Just as the topic title states:How many browsers do you use? I use three: Internet Explorer, Opera, and Mozilla Firefox.
It's interesting to see what has happened over the years. I remember vividly the first time I used Netscape. I connected to the Internet using Winsock, and it blabbered information I could not comprehend (at the time). I ran Netscape, and it brought me to a beautiful front page, Netscape.com. There was only one problem with all of this: Where do I go from there? I was absolutely clueless. It was like: what's the point of the Internet? The next day, when my dad realised we didn't know a thing about what to do, he was introduced to a site, probably the best search engine at the time: Yahoo! :D It was vague understanding why we had to type ridiculous things like www and com just get to a specific site. Later, I learnt what a home page was., wrote my own login script to try out, and so on.
Then came the age of Internet Explorer. It came with one of the Windows 95 updates, which heralded the much hated MSN Bar on my desktop. It came with channels I didn't want, and being as clueless as I was, I didn't know how to get rid of it. Months later, I got rid of it anyway after finding out. Internet Explorer was less cluttered than Netscape, and definitely ran faster. It was the browser of the moment. This lasted a long time, up till the time my new computer came.
One fine day, I read about a browser. Apparently, it was small , fast and had a built in mail client. It seemed like it was worth a try. I installed a copy form a CD that came with a magazine from New Zealand. (Hey, don't ask me, but mags there are pretty fun to read!) I installed Opera, and it changed the way I browsed the Internet. It was the first tabbed browser I'd ever used, and it didn't crash when you had about 6 to 7 websites open. Of course, dialup was still hell to live with. It came with this handy Google Search textbox which really saved me a lot of time (loading Google wasn't slow, but hey, who won't want a small speed boost). I used it all the way till now, which is version 7.54u1. :D
Then, I decided that I should get Mozilla and try it out. It was there I found Firefox. It was something like version 0.7. Oh well, I was going to try something funky anyway, so why not? Being an advocate of open source, I thought it was the right thing to do. It was faster than Opera, supported tabbed browsing, and could have some pretty funky plugins too! I loved it, as it had less web site compatibility problems than Opera did. It was the best browser ever, but some how, couldn't replace Opera completely. Opera still had the stranglehold on part of me, in my opinion. Firefox isn't customizable enough. When it becomes customizable enough (as in features and settings), it'll probably become the browser of choice for many.
But for now, let me give you some advice. Get Firefox. Rediscover the web. :D
