OT Survey: internet browsers and mail readers

This survey is off-topic and was suggested by Justin Dearing (blog|twitter) and I'm curious about the results too so I agreed to run it.

We're interested to see what internet browsers are most commonly used my members of the database community, along with which email clients. People are often fanatic about one browser/client or another and vehemently opposed to using others (I detest Outlook, for instance, and was overjoyed to be freed from it when I left Microsoft 4 years ago). Consider whatever is your primary machine and answer for that. If you want to answer multiple times, you'll need to do so from different machines so the survey site doesn't recognize you.




I'll report on the results in a couple of weeks or so.

Thanks!

PS No, I'm not changing which survey provider I use, and if you don't like the choices in the survey, that's unfortunate :-)

6 thoughts on “OT Survey: internet browsers and mail readers

  1. It depends for me too. I use IE when I have to, OWA, Sharepoint, and other IE only sites. I use firefox to debug websites I am writing, and chrome for everything else.

    For email, I use gmail for reading my email and thunderbird for local backups.

    I’d like to thank Paul for running this.

  2. As you know I do about 99% of my surfing from a Mac. I switch between Firefox 6 and Safari 5.1. I wish I could just use one, but I can’t. I like Safari because:

    – its "reader" capability (not an RSS reader) lets you read blog posts without all the ads and sidebar distractions – it even combines multi-page articles for you
    – I can’t get Firefox to run GoToMeeting or LiveMeeting correctly (they work fine in Safari)

    I like Firefox because:

    – Community Server does not work in Safari (except for basic blog posts with no links, images or code)
    – there is a very cool GMail redesigned add-in that makes GMail look marginally pretty

    As for the mail readers, at work we have Exchange, so I use Outlook 2011 for that (and shared calendars). All my other mail goes through my GMail account.

  3. I use multiple browsers. IE, Firefox and Chrome are usually all running. Mostly it allows me to login to the same site with multiple usernames which is required for my job, but I’ve slowly formed a habit to use each browser for different purposes — IE for Microsoft sites like Outlook Web Access and Sharepoint, Firefox for web app development, Chrome for looking up documentation.

    So… it depends!

  4. For browsing I use Chrome, Still need to use IE for some intranet sites in office.

    For EMail, I Import my yahoo/gmail mails to my hotmail account, and I use Windows Live Mail Client to read… :)

  5. I primarily use Chrome. However I find that no corp web application/site works correctly in all browsers. Many of these corp sites "only" work with IE6. Therefore each browser implemented some features the same way IE6 did – which is why I keep all flavors of browsers around (IE 6 was deep-sixed awhile ago) . IE tends to be the most compatible with corp stuff so it is my default browser.

    My favorite situation is our documentation life cycle web site. I must use IE to view the documents because the HTML for the "view" hyperlink (div section) doesn’t render at all in the other browsers. However I can’t Sign the documents in IE because IE caches something that the web site is trying to replace (a blank window comes up in IE). Signing works fine w/ FF, so I view it in IE and sign in FF (and neither function works in Chrome).

    And Chrome doesn’t get along with proxies consistently. It works great until it stops working – quite frustrating.

    Egads.

  6. Did I miss something? I just upgraded to IE 9 a few months ago. How are there 6 people, in THIS site alone, with IE 10? I must be hanging out in the wrong region of the Tubes. Also, I just upgraded to FireFox 5 when my FireFox 4 (which seems like it was just released a few months ago) said that I could upgrade. Now Aaron Bertrand is running around the InterTubes in FireFox 6?

    I have trouble in FireFox with LinkedIn. It’s probably me but IE 9 is a lot snappier than any previous version and it renders/navigates LinkedIn just fine. I prefer FireFox for viewing XKCD.com and Wikipedia because (well I’m not really sure why on Wikipedia, it just…looks better…I dunno) I can’t get the alt-text to stay up long enough in IE to read some of the longer ones on the comics.

    But no joke people, where in the Tubes to you hang out to get access to the stuff that I haven’t even heard about?

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