I know this isn't about cracking, but on many cracking channels on IRC, there are always big discussions on what browser's best and that Microsoft sucks big time...even websites check what browser you have and throw their opnion (sometimes hard) in your face! So, dear reader, it's about time to set everything on a row :-)
First I want to say I did not include Netscape, because I haven't used it for a long time (because it was REAL slow), so besides that I don't know anything of its features.
In this little essay I 'll try to be as objective as possible and give some pro's /contra 's on the two browsers.

In order to make a good decision on what browser you'll use it 's important for you to know what sort of sites/information you want to look at. If you are a Internaut that likes to surf to the big commercial sites, with many special effects and graphics, and you don't like downloading plugins and imstalling them in your browser, then Internet Explorer 5 is definatly the best choice: you download 17 MB, install, and everything has been made ready to go.

If you are a person that hates javascript, flash, and other (junk) stuff or you want a highly configurable browser then I can strongly recommend Opera 3.60!
Opera 's about 1 MB to download and (believe me) is VERY fast. Of course, when you just downloaded the browser and installed it on your system, you won't be able to view java, flash, getright won't work with it etc... . So if you want to use java, you have to download an additional 7 MB (!). The other plugins aren't that big (few hundred kilobytes). But keep in mind that a total of 8 MB 's still half the size of IE5.0 .

An advantage, but also a disadvantage of Opera is that it uses the 100 % standard .HTML. That implies that most sites look somewhat different and weird (like mine). But I like standarised programs :-)
But now you ask: "Besides that, has Opera any disadvantage to IE5.0?" The answer is unfortunately yes. As an example: the getright plugin isn't as good as in IE5.0 and Opera does not support (YET!) javascript (don't misunderstand this....it DOES support JAVA, but NOT javascript) and doesn't seem to be able to display every java applet properly.

If you decided to use IE5.0...well that's an okay choice. I also have it on my HD (and I'm testing it now for 2 weeks) and I have to say it's much faster in loading pages than IE4.0 but certainly not as fast as Opera! It didn't crash one time, it's also quite configurable and easy to use (easier than Opera). So the never ending "Internet Exploder sux"-comments are totally false. IE5.0 also comes with the nice Outlook Express e-mail client that's also better than its predecessor. Opera does not have such an e-mail client.
It also has 2 big disadvantages: wastes a lot of diskspace (with stuff you'll NEVER need) and it's very slow compared to Opera.

SO! What to choose? I'll leave it up to you. But if you want to know what system I use: I use Opera 3.60 in combination with IE5.0 : if i want a fast page loading for sites without much graphical garbage I use Opera, if I really need to visit a site with all the new techstuff on it I use IE5.0

Download Opera at http://www.operasoftware.com
Download IE5.0 at http://www.microsoft.com