I recently read a study on internet browser adoption. No surprise MS’s Internet Explorer still rules the roost with Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari coming in next. What did surprise me was the level of adoption for Google’s new Chrome browser.
I wonder how much overlap is in these statistics.
Myself, I use all 3 browsers, each for different purposes. For many years, my preferred daily browser has been Firefox. It won me over with innovative features (remember when tabbed browsing was new?) and faster speeds. Unfortunately, some websites do not work with it. When accessing my corporate Exchange email from home or the road, Microsoft requires I use a version of IE.
For a while, I was able to “cheat” with the IE tab extension for Firefox. But ever since the upgrade to v3, IE tab has been buggy and causes random crashes. These crashes are inevitably more painful to me than opening an instance of IE for the one site that requires it. So I have 2 browsers.
But wait, there’s more! Recent upgrades to MLB.com, where my family and I enjoy watching the Red Sox nearly every single night, caused problems in Firefox. Technical support was unable to resolve our issues and recommended trying a different browser. Enter Chrome working like a charm, and faster than Firefox to boot. Unfortunately, it is still young, and not as stable as Firefox. With my habitual tabbed browsing, and multiple open windows, I managed to crash Chrome on a nightly basis. (For the record, it does not crash under “normal” use – ie just a couple of game day tabs open and the baseball game streaming.) Now I have 3 browsers.
What internet browser to you use? How many folks use multiple browsers? Do you use different browsers for different purposes?