Firefox 3 Release Date

An alternate browser isn't for everyone, althrough there are benchmarks posted all over to show how this browser or that browser is faster than this browser. Im surprised you didn't notice any difference in speed though, but if you are happy with IE then by all means stick with it. Its comes down to a personal preference and having the features you want. The same could be said of any application, why do people use Winamp over Windows Media Player when the sound is the same, or why does someone use a 3rd party defrag utility when there is one built in when the both essentially accomplish the same thing. Just my 2 cents.

Oh and I've been a happy Opera user for the past 8 years

Hmmmmm I tried Opera 9.5 today too. Both Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 seem to be taking on a "glossy" look that reminds me of Netscape 7.2 .. when things started to get bloated.

I think it's a bad sign. The one thing they did fix in Opera was letting your login go through before asking you if you wanted to save the password. Pretty dumb saving passwords to failed logins the way it was!! But it has a few bugs and again taking on bloat instead of providing features that should be standard by now.

The trouble with IE no matter how good or bad they make it, is they insist on it being there. So every malware knows it has a target. You can't uninstall it so you're hosed.
I have an app killer sitting there just to kill IE if it ever pops up.

I use it for sheer customization, and use Opera now because of sheer speed - maybe it is not noticeable to anyone else, but Using KeePass Password Safe as my trusted login manager, in IE the letters get typed at a rate of 2/s or 3 /2s, whereas in Firefox it is nearly instantaneous (well under a second for entire username and password, most of which are 34 or more characters) to be input.

Furthermore, loading pages is extremely noticeable between Fx 3 / Opera 9.5 and IE 7 - but a lot of that will depend upon your networks speeds as well.

The only fair, unbiased testing can come from multiple loadings of the same site in each browser, with all history, cache, etc cleared out - and then, in Vista, you also have IE in protected and non protected mode, which makes for a larger difference as well.

What it comes down to is this: As M$MVP Donna Buenaventura writes : There is no 100% secure browser. It is a matter of taste and personal choice. As soon as I can customize IE with all the same settings / tweaks / add-ons as I can with Fx, I'll give it serious consideration - Micro$oft has gone a long way to make IE 7 a lot more secure than IE 6 - but it is still only as secure as the user using it.

The one thing about Firefox (and a lot of FOSS) is that usually there is a much larger global span of developers looking at both vulnerabilities *and* patches - so that usually means fixes are quick to come out.

yea---FF3 has taken over my home Vista and work XP machines. although my Linux always used FF before.

I did like Opera but it crashed on me a coupla times and didn't pursue it.