I liked Firefox.  It had tabbed browsing before Internet Explorer (IE) and seemed lighter and faster.  The plug-ins were also a great feature, especially IE Tab, which ran IE from within Firefox.  It was very easy to change the rendering engine and you could assign certain web sites to automatically switch to use IE.

Certain web sites use non-standard features of IE and will not look right or be usable on other browsers.  This is especially true of Microsoft SharePoint, which uses ActiveX controls for some of its user interface enhancements.  Connections between Microsoft Office and SharePoint do not work well outside of IE.

Then, Firefox started to run slower and began crashing.  There were many new features that seemed to bog everything down and the user interface became very crowded and bloated.  Along came Google Chrome.  It started quickly, ran fast, and felt very lightweight.  It also has some great features under the hood to isolate pages from each other (when they crash).

But, Chrome did not have an IE Tab...until now.  The beta version of the browser now supports extensions, including IE Tab.  I've just started trying it out, but so far so good.  The Chrome beta is available here: www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel.  I used beta and dev channel and backed-up my settings as recommended.  The extensions, including IE Tab, are available here: chrome.google.com/extensions.

I hope Chrome will continue to run well and not become bogged down by these extensions.