When I owned my first computer there were two well known choice: Internet Explorer and Netscape. IE won and for about a year thats all I used. I tinkered around with Mozilla (this is the old Mozilla suite), but found it less polished and it tried to do everything.
I discovered a new browser called Firebird. It had been previously released as Phoenix, but the name was changed. I loved it. It was so slick, so fast, so compatible. There were cool plugins and search features. Every .1 version upgrade I dutifully reinstalled flash, Java, and the other plugins needed to make it work with rich content. We take all this automation for granted now, but upgrading Firebird was an involved process, and I even wrote tutorials for others on how to get it working.
I hated the name Firefox initially, but it grew on me because I loved the browser so much. I made a Firefox cake for the 1.0 release (and ate it myself). I had Firefox wallpaper and custom Firefox icons (though I still like the original logo). I used Thunderbird and Sunbird for my email and calendars. I called it early. Firefox became big and the Suite, what I believe was later named Seamonkey, vanished. I shed few tears, as I wanted stripped-down browsing.
I did everything to juice out speed. I kept only the most essential extensions–like Web Developer and the original Adblock. I later installed FasterFox which opened additional connections to get data faster. Those were great days, and how I browsed until about three years ago.
To be continued.