Assuming most people are using Internet Explorer, the default browser that came with your Computer, I'll use that one as a baseline for any comparisons. Here are my recommendations. Here is an interesting article by Farhad Manjoo at Slate.com about Google's Chrome browser strategy including a short video Google made when it asked people in the street the question, what is a browser?

Mozilla Firefox

My pick for Best Browser is currently Firefox. There are some solid reasons why I like it but key ones for a potential new user are these. Its fast, its secure and its customisable. A lot of the new developments in browser functionality over the last few years have been developed and perfected by Open Source developers working on the Firefox project making them an innovation leader when Microsoft dominated the marketplace with Internet Explorer.

Not to go into detail but the best benefit of Firefox is the add-on feature. There are currently over 6,000 add-ons to customize and enhance your web browsing experience.

In my eyes the Add-on to rule them all and reason enough to download and install Firefox is Adblock Plus.

I hate ads on webpages, I find them distracting at best, and a pain in the butt at worse. Adblock Plus removes them. All of them. Gone. This has the side benefit of speeding up your webbrowsing as you're PC no longer has to download or display ads.

Other Add-ons I use are Gmail Manager (integrating gmail login and mail notification into firefox), Better Gmail 2 (icons for Gmail attachments), Colourful Tabs (self explanatory), Fox Clocks (multiple city times viewable across the bottom of the browser), Google Gears (offline access to my google applications), Wikipedia Lookup (right click on a word which takes you to its Wikipedia page) and for fun, amusement and spectacular amounts of time-wasting, the StumbleUpon toolbar.

Opera 10

My 2nd choice is Opera 10. Its is probably faster than Firefox (those Firefox add-ons come with a small speed penalty) and also secure with all the functionality of a modern browser - tabbed browser windows, password manager and a quicklinks bar.

It also has an Addblock like feature. Rightclick empty space on any webpage and click Block Content and you can select add content that you don't want to see any more. You have to do it website by website so its not as comprehensive as Firefox's AdBlock Plus add-on but its pretty good. Opera has some nice features like Visual Tabs and smart toolbar suggesting sites while you are typing in your site address. Opera has some unique features also, including voice integration - allowing you to command Opera functions using your voice instead of your keyboard and mouse and also allowing you to rest your eyes and have the browser read back to you (albeit in a robotic voice) the text from articles you highlight.

Opera is an unsung success story in browsers. In the mobile browser world it has shipped over 120 Million copies of its browser on smartphones and PDAs including 30 Million using its Opera Mini browser.

Google Chrome

I'm an admitted Google software fan but so far Google Chrome just isn't doing it for me, and its not just the lack of an adblocker at this time. (As Google is now the worlds biggest advertising Company I'm not expecting this any time soon). I'm not a fan of the top toolbar layout with the tabs at the top, which looks weird to me, or OK, just unfamiliar.

Chrome features an Incognito mode, so you can browse in private. This stealth browsing mode allows you to open sites and even download files without affecting your histories. Additionally, cookies and passwords are deleted after you close the incognito window. You can even have one browser window open in normal mode and another in incognito mode.

Another nice feature is the anywhere drag and drop, which allows you to drag text or a link from anywhere on a web page and put it directly into your search bar. The smart toolbar gives helpful suggestions while you are typing in it, and makes it easy to revisit a previously viewed site that you’ve forgotten because the toolbar searches through titles as well as actual in-page text.

As a fan of the innovation going on within Google and its I expect my appreciation for Google Chrome would rise the more I use it, but I can't seeing me becoming familiar enough using it as my daily browser until it helps get those pesky ads of my screen.

Internet Explorer

I admit, I biased against Internet Explorer as a result of a legacy of crushing Netscape with their market postion and then producing some mediocre browser software. Previously Internet Explorer versions were known to be slow, unsecure and not standards compliant. A lot of the reasons for the bias no longer exist in the latest version 8.0 but its still not best of breed.

With IE 8 Microsoft has produced a solid product that is faster (but still slow in comparison) and is a good browser with some good features. If you you use Internet Explorer and don't fancy switching you should definitely upgrade to Version 8. It doesn't have an adblocking feature so it'll not be in the running for my default browser but they are starting to move in the add-on direction, offering a small selection of add-ons available but none that grabbed me as a standout.

Like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 has a private browsing mode. Unfortunately Microsoft is now no longer a leader in Browser software, rather Microsoft seems to be content to play catch up its competititors in this sector lagging them when it comes to speed of innovation as it focuses its resources in other more lucrative areas.

Fix IT is often asked what do we recommend. Over time we'll be posting articles about products we recommend for our readers.

You can find a growing list of these articles here

As a Computing philosophy our recommendations are based around a few key factors.

Firstly, what is right for your purposes? For example, if you want to learn to manipulate images to a high level requires some sophisticated tools and investing a lot of time as a hobbist and perhaps professional classes. Adobe Photoshop is the go-to choice for this purpose, but as photoshop is expensive, and if price was a strong consideration we'd recommend the free Open Source GIMP which is photoshop level in quality and sophistication as an alternative.

If, on the otherhand you want to reduce the file sizes on the pictures you've taken on your Digital Camera so you can easily email them to family, we'd probably recommend a product like Google's Picasa as an easy to use product, and its features like easy batch processing so you can make file size changes, to 10 pictures or hundreds at a time, are a breeze to use.

If you're already experienced with a software product, working with an upgraded version rather than moving to an alternative makes a lot of sense, unless the other reasons for making a change are compelling. Getting things done fast is our motto and that's easier when you already know the product.

There is a changing paradigm that the computing world is undergoing, moving from software on your computer vs software in the Cloud which could provide some of these compelling reasons.

Cloud Computing: Think of it as the difference between getting your email in your computer email application (for example MS Outlook) versus getting it from logging into Hotmail from your web-browser. Both are email, but the hotmail email application doesn't reside on your PC, and neither does the email you send and receive. Yes, you've been doing 'Cloud Computing' for a decade already and you haven't even know it. 

Now, expand that idea to your other software you use everyday and distribute it via a network, in this case the Internet. Make it faster, reliable and add in extra features so it is equal to, or better than what you're use to and you've got a small but powerful change in the software business that's worth looking into. 
Also add to this the fact that a lot of Cloud Computing software and services are provided to the consumer for free, or at least very cheap, and its hard not to to take the new model seriously.

Fix IT is a big advocate of the Google Applications suite of products, including Gmail, GoogleTalk, Google Calendar and GoogleDocs and use their online products like iGoogle, GoogleReader and Google Finance. We also use Google Voice, but as that is open by invitation only and only for US phone numbers at the time being it may have limited use for European based customers.

We'll be reviewing Google Applications at a later point to provide some ideas on how to set them up to make them even more useful.

An alternative to Google Apps is the Zoho Suite of Online Applications and of course Microsoft Office. Though I am a big advocate of Google Apps, after spending almost 20 years using MS Word and Excel, they are my go-to applications for writing documents and developing spreadsheets. Microsoft have announced that they'll be releasing Cloud versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint with limited functionality shortly though the jury on whether the product will be a solid alternative.

One of the key impetuses behind the advent of Cloud Computing (along with fast, cheap and ubiquitous broadband networking and developments in cheap server-farm technology and network scalable distributed software languages) the has been competition from Open Source software on traditional software developers.

Open Source Communities of SW developers contribute their own time to develop software together and provide it and the source code for free, which further allows other people to build on their existing work. Thousands of developers working together means innovation came come fast and at low cost. Today you have many pieces of Open Source software that are equal to and better than traditionally produced software - and its free.

Examples of this are the Firefox browser which we highly recommend alongside Opera and Google Chrome. All are better than Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Other examples is the Drupal CMS software which this website is developed in, and Joomla CMS, another alternative.

Add this to high quality Shareware and Freeware available for download on the internet and you've got immense pressure on traditional software makers looking for new ways to sell their product and generate revenue.

We'll provide some future guides on recommended free software that we use or have used.

We hope you enjoy our recommendations and we'll hope to be as clear why you should look at these alternatives or suggestions. We hope you give them a try.