For years, Internet Explorer (v6) was the only game in the town of PC web browsers. There were modified versions of IE such as the AOL web browser, but it was still basically IE with additional bugs.
Opera was released as free software in 2000. It did some tasks really well and felt like left-handed scissors for others.
In 2004, Mozilla Firefox (FF) was released. There were a few problems with FF causing me to switch to IE on some web sites. Back then, many web developers designed many non-standard web sites expressly for IE. I soon adopted FF as my primary browser.
Google Chrome entered the browser wars in late 2008. It was designed from the ground up to be fast and secure.
I have Apple Safari loaded on my PC. I rarely use Safari. It uses the same layout engine, WebKit, as Chrome.
I have used FF as my primary browser for six years. FF v4 was released this year. It is a bit of a pig to load and has problems rendering pages from my bank and credit card vendors. Two weeks ago, I made the decision to try using Chrome as my primary browser. Chrome also has its quirks such as tabs above the search bar. Since I change tabs far more often than doing searches, that is a bit annoying and can also conflicts with the Windows "minimize" button. Now I am in the middle ground of using both Chrome and FF as my primary web browsers.
I am grateful for all the choices in web browsers, options, add-ons and themes for my WWW surfing pleasure. Choice and competition are great for innovation.
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