I've been a Microsoft IE person pretty much my whole computering life, whether for home or work use. Work use was out of my control as the govt/civilian companies I worked for required use of a specific browser and that was IE...but my work life ended about 5 years ago since I've retired to Thailand and maybe Chrome and Firefox have bigger market shares in govt and civilian work environments now.

For the last few years I also had Chrome loaded on my computer as my secondary/backup browser in those cases where I was having a website issue and wanted to see if another browser made a difference...but I didn't use Chrome very much at all. Had never used Firefox until about a week ago.

Anyway, I have the latest version of each browser, Firefox 25, Chrome 31, and IE11 installed on my computer and have been using them pretty much equally over the last week to surf the net, get use to their menu structures, features, speed of browsing, add-ons/extensions available, etc. Been reading a lot about the pros and cons/reviews on each taking in consideration some reviews/comparisons/benchmarks may be biased for whatever reasons. I've also run benchmarks of my own. Over the week I have pretty much always had all three browsers open, jumping back and forth between them when viewing/moving around a website, and just trying to use each one pretty equally and get a good understanding of each...but I have spent some extra time with Firefox and Chrome since I hadn't used them much/at all before. The browsers are running on my 7 year old Toshiba laptop running a Pentium Core Duo CPU and Windows 7 Home Premium.

And most importantly trying to determine which one would be best "for me," as each individual will have different desires/needs for browser use and each individual will usually arrive at their decision for tangible and intangible reasons...and to a degree you just end up being attracted to a certain browser for known and unknown reasons. I'm pretty close to making my decision on the browser I prefer, but I want to continue to use all three pretty much equally for a couple more days before I make my final decision on which one I like the best for now and will make my primarily browser...but I plan to keep the other two on my computer and use them to a degree.

Although I've never been one to just follow the crowd because some crowds really don't have good reasons going a certain way and I did want to see some stats on browser usage on a wide scale, so I used the StatCounter Global Stats website which collects around 15 Billion page views per month from 3 Million websites on browser usage. Below are some browser usage stats for Oct 12- Oct 13 on a worldwide, some specific regions, and some selected countries. Here's the StatCount webpage where you can run your own queries/stats...just select the area/country, time frame, and click the button...easy.

You might find below snapshots interesting as to how browsers such are IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc., are fairing market share-wise...and you may be a little surprised how browser usage can vary quite a bit by region and/or country. These are supposedly browser stats for "computer" browser usage; a person can pull up separate stats for mobile use. I've added some comments on each stats.

Worldwide Stats: Chrome in lead trending up, IE in 2nd trending down, Firefox in distance 3rd trending down.

Thailand Stats: Chrome way in the lead trending up, IE and Firefox in distance 2nd and 3rd, respectively, and both trending down.

Asia Stats: Chrome way in the lead trending up, IE and Firefox in distance 2nd and 3rd, respectively, and both trending down.

Japan Stats: IE way in the lead but trending down, Chrome and Firefox in distance 2nd and 3rd, respectively, with Chrome slowly trending up and Firefox slowly trending down

United States Stats: Some strange market share movements going on here...IE in the lead, Chrome in 2nd, and Firefox a distance 3rd. Over the last few months IE and Chrome have been swapping the lead...don't know what's driving that back and forth.

European Stats: Chrome in 1st with a good lead, Firefox and IE in a horse race with each other with IE edging ahead of Firefox in Oct 13....seems to reflect again Firefox slowing trending down in many regions/countries.

United Kingdom Stats: IE took the lead from Chrome over the last two months but looks like Chrome may regain the lead very soon, Firefox in distance 4th...Safari is 3rd.

Australia Stats: Once again Chrome and IE battling for 1st place...Chrome just took it back from IE, Safari & Firefox in distance 3rd & 4th, respectively.

North Korea Stats: Ok, lets see which browser the 10 or so people with internet capability in this country prefer. It's a real neck-to-neck horse race between Chrome, IE, and Firefox...you can get dizzy just looking at chart as each browser's market share goes up and down significantly month to month. I guess those 10 folks just can't make up their mind which browser to use...kinda like me right now.

Above just FYI...written while sipping a fine Chang beer...I know many people have very strong preferences for certain browsers...kinda like preferences in politics and religion.

I have been using IE +90% of the time over the years I been on-line.

Also have chrome and firefox on my main pc (desktop pc running win7 64 bit legal version).

IE have crapped up on me a couple of times and you can see my resent topic where I needed help getting it going again, not good.

The person who helped me in the topic recommended firefox as it a free browser (he also told me that) and not owned by a big multinational company which will always try "dragging" certain search machines/homepages and so on over your head in the process.

I guess you can compare it to the free Linux o.p. system (which I never tried myself).

I will try firefox more seriously for sure.

Yes I will also keep all 3 on my pc, why not, same as having 3 cars in your garage, one favorite, one for back up, one nobody wants to buy so you keep it.

Just for the record: we only have one 4 wheeled vehicle in the household but also 2 small Thai bikes.

I have always used something else than IE, when possible

Lynx, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Firefox (which was my default browser for a long time) and nowadays Chromium.

I had to use IE for few sites long time ago, but after the EU forced Microsoft to offer alternative browsers, there is not really any sites, which require IE anymore.

Chromium has been good and the browser data sync between different computer has been great. However currently Chromium is having some problems (html5 youtube videos), which might force me to go back to FF. It's still a lot of work to get all the bookmarks, saved passwords etc correctly to the different browser.

Opera

Chrome for personal stuff, Firefox for work stuff, and IE10 as it surprisingly works better with facebook...

Chrome by a mile. Tremendous add-on and extension selections. Love the book marking scheme. Can't imagine using anything else. No toolbars (I hate em). Great session recovery when browser crashes. I also used to be an avid IE user, but when I switched to Chrome, I never went back unless I had to.

Have been using Opera,its has everything I want,except been able to use Hola,

I also have tried Maxthon cloud browser,which I may have to turn to if I am forced

to change to when the old Opera is no longer supported.

regards Worgeordie

Had too many problems with IE and switched to Chrome some years ago.

Haven't heard of Hola so will check it out. Adblock is good.

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I stay clear of IE and also Windows Explorer, as they both call home.

I use:

SRware Iron for my news.

Epic for any social networking and searches. Both SR and Epic are based on Chromium, but they both censure any data going back to Google (which happens with Chrome) and epic does the searches on google for you.

Opera for banking and gaming.

And a tor browser when I want to do evil things.

I have Chrome and IE installed, as well as Maxthon. But the three above are my daily stuff.

Safari.

About 95% Firefox on Linux, the remaining 5% are Opera Mobile on the tablet (Galaxy 7.7) and mobile (808 Pureview). Internet Explorer was used last time when version 4 was up-to-date, just until FF came out.

Written sipping a coffee from my Saeco

Language teaching post and reply removed.

Firefox dreadful for downloading, every browser I have used has had something wrong with it. I am using Chrome just now, excellent when it is working properly, but tends to slow down at times.

Firefox dreadful for downloading, every browser I have used has had something wrong with it. I am using Chrome just now, excellent when it is working properly, but tends to slow down at times.

I noticed this too with FF and installed the DownThemAll add on. Excellent download speeds and I can pause and carry on at will, never have to start a failed download from scratch.

Sometimes I use Opera or Chromium as well. Opera and Chromium both have far better download speeds than FF without an additional download manager.

Firefox dreadful for downloading, every browser I have used has had something wrong with it. I am using Chrome just now, excellent when it is working properly, but tends to slow down at times.

I noticed this too with FF and installed the DownThemAll add on. Excellent download speeds and I can pause and carry on at will, never have to start a failed download from scratch.

I 2nd DownThemAll. Works a treat for reliable and multi-part downloads. I've been using Mozilla browsers since Netscape, before it was formalized to Mozilla. IE, only for test purposes to verify my websites and checking members having forum issues. Chrome, try it off and on and just not that crazy about it, neither look nor feel. Use it also for testing purposes. So Firefox is my primary since its inception and quite happy with it and the extendability of it though I guess Chrome is extendable also.

Firefox dreadful for downloading, every browser I have used has had something wrong with it. I am using Chrome just now, excellent when it is working properly, but tends to slow down at times.

I noticed this too with FF and installed the DownThemAll add on. Excellent download speeds and I can pause and carry on at will, never have to start a failed download from scratch.

Sometimes I use Opera or Chromium as well. Opera and Chromium both have far better download speeds than FF without an additional download manager.

I was not the download speeds, if I was downloading say 5 parts of a film, about three would disappear, If I download a show, it would only tell you the name of it, where on IE or Chrome, you would get the series and episode numbers also. I will try the downthemall add on.

Firefox dreadful for downloading, every browser I have used has had something wrong with it. I am using Chrome just now, excellent when it is working properly, but tends to slow down at times.

I noticed this too with FF and installed the DownThemAll add on. Excellent download speeds and I can pause and carry on at will, never have to start a failed download from scratch.

I 2nd DownThemAll. Works a treat for reliable and multi-part downloads. I've been using Mozilla browsers since Netscape, before it was formalized to Mozilla. IE, only for test purposes to verify my websites and checking members having forum issues. Chrome, try it off and on and just not that crazy about it, neither look nor feel. Use it also for testing purposes. So Firefox is my primary since its inception and quite happy with it and the extendability of it though I guess Chrome is extendable also.

Thanks Tywais, read my answer to Schondie in the next post.

Firefox dreadful for downloading, every browser I have used has had something wrong with it. I am using Chrome just now, excellent when it is working properly, but tends to slow down at times.

I noticed this too with FF and installed the DownThemAll add on. Excellent download speeds and I can pause and carry on at will, never have to start a failed download from scratch.

I 2nd DownThemAll. Works a treat for reliable and multi-part downloads. I've been using Mozilla browsers since Netscape, before it was formalized to Mozilla. IE, only for test purposes to verify my websites and checking members having forum issues. Chrome, try it off and on and just not that crazy about it, neither look nor feel. Use it also for testing purposes. So Firefox is my primary since its inception and quite happy with it and the extendability of it though I guess Chrome is extendable also.

Thanks Tywais, read my answer to Schondie in the next post. Sorry, post no 16.

I don't care, as i have a life. But if someone else cares, Maxthon 3 !

Just an educated guess here but I would imagine Chrome is trending upwards and in the lead in Thailand and Asia because of the "automatic web page translation" that it is capable of? A feature I use daily.

I am a Mac user and the new Safari in Mavericks is much better than the previous version with increased battery efficiency when browsing on the laptop, third party data cookie blocking, much faster speeds browsing in Javascript. It now has a web page translation plug-in but it doesn't always seem to work better than Chrome.

A 64-bit browser (Safari or Firefox, for example) is required to run Java 7 on Mac OS X. 32-bit browsers such as Chrome do not support Java 7 on the Mac platform.

And lastly, I find that Firefox seems to run YouTube the best on my Mac though......

So, I am still jumping between the three browsers but now spend much more time on Safari. Second Chrome. Third Firefox.

Just an educated guess here but I would imagine Chrome is trending upwards and in the lead in Thailand and Asia because of the "automatic web page translation" that it is capable of? A feature I use daily.

I am a Mac user and the new Safari in Mavericks is much better than the previous version with increased battery efficiency when browsing on the laptop, third party data cookie blocking, much faster speeds browsing in Javascript. It now has a web page translation plug-in but it doesn't always seem to work better than Chrome.

A 64-bit browser (Safari or Firefox, for example) is required to run Java 7 on Mac OS X. 32-bit browsers such as Chrome do not support Java 7 on the Mac platform.

And lastly, I find that Firefox seems to run YouTube the best on my Mac though......

So, I am still jumping between the three browsers but now spend much more time on Safari. Second Chrome. Third Firefox.

YouTube is ok on my Mavericks Mac. What's not functioning well for you? What machine?

I don't care, as i have a life. But if someone else cares, Maxthon 3 !

Maxthon 3 for me also when in Windows O/S. Unfortunately not yet running in Linux but that is on the way.

Previously used Opera for many years but they now appear to be jumping into bed with Google e.g. default search engine keeps defaulting back to Google.

I am using Chrome although I have IE too as a choice

Opera and FF.

Mostly Chrome 80% and Firefox 20%. I avoid IR for several reasons some personal and some just plain old hard headed.

I have used Firefox since it started because i have learnt how to customise it using add ons, and i use u torrent for downloads, now my browsing is great because i don't get stopped by ads and it's secure.

As the OP I thought I would give an update on which of the three browsers (IE, Firefox, & Chrome) I'm strongly leaning towards. Remember from my opening post I've been an IE person all my computering life, both in the home and work environment. Well, I'm strongly leaning towards Chrome as my primary browser...not only on my PCs but on my Android smartphones/tablets also. In fact, yesterday I became engaged to Chrome by changing the default browser setting on my computer from IE to Chrome.

I've found Chrome to be simple and fast. But with that being said, I do not mean Chrome is always significantly faster than IE and Firefox in fully loading webpages because it seems to really depend on which site/pages you are surfing as to which browser is faster...sometimes Chrome seemed faster, sometimes IE, and sometimes Firefox. When you get right down to it all three are fast. But if pressed to say which one was faster on the average I would say Chrome...if pressed to say which one came in second I just couldn't answer that without more testing. When popular Adblocker/Anti-Tracking add-on/extensions are used on each browser it seems I see a lot of the page tab rotating wheel continuing for around a minute with Firefox even though the page seems fully loaded...don't have that issue with IE and Chrome. And when basing the speed on a couple of benchmarks I used it would be Chrome 1st, with Firefox and IE nose-to-nose for 2nd...but I take benchmarks with a big grain of salt. Additionally, once a computer gets so powerful in terms of CPU/GPU horsepower how fast a webpage loads is much more dependent on how fast your internet connection is....even on a high end CPU powered computer a webpage will load slowly if your internet connection is slow.

But when it comes to start-up of the browsers Firefox definitely comes in dead last on my computer, but start-up time is not really a biggie to me...I don't really care if it takes the browser 12 seconds to fully start-up & load your home page compared to another one that fully starts-up & loads your home page in 7 seconds...once it's started, it started ready to go for other webpages...although 5 seconds can seem like an eternity sometimes when staring at screen. Now this testing was done on what I call my 7 year old Toshiba laptop running a Pentium Core Duo CPU and Win 7...that I also refer to as my 8 cylinder computer. I also know that Chrome is faster on my other, older 8 year Toshiba laptop running a Pentium Celeron CPU and XP in comparison to IE8 which I refer to as my 4 cylinder computer...I've never put Firefox on this laptop.

Firefox and Chrome definitely leave IE setting in the dust when it comes to available add-ons/extensions which can really enhance your browser and browsing experience. Chrome and Firefox has so many add-ons/extensions a person could spend a life time just comparing the browsers based on how the add-ons/extensions affect the browsing experience and each browser's capabilities. I can see how the various add-ons/extensions could affect a person's browser preferences.

I like Chrome's menu structure/interface a little better than Firefox, although Firefox seems more like a simplified version of IE's...and IE is what I have primarily used for years.

But probably what gives Chrome extra points with me is its better integration with all the other Google applications/capabilities and with my Android smartphones and tablets. I put the mobile browser version of Chrome and Firefox on my smartphones and tablets, and I preferred Chrome there also. Firefox on my Chinese-clone tablet was slow and had some issues in getting the screen size correct sometimes....Chrome was much faster on this tablet and no screen sizing issues. Plus, being able to effortlessly sync my laptop Bookmarks/Favorites to my Android devices' Bookmarks/Favorites using Chrome was nice. I know Firefox supposedly has this sync capability but I will admit I didn't try it due to the issues I had with the mobile Firefox browser.

So, for now I'm engaged to Chrome...IE is an old girlfriend I will continue to call-up occasionally and I'll probably continue dating Firefox for a while longer since I haven't known her that long. But I don't plan to marry any one browser and kickout the other two browsers, as playing around with browsers can be fun. Think I should ask my wife if our real world relationship can also follow my browser philosophy of relationship?..on second thought, I probably won't ask her.

Just some feedback....your results may vary...I know browser preference can be like politics and religion for some folks.

Safari for normal browsing (it's wicked fast), Firefox and once in a while Chrome for work (for FireBug and similar tools plus compatibility testing). I don't like Chrome, too many problems regarding flash content. Also had situations where jQuery plugins had problems coexisting together in Chrome. And to be honest, I'm not too fond of Google getting more of my life than necessary. It's enough that they scan my gmail and use my search queries for marketing purposes. Same reason my next phone will be an iPhone, not an Android one.

Recently switched from chrome to opera. Used on MacBook Pro. Like it...

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