Poll Results: Browser Choice Sans Developer Tools

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

Yes, all the major browsers have development tools now, but I think most people are in agreement that you just can’t beat Firebug and the slew of other development-specific addons for Firefox. Outside of these tools, I often hear people complain about Firefox being slow, memory hungry, or crashy. I thought it would be interesting to ask about people’s browser choice if these development tools were not a factor, so just judging by UI and speed and features and such.

1 Firefox (56%, 4,615 Votes)
2 Safari (17%, 1,443 Votes)
3 Chrome (16%, 1,310 Votes)
4 Opera (6%, 542 Votes)
5 Internet Explorer (4%, 324 Votes)
6 Other (1%, 61 Votes)

Firefox topped the polls, showing that you guys still like the browsing experience on Firefox best even without fancy tools. Personally I like Firefox OK, but I have some crashing issues and I would definitely be a Safari man if mostly just used browsers for browsing. I think WebKit is the best rendering engine, and Safari 4 is just smoking fast all the way around. The web inspector with Safari is also fairly nice, it’s definitely second to Firebug, it just needs the “inspect” feature of Firebug (mousing around to drill down to the exact element) to really be of great general use. If there was a final version of Chrome for Mac I could even seeing going that route, since I really dig how it localizes each tab so you can’t crash the whole browser. Safari and Chrome were neck and neck for second, but ultimately Safari took it.

Opera took fourth, happily beating out Internet Explorer, which was in last place other than the Other category. I’m sure some of the “Others” were specially purposed browsers like Flock, built around social networking.

I’ll leave this up for most of the day probably. I have a new Poll idea I’ll put up and post about tomorrow. As a heads up, Friday is the 2nd anniversary of CSS-Tricks, so definitely pop back over that day if you are only an infrequent reader!