I don't even notice any difference in terms of their function.
I just use Firefox because I hate the look of IE.

Yeah Tom's Hardware, the biggest and most respected site for hardware and software benchmarking, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opera-10.60-internet-explorer-9-safari-5,2680-12.html in their second Web Browser Gran Prix of 2010. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558-10.html.

In both tests, Firefox is also beaten by Opera (as well as Chrome). In one of the tests, it is also beaten by Safari, and in the latter test it 'ties' with Safari.

Personal preferences aside, these are the best and most accurate objective facts available, for those areas which can be objectively measured.

Every version of IE8 I have used experiences this bug where opening a new tab occasionally freezes the browser until you end an iexplorer.exe task with the lowest mem usage. The whole thing eats up RAM like a cheetah at a zebra convention. /i'm mad

i would say it depends on how computer literate people are. between the people i know its about 50/50 between IE and mozilla. dont know anyone that uses chrome all the time yet mostly because they dont have as many plugins yet. the people that seem to use IE simply use it cause they dont do anything with their computer except for basic webbrowsing and typing something out or shopping online. it seems that the firefox users are more concientious of script and ad blockers etc.

You can disable them if they annoy you.

Seriously, the only reason anyone uses IE is because they don't know that you can actually install a different web browser. I don't know a single person under the age of 30 who uses IE as their default browser. Most people nowadays either uses Firefox (which is what I used until recently, before I got RockMelt), or Chrome. "Most people" should probably be rephrased as it isn't necessarily accurate, but you get that it's just a figure of speech. Like I said, IE is the default browser that is installed on your computer, and that is the only reason people use it. And by "people", in this case I mean the average man or woman who doesn't have a lot of computer knowledge, or uses the computer to little to care about upgrading the software.

I'm 18 and I use IE......... ha now you do know someone.

No offense, but I'll probably have forgotten about you in 5 minutes

I havn't found a better browser than Chrome.

I have to use IE at work and cringe everytime.

I use Firefox at home, although I have Chrome too. I find Chrome much more faster, however I've got add-ons and what not for FF and I cba to find the equivalent of those for Chrome and install them.

At uni sometimes Firefox doesn't work and I have to use IE. Is it me or is the text/font not very clear? Kinda blurry. And the colour 'white' looks a bit yellowish on each webpage, although this could be the monitor. Well IE well and truly svcks, and I'm glad that even my fellow class mates don't use IE, which surprises me since most people have no [censored] clue on how to use a computer (pretty sad actually).

I don't like Firefox. Even though I'm using the exact same fonts and sizes as IE, it still doesn't look the same.

There are themes that make Firefox look identical to IE like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4129/ and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4988/ :shrug:

And if your font types are the same and the fonts still aren't looking the same, you probably don't have Cleartype enabled:

Vista: Control Panel -> Personalization -> Window Color and Appearance -> Effects: "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts"-> Cleartype

XP: Control Panel -> Display -> Appearance -> Effects: "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts" -> Cleartype

Yeah that made the fonts the same, but they also look terrible elsewhere, sort of blurred, especially my desktop icons on a white background which now have an awful black shadow effect.

Cleartype ain't supposed to do things like that, unless you aren't using an LCD monitor. Subpixel rendering increases the readability of fonts, though it does "fuzz" a little to do this, it overall helps (unless you are using a CRT, but then it should look horrible in IE too)

You can use the http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypePowerToy.mspx to mess with the Cleartype settings to see if you can get it more to your liking

Well "terrible" is subjective, and it probably just because I'm not used to see my fonts that way. They did look blurrier than I'm used to, and my icon fonts that were on white portions of my background pic had what looked like an exaggerated 3D shadow effect.

I use Firefox for certain websites, and IE for others. That's good enough for me.