Perhaps instead of this poll, pg could simply toss some page analytics onto hackernews? To be honest, I was surprised when I didn't see any trackers in the page source.
If pg did post analytics like these, I wouldn't have made this poll. But the thing is that he did not for whatever reason, and I felt that a lot of users (including me) would like to see the data ourselves. Unless pg decides to post it, I see this as the only way for HN users to find out.
Mondays: Chrome;
Tuesdays: Frustrated with WebKit inspector, switch to latest Firefox 4 beta;
Wednesdays: Annoyed with sluggish performance, switch to Safari;
Thursdays: Feel like I'm not on the cutting edge, switch to Chromium;
Fridays: Realize I'm a front-end developer and need Firebug, switch back to latest Firefox 4 beta and hope Firebug's been updated since Tuesday
For a browser that dominates the market share, Internet Explorer has a very small presence among HN users. This just goes to show that most of those IE users are simply folks with less of a technical background.
Firefox for browsing (because the awesomebar is still way better at finding things in my history/bookmarks than Chrome for me, and because of bookmark tags). Chrome for development.
I agree that the Chrome inspector is missing some things that Firebug has (primarily, it is unable to render the HTML returned in XHR requests - this is a big deal for me, since I use Django which returns debug pages in HTML, and I do a ton of XHR in my applications) but I use it when I can simply because it hangs less, crashes less and is faster overall for me. You should know though that there's a Firebug Lite bookmarklet available for Chrome - that's what I use when I need to examine XHR responses. There's probably a plugin for it too.
Also how recently have you tried the Chrome inspector? It's been getting a lot of attention lately from the dev team.
Out of curiosity, what do you like better about Firebug? I've been using the Chrome web inspector for awhile now and loving it. Maybe there's some feature in Firebug that's useful that I don't know about yet though.
I’m a Safari user primarily, and while I generally use the webkit inspector as a last ditch when Firebug is being stupid, Firebug is much better at listing css styles. Webkit’s styles have way too much in the way of per-selector headers.
I used Firefox for the same reason, the awesome-bar takes me places so much faster than in Chrome. But Firefox feels so clunky and slow that I had to make the switch to Chrome a few weeks ago. Everything is snappier, no lag.
There’s a lot of dev’s here that use OS X as their primary dev environment. (Yes, Android dev’s too.) Safari simply has the best chrome on Mac. The other ones use a lot of cross-platform widget placement, which feels wrong.
