Comparing browsers

While I'm still very fond of Firefox, I'm willing to branch out a bit as far as browsers are concerned. I'm not sure what initially turned me on to Firefox- possibly it seemed faster than Safari, for instance, and I just got used to using it. Either way, Firefox has all of my bookmarks saved, so I've returned to it time and time again. That having been said, it doesn't actually load the fastest (including my homepage, www.amirbar.com), contrary to what I initially thought. When it does, it adds annoying graphics to certain pages, such as a blue rectangular box to the center of my "clips" page. I've noticed that Flock does this as well. Camino, which looks like a glorified version of Safari, is a slow loader of my homepage as well (which I use as sort of a test case). The .mov files and other graphics I have on the page load more slowly as well. In contrast, I've been very impressed by both Netscape Communicator and especially Opera. All of the newest browsers have the tab function, which is extremely useful and allows quick and easy switching between multiple pages. Flock automatically loaded all of my Firefox bookmarks when I made it my default browser, which was nice. The interface is excellent on all of them, though. Flock might be my favorite in this respect. I like the cool blues and space-age looking design. It makes Firefox and Safari look kind of clunky. Accessing major pages and high-traffic sites, like the New York Times and CNN are easily accomplished with all of the browsers. Viewing Flash animation looks pretty good on all of the latest versions of each of the browsers. By this point, they've hopefully ironed out most of the kinks.