Browsers Everywhere...

So in the process of working on this site, I have bene using IE7, Chrome and Firefox 3.  I have not really found any major preference between the three.

I am using Firefox 3 in a VM at work that is on my main machine.  I also use it from a Kingston key that is rigged up with the Portable Apps Suite.  As a quick aside, having a USB key with Portable apps is awesome.  You can have a full verion of many very useful apps in your pocket all the time.

Chrome is only installed on my main PC and my Wife’s laptop although she does not use it.

I am using IE7 on all of my PCs at home and on my PC at work.

Generally, I do not have any complaints on IE7 except that it can be a little slow loading pages from time to time.  It never seems to make any sense as to why it acts that way either.  For almost all of the other lackings that Firefox and its army of plugins, I install IE7Pro.  It certainly makes up for a great deal of the minor shortcomings in IE7 and it is free.

Chrome is just silly fast on rendering almost any page.  This is not news as many have reported on this but I really do not like the minimalist attitude and the security issues that Steve Gibson listed out on episode 161 of Security Now.  I am using it while editing this site at home at it is just so fast.

FireFox…  I have followed Firefox since version 1.5x and for years was generally unimpressed.  Version 2 and a lot of plugins and people got really excited about it but IE7 muted a lot of that for me.  This new version 3, however, is really nice overall.  There are really only a few things that I am annoyed with but I bet the more that I play, the more likely I am to find a fix or a workaround.

I guess that the more I type, the more I realize that unless IE8 is a major improvement over IE7, that except at work, I will likley roll over to FF3 entirely and use Chrome when I am REALLY impatient.