Three cheers for Xen!

I really can't see why anyone would still use Explorer. I would recommend Opera or Firefox. Opera if tabs is your thing. Also, doesn't Chrome and Explorer both register and save everything you do on the internet? Maybe not IE7, but I think IE8 does.

I really can't see why anyone would still use Explorer. I would recommend Opera or Firefox. Opera if tabs is your thing. Also, doesn't Chrome and Explorer both register and save everything you do on the internet? Maybe not IE7, but I think IE8 does.

As for the comment about loosing "favs" Fire Fox and Opera can import them. So you don't lose any of those. The only thing you lose out on is the already saved login managers which both have. IE is years behind other browesers. If you like the now new features then your missing out on easy to use, quicker, friendlier browesers like Opera. You may even get a kick out of themes and extentions/widgets that other browsers have.

I've personally been finding my self swaying back and forth between FF and Opera, but after experiencing FF on a low ram and CPU system I went back to Opera. Opera is just a _LEAN_AND_MEAN browser. Though watchit Widgets can chug it down.

reask I understand your position to defend IE, but outside of it being packaged with Windows it's a inferior everyother way. You put youtself into the exact role MS depends on for sales. Break free of your shackles and see the light. Reask see the light :P either way welcome to the 20th century of the superiority of an old feature. Tab browsing.

counting addons for Firefox doesn't count :p... but IE8 has alot of options to stop things like that.  I really like it, but I haven't downloaded the new release that has the it's new options that is suppose to dynamicly deal with ads...  As for tabs... it's been around longer than firefox... I really like both IE and Firefox especially since I got the mod to make it look like IE :p

I don't use any browser with the name "Internet Explorer" in it. It sucks. It is slow, it keeps on breaking down and generally it was created so that hackers could gain control of your computer. Firefox/Safari/Opera is much better.

People may not care for this post, people may not read this post, but, hell, I'm going to post it anyways:

Why you should use Opera:

Speed
Before Chrome, Opera was, without a doubt, the fastest browser on the market. The gap in speed between the latest version of Opera and Chrome is nowhere near as huge as the gap between Chrome and other browsers anyway.

Source: Although the speed differences between Chrome and Opera are purely anecdotal, there is a (quite famous) speed test that was performed a few years ago. However, it must be noted that these are not the latest versions of the browsers, but it can give a general idea about the browsers:

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html

Reliability
In my two years of using Opera, it has only crashed twice, and both of those crashes were down to the third party application in use. Even on those times when Opera did crash, everything was painless, Opera restarted instantly, and all of the tabs were opened and loaded from the cache.

Light:
Although Chrome's multi-process setup may be the new in-thing, it causes for a massive overhead:

Taken from: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=248413

According to the poster, all of the browsers had the same 15 "heavy duty" tabs open:

(If you can't see all of the image Right Click -> View Image (or something similar))

Customisability:
Opera is one sexy beast, but some people may be a little "fruity" and not like how Opera looks by default, however, the skin can be completly changed within a maximum of five clicks (you can do it in much less, but then you need to learn the short cuts). Also, community made skins can be downloaded straight from the "Appearance" frame. The default skin also has 10 different colour schemes avaliable.

So what if... you like the skin, but you don't like the arrangement of the tool bars? Well, the organisation is 100% customisable. Here's a short video showing just what can be done with Opera: (bearing in mind that this is an old version of Opera, and the new one has a much nicer default skin/layout - which is just as customisable):

Feature Packed:

Notes - Ever written a hell of a long post tryinig to advertise a browser on an internet forum, but you've been worried about losing all of the data if the connection goes. Well, with Opera you don't have to worry, because it always remembers all the data put into forms. However, if you still have niggling worry, you can easily create an Opera Note where you just select all of the text, right click -> Copy to notes. And damn, you've instantly created a replica of the data on your HDD:

http://img360.imageshack.us/img360/151/operanoteia8.th.jpg

Speed Dial - Works exactly the same as Speed Dial on a phone. Simply programme in 9 websites into your speed dial, and you are presented with a thumbnail (live, if you wish) of your 9 sites, click on one to jump straight to it. Alternatively, just hit ctrl + 1-9 to jump straight to the assigned site from any tab. I, for one, have VGC as ctrl + 1

Active Sync - If you have Opera installed on multiple devices (be it pdas, computers, phones, or any combination), you can enable active-sync where it synchronises all of your bookmarks and notes across all of your machines. This means that you can begin a rant on a forum at home, realise that you're late for school, save it as a note, and pick up where you left off on your mobile whilst travelling on the bus.

Search your history - As of v 9.5 you can now search through your history the same way that a search engine would. That means that if you remember seeing a video on customising Opera's UI a few weeks ago, but can't remember where, you can just search for key words that are bound to be on the page, and Opera will try to find the most relevant page.

Wand - Have trouble remembering passwords? Have no fear because wand is here. Wand is a simple-to-use system which allows you to bring up all forgotten passwords when it is enabled. It also stores multiple passwords for the same site. Incase you have forgotten your password three times, and the system for correcting it is to send a completly random series of numbers/letters that have little to do with anything.

Mouse Gestures - You can easy navigate your way through Opera with the laziest of movements. Quickly jump back a page by right-clicking, and the left-clicking, and do the reverse to go forward again. There are also mouse gestures for closing tabs, refreshing, opening new tabs, switching tabs, going home, eating pizza, and cleaning inbetween your oes.

Navigate through the web using just the keyboard - Now, I don't know whether this feature is avaliable on other browsers, but a few weeks ago, I broke the reciever end of my mouse. Simple, I thought, I just opened Opera, and went to Amazon, and browsed the webpages, and selected what I wanted, and ordered without using the mouse. You just use the directional buttons to scoll around and hold SHIFT + directional buttons to shift between links on a page, the return key is a great substitute for left-click.

Voice Command - No need to explain.

Widgets - Akin to extentions on Firefox, these are just a means of adding new features to Opera. There's also a handy wizard inbuilt that allows you to quickly and easily build your own basic widgets. I, for one, created a BBC news RSS feed reader before realising that Opera has a damn fine RSS reader inbuilt in itself.

RSS Reader - Reads RSS feeds

Quick Search - just type "g" + "criteria" into the address bar to search google, or "a" for Ask, "y" for Yahoo "z" for Amazon "e" for eBay "w" for Wikipedia "h" to search your history "f" find in page "b" bittorrent. If there are any others that you want, you can add your own.

Inbuilt Torrent downloader - Basically gives you the ability to download torrents without the need of a third party application

Custom CSS - Basically changes the way that Opera reads CSS files, so you can essentially customise the way certain websites look.

Inbuilt content blocker - Just right click -> block content, to block any kind of image/plugin/etc on a web page.

Page Muter - Don't want to block an advert because you know it hurts the revenue of your favourite website, simple, you can just mute the content instead, to stop those annoying talking ads.

Links - This essentially stores links of loads of pages. I don't know how it works, but I know that I can jump straight to the Sony forum, or Off-topic, or whatever without actually going to the VGChartz homepage.

There are obviously hundreds of other features that are left out, but these are jsut the ones that I find the most useful

Fair play to you samuel that is one informative post.

I think I will add this thread to my favourites.

I want to have a good look at this again.

Thank you.

Ditch IE, go for Firefox (or Opera...Firefox is just fine though).

I am 100% serious you need to ditch IE though...Firefox is so much better, and it has way more features.