I’m a Mozilla Firefox user, it’s safe, fast and reliable. It must have been years ago since I used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as my main web browser. This doesn’t automatically mean that I never use IE. For testing my websites and those of my clients, I still need to use IE6, 7 and 8.

It seems that some of the major browsers render the page different, mainly when it comes to CSS. Everytime a new browser will be released I’m hoping it won’t break the layout of my websites (which mostly are coded in conformity with the current standards).

Another point which is important to me, is that IE gradually slows down my laptop, it’s using to many of my systems resources when it’s running. Not that my laptop is very high end, but running with 1 GB of RAM, it should be able to run IE without causing enormous delays on nearly anything I do. In comparison to IE, Firefox is running smoothly, and doesn’t cause any trouble.

IE8 is an improvement when it comes to rendering my sites correctly, I’m not a expert on this, but all the sites I tested, were shown correctly. Browsers are tested with the Acid2 test, which has a successor now, the Acid3 test. IE8 has recently passed the Acid2 test.

The problem with having multiple browsers available to use (especially the IE browsers) is the extra work it costs to make your websites working properly in all the different browsers. According to my blog’s visitor statistics, nearly 20% of all my visitors are still using IE6. Currently most browsers support transparent PNG’s, but IE6 doesn’t, so I had to apply a little hack: SuperSleight.

It would be a lot easier for all web developers if every browser rendered the websites exactly the same. And as long as that is not going to happen, I’ll stick to Firefox.