I often tend to judge people based on the type of browser they use. Believe it or not, the choice of your favorite browser reveals a lot about your personality.
IE 5.0:
You only use your computer for IM, email and Myspace. You stubbornly refuse to upgrade that ancient Win 98 box that you are using because you don’t need some fancy computer and in your opinion the one you have works just fine. You also probably don’t use antivirus or antispyware either. You just let your son/nephew/friend clean it out every month or so.
IE 6.0:
You probably don’t know what a “browser” is and you think Internet is IE. You have no clue about technology, and you are generally afraid of computers. You also use your machine only for IM, chat, email and myspace. Your friends keep telling you about that “Fried Fox” thingy but you don’t really understand this stuff and never really had time to look into it.
IE 7.0:
You consider yourself to be on the cutting edge of technology. You think that Microsoft is the greatest company on the earth, and that this evil “Lenoux” operating system is made by terrorists. You have a poster of Steve Ballmer on your wall, and you want to be like Bill Gates when you grow up. When you think about Vista you get goosebumps and shiver with excitement.
Firefox 1.x:
You are most likely a little bit geeky and proud of it. You are a strong supporter of the Open Source movement, and you think that RMS is “the man”. You really don’t care if FF is faster, or safer than IE – you would use it even if it performed 10 times worse. You are just happy that you have a free, open source browser with a huge community that is supporting it. At any given time you have installed at least 7 extensions that you couldn’t live without.
Firefox 2.0 Beta:
You are a developer by day and open source developer by night. Either that, or a huge Firefox fan. You are all over Bugzilla reporting all the issues you encounter with the browser. You have probably summited at least one patch to an open source project at some point in your life. You love to tinker with your applications, and you don’t mind running beta software on your machine. After all, it is fun to discover new bugs, and to work little kinks out of the new cutting edge programs.
Mozilla:
You have been with Mozilla since the begging. You think that Firefox is really over-hyped and you prefer the old school Netscape like environment much better. You don’t think the Moz Suite is bloated – you actually like having a mail client, irc client, and a web editor embedded in the browser. You don’t understand why people would pick a browser with less features. In all other aspects you are much like a Firefox user – you love Open Source, you are fond of your extensions and etc… Actually, no – you would rather say that Firefox users are much like you in their tastes. After all, you were using an awesome gecko powered browser while they were still struggling with their IE or whatever.
Opera:
You really don’t care for they Firefox hype. What you want is the best browser there is – and for you that’s Opera. You actually used to pay them when the browser was ad supported. If a Firefox fanboi starts talking smack about your browser you quickly shoot him down by proposing the ACID2 test. You know what you want (a fast, standards compliant browser) and you know where to get it. Browser wars do not interest you at all, although you kinda hope that Firefox wins so that fewer web developers make IE only pages.
Netscape 8.x:
You are a senior citizen, who just recently got a new computer. You don’t really understand anything about the internets, but you distinctly remember that you must have Netscape to run them. You can’t understand all that talk about Internet Explorator and Firesomething, and you have no clue what Oprah has to do with the internets. All you know is that you need to click on that big N to get to the “onlines”. You think that Senator Steven’s speech about net neutrality made a lot of sense. You also sent out an internet one day, and the other person haven’t received it for days.
Netscape 7 and below:
See IE 5.0.
AOL Explorer:
Ever since you installed new AIM client this thing became your default browser. You really hate it, but you just can’t figure out how to change it back. You don’t even know how to explain what you want to your computer savvy friends. Whenever you try to get help and you say something like “can you change the new internet, back to the old internet?” they just stare at you and pretend they don’t understand. They probably don’t know as much about computers as they say they do, or something.
AOL Suite:
You most likely either still use AOL as your dialup ISP. Either that, or you somehow figured that you still need AOL even after getting broadband connection. Someone told you you can actually use the internets without starting AOL but you haven’t figured out how is that possible. It seems really difficult though, and you suspect it might be illegal.
Safari:
Congratulations! You are a Mac user with all perks and benefits that title offers you. You love OSX, and you would never use Windows. It just seems ugly and kludge stricken to you. You like the simplicity, and clarity that Mac offers you, and Safari is a browser that just works for you. You never really bothered to look for another one, because you are fully satisfied with what you have and you wouldn’t change it for the world.
Konqueror:
You are a linux user, and a geek at heart. You think that KDE is the best desktop environment out there, and you despise Gnome. You love the fact that your browser is also file manager, a ftp/scp client, smb share client, a PDF viewer and many other things. You like to show off KDE’s network transparency to your friends by scp’ing to your web server, editing HTML file, saving it, and then refreshing the modified page without ever leaving the browser. Most of the applications you use on a daily basis have names starting with a k (Kmail, Kontact, Kdevelop, Koffice etc..)
Lynx:
You are a liar. You really want me to believe that you use a text browser for everything? Especially one that does not support javascript, frames, css and has trouble displaying tables? Seriously, I can totally believe that you use vi all the time, and that your primary email client is Mutt or Pine. But there is no way that I’m prepared to buy that you use lynx for everything. And if you would, then you’d be the most hardcore geek I have ever seen in my life. Hats off to you!
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If you disagree with any of the above, please let me know in the comments. If you are offended, then stop using that shit you use and get a real browser. 
Also feel free to add short descriptions for the browsers that I missed.
Disclaimer: I have no clue who made that awesome firefox image. Someone had it as an avatar on a message board. I’m perfectly willing to give the author credit if I can find him.
Update Sun, August 20 2006, 04:00 AM
Thank you for all the comments. Just to set things straight – I am not saying Lynx is a bad browser. I use it quite often in fact for various things. I’m just saying that I doubt a lot of people would use it as their main browser of choice. But if you are, hats off to you! You are much more hardcore than I am.
Update Sun, August 20 2006, 10:09 PM
Now, here are some missing browsers by popular demand:
Flock:
They might as well call you Mr. Web 2.0. You are all over flickr, del.icio.us, youtube and dozens of other websites, and your browser reflects it. You think that Firefox is OK, but it does not include all the blogging, photo sharing, tagging and bookmark sharing tools right there at your fingertips. You wish you could get a chip implanted in your brain so that you would stay connected to the web and be able to moblog 24/7. When the small minded people tell you that Flock is just a fork of Firefox you dismiss them saying they are not seeing the big picture.
Epiphany:
You are a Gnome user and proud of it. You consider KDE a torture device from hell. You are fond of explaining people that KDE must be configured for hours before it can be usable. The people who claim that KDE is totally usable right out of the box are definitely dirty liers. You prefer things simple and intuitive – that’s why you picked Gnome, and that’s why you use Epiphany. You tried using Mozzila and Firefox but you found them bloated, counterintuitive and ugly. Your desktop is neat an organized, just like your desk is.
Maxthon and Avant:
You are a little bit confused. You like IE and you wouldn’t change it for another browser. You don’t want to worry about sites that won’t render properly, or ActiveX controls that won’t work on an alternative browser. But deep down inside you are envious of your friends who get to have tabbed browsing, and other cool features. You do recognize that IE is a little behind the times though, and you want something more modern, without giving up your ability to render certain websites. Maxhton/Avant lets you have the best of both worlds – the warm and comfy feel of IE rendering engine, and all the cool features that are standard in other browsers. You will likely switch to IE7 when it is out of beta.
Sea Monkey:
You simply like application suites. You can’t help it, but the thought of using separate applications for web browsing an email just seems obscene to you. You used to use Mozilla but when Sea Monkey was released, you quickly jumped ship and you have never looked back. You think Sea Monkey is the coolest name for a browser ever!
w3m:
You have been a sysadmin for most of your life. You rarely see the sunlight because you spend most of your day in the bowels of the NOC surrounded by big servers. You can’t sleep without the background noise of a humming computer fan. You take a warm jacket to work even in the summertime because the AC in the server room is cranked up so high you could get a cold just thinking about it. Young geeks look up to you, and try to imitate you – but you could never figure out why.
K-Meleon:
You are way to impatient to wait for your browser to load. Even IE starts up to slow for you. That’s why your browser has a preloader, and it is cranked up so high that it only takes nanoseconds for the window to pop up on the screen. You live life in the fast lane, and you do not have time to wait for the slow moving applications. You can remember spending hours doing windows registry tweaks to bring up those response rates, loading times, and decrease timeouts on everything.
Dillo:
You are a minimalist at heart. You like your applications small and fast. You can be obsessive about memory footprints of the programs you run on a daily basis. You most likely run IceWM or Windowmaker on your machine and you sneer at the bloated desktop environments such as KDE or Gnome. You are known as the the local Linux/BSD guru.
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Sigh… I tried to write something about Camino, Shiira and Omniweb but I have nothing. I never used them. Please feel free to do your own description of those in the comment and I will include it in the post.
Translations:
This post was translated to Chinese – here. I can’t read Chinese so I can’t tell you much more about it, but I think it’s awesome that someone took time to do this.
Portugese translation can be found here. Thanks!
Update Mon, Aug 21 2006, 3:20 PM
For those of you who are interested, here are my istes the browser usage statistics for the last few days.
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