Opera and Midori, but voted Opera.

Firefox on all platforms.

Opera

First, it is open source. See http://www.chromium.org/Home and http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wi...VsGoogleChrome

Second, from what I've read on the subject, they were requesting help from the NSA to secure their systems after the accounts of some human rights activists were breached. I haven't seen anything indicating any privacy violation, other than people speculating.

As far as browsers, I find Chromium lets me block all cookies except necessary ones far more easily than in any other browser I've used. Chromium also seems to be faster and better with resources than Firefox, especially for long sessions and large numbers of tabs. I haven't done any serious benchmarking though.

I'd call them a marketing company rather than a data mining company, but maybe that's because I've never seen evidence that they are selling my search information. Maybe I'm too comfortable with a machine seeing what I type in a search engine so that it can rank pages and show ads. Also, I don't think a search engine would work very well without heavily data mining web pages to determine things like page rank.

How is their acquisition policy relevant to a browser?

Firefox, used it since 0.7. Have Iron installed out of curiosity, Still prefer Firefox.
Arora shows promise as well.

First, no, Chrome is not open source. Sure, its based on Chromium, which is open source, and we can debate about how much closed code google has shoved into Chrome. But since the source is closed, we wont find out.

Second, Googles 'rumoured ties to intelligence agencies' goes back a long, long time, pretty much to the beginnings of google.

Thrid, you dont have to sell data to be a data miner. If you take a simple defintion of 'data mining' google is a data mining company without doubt.

Forth, IMO a companies polices always matter.

As for how its important, think about how google is operating. They do some work on Chrome, then release it as Chromium and open source, using a licence that allows then to make a closed source versio). That allows google to not only get code for 'free' (LOL), and have a 'development' version they dont have to do anything with, they also get lots of people who dont understand the situation (or are prepared to 'misstate' the situation because 'google isnt evil') running aroung saying that 'chrome is open source' and 'google supports open source' and similar bulldust.

Its a win/win/win as far as google is concerned. Lower production and development costs, a ready made cheer bench, while keeping the code that matters to google closed.

As far as I'm concerned, its lose/lose. Not only is Chrome giving google more power in the internet ecosystem (which they already have too much off) it also erodes the whole concept of 'open source', and is playing a silly licence game.

Opera suits all my browsing needs.

May be Firefox/IceWeasel and Chrome/Chromium in the poll options, or have any differences? besides the logo and the name?

Like sgosnell, I use Firefox with Debian, so it is technically Iceweasle. I make it even better by using DuckDuckGo as my preferred search engine. A pretty good combination!

EDIT
I see no option to vote for Arora. That might make Arch users unhappy.

Had to lol at this one. I voted Firefox, as I've been using it so long that anything else feels alien.

LOL

Oddly enough, I never liked IE. As soon as local internet became available, I installed AOL's version of Netscape (Navigator?) on Windows 98, and when AOL announced they were discontinuing Netscape, I switched to Firefox. I've used it on every platform since, and have never found reason to try anything else.

Firefox is the browser for me. I use it in Linux and Windows XP.

I use mostly Epiphany and elinks.
So I voted Epiphany, 'cause it's quick and light and I need to browse a lot of image-heavy sites. (fashion, costumes and photo-related sites)

Chrome. It sucks slightly less than the others. Firefox has lost it's way and drifted off into the land of crazy.

I chose Firefox. And I use Chrome and Chromium alot too, as well as IceCat and Konqueror - sometimes I'm running most all of the above at the same time too!

I suppose that with consideration to my debiantard side, I might should be choosing Firefox although it's really IceWeasel LOL!

Oh and let's not leave out lynx Hey is Emacs in the list? LOL!

I hope that helps

Kindest regards,

.