I’ve used several different web browsers over the years:

• Netscape Navigator Gold 3 - The browser my school system had installed.
• Netscape Communicator - Just an upgraded version with more features.
• Mozilla - Netscape Communicator without the “N”.
• Opera - The first browser I found with good tab navigation.
• Mozilla Firefox - I switched when several sites I visited stopped working.
• Safari - When Firefox 4 came out and broke every add-on I used with Macs.

It’s been an interesting ride. The story that came out last week about Chrome overtaking Firefox in browser market share got me thinking about it. I can’t say I’m surprised, it was hard navigating to any of Google sites in the last few years without being inundated with “Try Google Chrome” on each page. I’ve never tried using Chrome as my primary browser. The only places I always install it are on GNU/Linux machines or Windows Servers. Chrome works pretty well on GNU/Linux machines, considering that the computers I usually put GNU/Linux on are older laptops. Windows Servers had IE so locked down by default I couldn’t navigate anywhere, and I didn’t care enough to figure out exactly what policies I needed to change in order to fix that. I’d just copy a Chrome Installer.exe over onto the server and be done with it.

The thing that surprises me about this list is that Safari is the first browser I’ve ever used that’s the default for an operating system.