Let me state this clear: I’m not AGAINST internet explorer, even though my site is too cool for IE. I’m not telling you IE is bad or evil but there are browsers who have so much more to offer you. 

Let me tell you my personal experience with them. I’m not going to talk about the speed or safety, you can find stats all over the internet about that. What I want to tell you is why I like Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Truly, I am an internet addict. If you’d write the whole day long, you’d find yourself a good pen. Well if you surf the net a lot, you find yourself a good browser.

I use Firefox, Opera and Safari. Let me compare them.

At first, I found Firefox. Firefox is a great browser. You can dress it up with skins and you can add a lot of add-ons. I customized my Firefox so I have Mouse-gestures, a resizable Text-area, Firefox saves my windows from last session, I have a speed-dial,… I actually use like 25 add-ons. 

Then there I found Opera. Opera already has Mouse-gestures (though not as many as Firefox, but the most common), it starts up with speed-dial, it always saves your windows from last session..

Then I got my mac and Apple came up with Safari for Windows. It does not have mouse-gestures, but I learned to live without them, you can reopen all your windows from last session and it standard has resizable text areas..   

So you see, 3 great browsers, depending on what you want from it. 

But why do I use all 3 of them? Well, on my mac I use Safari. Ever since you can surf tabbed with it, it’s a great browser. The one thing I miss though is the integration of Delicious. I found Cocoalicious, whitch is pretty good, but sometimes I really miss the firefox add-on. 

On the pc, Safari isn’t that great. So there we use Firefox and Opera. The problem when your name is Sarah, is that you always have at least 20 tabs open. I choose Firefox as my main browser, but when I need to search something quickly on the internet and there’s no browser running, I run Opera, cause loading like 20 tabs, I can assure you it takes a while.

If you develop websites, you might have noticed that Firefox is the best browser during the proces of that. It has a great Web Developer Toolbar. I really love it. IE also has one, and you have some stuff like it on Safari to, but I still prefer Firefox for that. It’s not just the wd-toolbar, it has an xml-developer toolbar to, Firebug, Colorzilla, measureit.. 

Now back to the title. How to use them all in your own advantage. As I told you, I’m an internet addict. I use Delicious bookmarks but, and I did the test, bookmarking sites as ToDo and Daily, it just doesn’t work. The smartest thing to do is leave the sites open in a tab. Now that may be annoying, you don’t always want all your tabs, f.i when you’re working or when no browser is running and you need one quickly -loading may take a while-  so I categorized my browsers. 

On the mac: Safari as main browser, Firefox for site development & “fast-startup” browser. 

On the pc: Firefox as main browser, Opera as “fast-startup” browser and as fun-browser. 

What is a fun-browser? Well the main browser has all the tabs I need when I work, things I have to do, and things I’m working on. The fun browser is just fun surfing, reading some articles, blogs, listening to some music, and so on. 

Actually, what I really wanna say: Check out other browsers, they are fun! :-) 

There’s Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, Omniweb, Flock (the social browser, for those who like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, lastFM,… in a browser),.. 

Check out:

http://www.w3junkies.com/toocool/

http://www.bbspot.com/news/2005/01/firefox_vs_internet_explorer.html

http://operawatch.com/news/2007/09/opera-vs-firefox-vs-internet-explorer-picture.html