Firefox and Opera are the best if you need to download. Chrome blows. As bad as IE. Or worse.

The thing with FF and Opera is that you can pause downloads, etc. etc. Far superior to the others.

So far nobody has mentioned Safari...

Lately I've just been using Free Download Manager for 90% of my downloads under Windows. (And wget under Linux!) So I pretty much bypass any browser's built-in d/l manager. 

@Ren - nobody is ever gonna mention Safari and you know it!

I'm playing with Pale Moon at the moment but -- apart from the lack of orange -- am not seeing much difference between it and Firefox.

I LIKE Firefox (and the portable version which I use a LOT.) But there's a few indispensable addons to make it a keeper. Lastpass. Speed Dial. Tab Mix Plus. AdBlockPlus. NoScript. DownThemAll.

Speed Dial in particular broke my previous addiction to Opera, although the lack of extensibility for the latter (can't use Roboform or Lastpass, last time I looked) took away its other advantages.

The best thing about Opera is Fastmail.fm. By contrast, the embedded email client is from another universe to the one I inhabit and I couldn't use it.

I don't get many crashes. Maybe three in the last year?

Waterfox is fast!  And regular firefox addons work??  Cool.

Waterfox has become my new favourite;
all the addons from Firefox, and some more speed  

----------
64-bit only

Been all around the block, and always come back to Firefox... I love it for its add-ons, which don't slow it down overly, if I'm careful about which ones I install. And since around v9 or 10 when they finally fixed its tendency to take 20 minutes to quit properly, it now seems very smooth and quick.

Opera used to be the fastest thing available, before v11 I think when it became a RAM hog like FF pre-v9. Chrome I liked because it syncs so nicely with Google accounts... and sync'ing also syncs add ons, but I didn't find it especially fast.

The main thing was that my favourite download manager (FDM) never seemed happy with Chrome or Opera. Especially for downloading vids from Youtube etc. So, back to Firefox.