There is huge debate which browser is "the best". In my professional opinion the best browser is any modern browser such as IE9 (not any version of IE under 8), Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera would be a good choice for anyone. Really the differences aren't huge and if you have no real need for anything in particular (Flock for example can pull together your social networking feeds) then the choice is a personal one and won't affect your browsing in anyway. As a web developer I would be hung if i suggested any version of IE under 8 as they are notorious for security holes and inability to render the latest websites properly.

I'm running both and like parts of each. But what I like most about both of them is the plugins that extend them in any direction I want to go.

I agree with Simon.

Chrome first for me, then Firefox, and avoid Explorer like the plague.

Chrome (and Safari) has a wonderful elegance about it - what more do you need other than the basic back/forwards/home/refresh buttons, an address bar and an "options" button to save/print a page? Only gripe is that a very, very few websites still don't work properly with Chrome.

Explorer on the other hand is just a mess. OK, I know you can turn these all off but it's still a mess. And incredibly slow too. Hopefully they'll sort it out with IE9 but somehow I doubt it.

If I download all these browsers (Chrome, FF etc) won't they start to upset each other? I can't believe Microsoft hasn't built something into its IE that crashes the PC if I start to use a rival browser!

Is it safe to have three browsers?

I have Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE all installed on one computer for development/testing and they all work fine, not even any (obvious!) underhand tactics from Microsoft crashes my computer.

Just don't let IE set itself as default :(

I've found that Chrome is lightning quick both on pc and mac. I also like the fact that you can type your search question into the url window to bring up a list of results.

The other browser which is worth considering is Opera. It's delightful, if a bit leftfield. If you have an iPhone, try downloading the mobile version. It's so fast; leaves safari for dead.

You'll also find it in your Wii console!

I have several browsers, partly because I do some web development. I tend to keep pages open in Chrome, I use Firefox (which I find farly slow) for financial transactions and Yahoo groups (many sites only work with IE or Firefox), I use Opera for watching TV online and Safari for ad hoc requests - until recently when I discovered the lighning fast K-meleon which is great and is now my default browser.

I've never heard of this browser. It sounds good & I will check it out.
Who is behind it? What country does it come from>

This is very interesting, thanks. But what's the significance of having a browser as the default? Do you have to select one as default or can you not just have a series of icons on the desktop from which you select the browser you want? And I'm still convinced that, if you select anything other than IE as default, you will live to regret it!

The problem with having IE as your default browser is that any content you click on in emails, or anywhere else then loads into IE. Which, the general opinion seems to be is not the best browser...

So, set one of the others as default. The other reason to do this is that if you choose IE as your default browser, it tries to hijack other file extensions as well.

You can have them all loaded at the same time and running fine but only one can be default.

There are some very good reasons why you should use newer browsers such as Firefox 3.6, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Internet Explorer 8 or Opera 10 and one of the biggest is security.

Microsoft recently has some major problems with IE6 as more significant holes were found that enabled potential hackers access, each version brought out tends to fix issues to do with security whilst also juggling a few new features as well.

We still have to use IE6 here (along with all the other versions). Why? Simply because many large organisations don't use anything else and its simply too costly to upgrade. Unfortunately IE6 doesn't play nice with HTML and CSS (web site based languages) unless you hit it with a large stick!

Which browser would I choose? I'm currently using Chrome and I do like it but a good development browser is Firefox for its additional toolsets. If you want a speedy browser then Safari is pretty nippy all round. The new Internet Explorer 9 beta is looking very good and I almost hate saying that.

If you're running linux (think Ubuntu) then your options are slightly different and you won't natively get IE running unless you poke around a bit but you can run Firefox and some KDE based browsers such as K Meleon and Chromium, which is Googles own Chrome browser by another name.