I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are like a hundred and fifty browsers out there these days. For a long time, it was Internet Explorer that dominated the space, but in recent years some new guys have come along and said what’s up. In fact, one just took over IE’s spot as the top browser.

I’ve been trying out the various browsers over the last year just for my own edification. I’ve spent a couple months each on IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.

Supposedly, there was a study done that showed people who use IE are on average less intelligent than people who use Chrome and Opera. I have no idea how they figured that out and/or made that assumption, but hearing about the study actually introduced me to Opera, which I’d never even heard of before.

So, not wanting to seem less intelligent and having used IE (like everyone else) for years, I started testing the others out. What I found was that while they all do their thing well, every single one of them had something that annoyed me.

IE. Ah, IE. You’ve been around forever, you’ve been very, very popular. Too popular, in fact. Way too popular. You have bugs. Like viruses. It’s not secure and I don’t trust it because it’s been hacker prey for too long.

Firefox. Been around a bit longer than some of the other guys, but it doesn’t seem to have the same security issues that IE has. What it did to annoy me was block everything in sight.

Safari. Also not brand new. And, honestly, there wasn’t anything that bothered me all that much about Safari other than the kind of weird layout.

Opera. “Ooooh, Operaaaah.” It even sounds smart. Actually, I like Opera a lot, especially the appearance, which is kind of mod. It can be weird on certain security things, though, which probably has more to do with banking websites not being designed for Opera because it’s so new.

Chrome. The cool kid. Chrome is cool, especially the layout, which is clean like Opera. My complaint about Chrome—typical Google, they make you jump through extra hoops to get tasks done, which gives it kind of an outdated feel sometimes.

BUT. It turns out that Chrome is more than just the cool kid—it’s the browser that just overtook IE as the most popular. According to MSNBC, Chrome 15 now has 23.6% of the marketplace to IE’s 23.5%.

I know. Pretty close. But the people have spoken. As for me, I use Chrome and Opera the most now (not because of the intelligence thing, I swear—I just like them better overall.)