Browsers

Ok.. I spend all of my working life working on browsers, now - unfortunately, its a given that most of the time we work on IE. Most companies that I work with use IE as the SOE browser, and as the obvious market leader, it's the most used in the Internet (as opposed to a company Intranet site).

I've played with a few browsers over my time, but have not really used much other than IE in anger. Just recently, I have been sussing out other browsers, and have got a few thoughts:

Avant Browser:
Really interesting browser - it's essentially a skin for IE, but gives you really nice add ons like tabbed browsing and popup blocker. I reckon it's pretty good - although it doesn't show the javascript errors like IE does. I also found that it just chews through the memory - it stays in the task bar. This is not too bad, but it sometimes just goes awol. Totally unrecoverable. Very frustrating, because I want to love it. Also has 3rd party password manager.

Opera:
I had used this a few years ago, I think it was around 7/7.5, but recently heard they had started making moneyt from the mobile phone version of their browser - so had decided to release 8 without ads. This was enough for me to try it again. I really really like this browser, although there are a few frustrations: No plugins being the main one. Oh, and it doesn't really work that well with the Blogger.com edit window.

Mozilla Firefox:
I had previously been turned off version 1.0 of this browser, because a number of my colleagues (Peter!) had been so rabidly in support of it. I installed it when it went to 1.5, and I'm really glad that I did. Excellent range of extensions and plugins (StumbleUpon, Bit Torrent, LinkedIn and my fave, Performancing). Performancing gives you pretty much full blogger support in the browser. Really really good. Only gripe is that you cant seem to backdate posts.

FF seems to be getting a bit of traction, latest indications are that it's up to 15-20% of the overall market, but I think it's probably higher in those 'hard-core' of users who are serious web browser users, and that most 'mom and pop' users will still use IE (why download something that I already have out of the box).

I really want to love Avant, but it's freezing up irritates me, I like Opera, but it lacks penetration, so is much less supported, so I guess it's between IE and FF - No competition really, FF wins this battle hands down.