IBrowse vs. Peecee, go figure.

[AmiGR]

Best browser is Explorer if you are competent and update your system with security patches often.
With Explorer you almost always get the best version of the homepage since it is the defacto standard for viewing homepages.

Had you done any web development recently you'd know that this is in fact untrue. Nowadays, most modern pages are XHTML with CSS for the actual layout. Internet Explorer does not follow the standards and all developers and tools have to work to work around the bugs and layout mistakes. IE6, the most used browser in the world, has quite an impressive list of long standing bugs that will never be fixed, since IE7 is out, and even IE7 does not render the Acid2 test correctly (at least it understands min-height and the PNG alpha channel). No, any decent web page nowadays is not designed for IE, it's correct CSS with IE workarounds. I build primary school websites (based on Microsoft technologies, mind you) and the building process we use is the following:

o Build for all browsers (KHTML, Gecko, Opera and any other decent browser).

o Add workarounds for Internet Explorer. The usual target is IE6 but with proper min-heights for IE7, since it understands that. Targeting IE7 directly is not currently an option, since IE6 does not display all pages correctly while IE7 renders all IE6 pages fine.

Explorer starts faster than Firefox.

I personally don't like Firefox and the startup time is quite an insignificant and silly thing to mention. Firefox and all Mozilla variants are just not snappy enough for my liking, I prefer KHTML browsers.

I am not enjoying the situation, just telling you how it is.

[AmiGR]

I am on (yuck) dial-up service, but good god! Tell me why I can't use a *modern* browser on a *new* machine to do something as simple as visit a website?

Possibly because of default concurrent connection settings on the other browsers or a bad internet connection configuration on the other OSes.

[AmiGR]

In this order on any OS, I'd use: Any KHTML browser (I currently use Safari), Camino (the fastest Gecko browser in my experience), IE7, Firefox, Opera, IE6, Mozilla.

[AmiGR]

IE is far from perfect, but it's not horrible.

It is not, it's just not "the best browser" the other guy wanted to claim it is,

I have very few problems making CSS for it. Also, IE uses different rendering depending on what DOCTYPE you use. IE will use a much more standards-compliant rendering if you format the header correctly. It's assumed that if a web developer uses a proper DOCTYPE, they're serious about standards-compliance.

We do use the DOCTYPE forcing it to strict mode. It just renders things differently regardless.

Funny how nobody complains about Firefox's horrible GUI problems. Copy/paste work intermittently, and my media buttons do not work at all, which makes browsing with Firefox a REAL pain. I prefer media keys to all that other gimmicky crap, like mouse gestures. It figures that Firefox would completely fail in this department, and has been faulty for YEARS. There's no need for a Linux-based browser to work properly on Windows.

I do, I never liked the Firefox GUI and behaviour and as I said earlier, it's just not snappy enough for me. People tend to use arguments like "it starts up slowly", which is quite laughable a problem in comparison.

Nothing renders it properly except the unreleased Firefox alpha. Current versions of Firefox display a real mess. Don't yell at IE if nothing else works, either, including the endlessly-praised darling of the open source browser movement.

Do you really think the acid tests are designed to work with any closed-source browsers?

Huh? It displays correctly on KHTML/Webcore after some Apple patches,  Opera and iCab. That was looooong before Firefox betas got anywhere near rendering it correctly. Opera and iCab are not open source and Webcore is really a commercial effort on an open base (KHTML).

It's hardly fair to test browsers with acid tests that do not support graceful degredation, either. Nothing shows at all? No kidding! That's because the code violates the whole reason for using HTML in the first place.

Something always gets displayed, what that something is is the problem. Also, Acid2 *does* check how correctly the browser falls back. Read this for more info. It is pretty heavy in data URLs but it does include a version without them for browsers that do not support them (like IE6/7).