[holymoly]

Does Avant have the same problems as IE or is it more immune??

As I recall, Avant runs on the IE engine (it requires IE to work).

The browsers I listed are all stand-alone.

In my opinion, if you're going to break with IE, it should be a clean break.

[TomGuy]

Avant
Fastbrowser
Maxthon

and several others use the IE engine.

I have used Fastbrowser for several years because it was one of the first tabbed browsers (nice for FR viewing) and it had built-in speech (again, nice for FR, especially for long news articles).

FireFox has both, now--tabs and speech. I am using it occasionally, trying to get used to it. If you want speech on FireFox, check out the extension, FoxyVoice. It requires the MS speech engine, which is available free from this link:

http://www.tucows.com/adnload/193770_87093.html