable brwsers get updates (read portable as nintendo ds version ) because I wonder how.
Don't get me wrong, for some reason I think opera is the best choise to have on a gaming device but the DS version is just crap.

Not the browser itself, but more the fact you need a flash card before you can actually run it..
Probably because of the DS specs not being sufficient enough but i cant stop wondering if it could be made without the flash card.
Would make it hell more usefull.

[Qhimm]

@Qhimm: what do you mean by "maintain"?
Do the portable brwsers get updates (read portable as nintendo ds version ) because I wonder how.

There are new versions being developed for new customers, not necessarily any updates of existing releases though.

Don't get me wrong, for some reason I think opera is the best choise to have on a gaming device but the DS version is just crap.

Not the browser itself, but more the fact you need a flash card before you can actually run it..
Probably because of the DS specs not being sufficient enough but i cant stop wondering if it could be made without the flash card.
Would make it hell more usefull.

The DS version's biggest problem is the rather limiting hardware in the DS itself. It's just not powerful enough to run a general-purpose application like a web browser at the speed which most users are accustomed to browsing the web. And the flash card thing didn't exactly help its popularity; reviews so far have been rather dismal I'm afraid. Could it have been done better? Possibly, but at a greater cost with not so much real room for improvement. Hopefully people won't hold too much of a grudge against Opera for the DS browser "failure" though... maybe the DS just wasn't meant to browse.

[ChaosControl]

I think the DS isn't made for browsing.
It's a handheld made for gaming, shouldn't that be enough?

Go browse int0rnet on your phone, PDA or PSP.
Not the DS, go play New Super Mario Bros. on that