Answers: It really depends on what you are looking for in a browser. Internet Explorer has been around for ages, and has the full support of Microsoft behind it. It is sleek and powerful, but on old(ish) computers that may slow you down a bit. Still, as the standard browser, you won't find many other negatives with it.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/product...
Mozilla FireFox is a highly customizable browser. New themes and gadgets are realeased every week, and this gives a personal feel to it when viewing websites. Although it slows the comuter down, it isn't as bad as IE, though ona fast computer, you won't notice much of a difference between the two.
FireFox 3.0.1: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all...
Other options available are Opera Browser. This browser offers very limited customization features (only a colour change in fact), but because of this gives very fast browsing. it doesn't reequire as many resources as IE or FF, but it isn't very fun to browse in somehting that looks as out-of-date as it does.
Opera 9.51: http://www.opera.com/download/
The final major browser is Apple Safari. In my opinion it it the fastest of the 4 browser and my personal favourite. It's style is bsed on the iTunes layout and it doesn't offer any customizability, but if you liek iTunes, you'll love this browser. It's major downfall is the fact that it doesn't render (load) webpages very well. This can become very irritating while browsing so most people don't give it a second thought. It does run very fast (even on slow computers) and has the fatsest startup time of all browsers. If you find that the pages you usually visit work fine on Safari, you won't have anything bad to say about it.
Safari 3.1.2: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/s...
So it really depends on what kind of person you are and what type of computer you have. You can't go wrong with IE or FF, but under stress, they perform slowly, Opera is a boring looking browser but can run where the other two can't, and Safari has problems with many webpages, but is much the fastest of them all. If Apple ever get the rendering process sorted, it would be my number 1 choice.
Hope that helps.
The question is not which is fastest, the benefit of firefox is that you can add a lot more of plugins and it is generally a lot safer than the other web browsers... i personally use mozilla firefox simply cos its easy to use and has a nice easy to use layout :)
i have no gripes about opera, i just prefer firefox
USING FIREFOX YEARS NOW ...TRIED OPERA NOT BAD ... IS STILL GROWING ..... FOR SPEED FIREFOX IS IT ...ALSO SO MUCH MORE U CAN DO WITH FF ... IS THE REAL DEAL ...BETTER AND BETTER WITH EACH VERSION ..
It depends on how often you delete your history/cookies