"It Just Works" (tm)

I used Firefox for quite a while but it was getting slower, and had so many mandatory upgrades that threw out the add-ons - Chrome seems robust & powerful to me.

because I was told that it is a memory-hog, hence the slowness (I am no kind of expert on this). I have been giving Opera and Camino a go. Both have pluses and minuses, so I would not say I am sold on either at the moment.

Since starting to use Chrome, I rarely use anything else at home. I prefer the way IE deals with bookmarks though.

Very impressive, imo.

I use Explorer on the PC, because I know nothing else, and Safari on the Mac for the same reason.

Please enlighten me on what I am missing with other providers.

Does the job, simple & effective. No bells & whistles or bloating (are you listening Internet Explorer?)
Preferences for those I've used:
5) Internet Explorer
4) Opera
3) Firefox
2) Safari
1) Chrome

(Sorry, couldn't resist presenting the answer in a list)

Will report back later!

I'll sleep with any old browser, apart from Internet Explorer (even an old net whore like me has *some* standards).

Particularly enjoying a bit of a naughty relationship with Camino on my Macbook Pro, and I've even gone back to the animalistic reptilian directness of Lynx, the ancient text-only browser*.

* which is also very handy if you want to do sneaky 'under the radar' surfing at work as it looks just like a terminal-based text editor when you're using it...

Using XP. It is a bit cloggy, though.

It can block Flash applications. What this means is that any videos/adverts/moving things just come up as a wonderful little grey box. So your computer doesn't freeze and your browsing is much much faster. And you just click on any of the grey boxes to open up any of the videos that have been blocked.

It turns surfing into a blissful silence with very few annoying pop up things.

I asked the same question a few months ago. As a result, I've stopped using Firefox, and use Chrome all the time.

Best thing I ever did. Well, in the context of internet browsers, anyway.

The idea of Firefox was (and is) great. However the execution over the last couple of iterations has begun to suffer.

Still swear by Thunderbird for email though.

Unfortunately, Google's attitude to your personal data is rather less impressive:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/11/dotzler_on_schmidtt/

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" Eric Schmidt (Google CEO)

Or perhaps we've moved into a new online paradigm where such things aren't a concern to people? Certainly 'da yoot' seem to feel at ease with making everything about themselves public.

I just discovered what a memory hog Firefox is - 100meg it wanted! I have removed a load of plugins and addons I don't even remember installing (mulitiple versions of Java?) and it is down to 59 meg. Even so.....any new recommendations? I tried Chrome and it does seem to remember everything you do which I object to on principle.

Use 'Start browsing browsing' if you are visiting sites that musn't be remembered in Firefox

for me. Yeah, it eats tons of memory, but my machine generally swallows that reasonably happily. I just like using it, so unless it gets truly ridiculous in its system hoggery, I'll stick with it.