"So tell me (I only used Netscape 3, IE 5, 6, and FF) why you think all modern GUI browsers suck."
All modern GUI browsers are either too bloated and slow or functionally retarded.
All modern GUI browsers are security deathtraps.
No modern GUI browser is sufficiently stable to avoid my disdain.
Modern GUI browsers are all too mouse-dependent.
No modern GUI browser's native bookmarking functionality is better than "passable", in part because they make it damn near impossible to use a single centrally managed set of bookmarks between different systems.
The best treatment of custom editor specification I've seen so far in a modern GUI browser is Firefox, and it requires extensions with dirty hacks to get any custom editor specification working at all even in Firefox.
Application file type associations via the modern GUI browser are severely brain-dead in their configuration interface.
Cookie management is crappy in all modern GUI browsers, to varying degrees (to the extent that I had to write my own separate cookie policy search utility for Firefox -- which at least provides better cookie policy tools than IE).
I have yet to see good tab session management for any modern GUI browser.
Memory management for different tabs is insufficiently partitioned in all modern GUI browsers (that support tabs), leading to problems where a single webpage issue can cause twelve open tabs in a single browser session to vanish in an instant when the browser crashes.
Modern GUI browsers don't provide sufficiently fine-grained control over things like whether you want to reload a page from the source or just rerender from cache when using the Back button, even though it's basically always in cache.
Configuration of JavaScript functionality is too heuristic in modern GUI browsers -- there's no explicit feature activation specification except for 100% "on" and 100% "off", even in Firefox (which is still a heck of a lot better than IE in this regard).
It wouldn't be difficult, when creating a browser, to provide arbitrary protocol tunneling and plug-in capability, but somehow modern GUI browser developers tend to completely overlook this possibility.
Internal file format support is primarily either integrated with the core rendering engine or entirely absent -- there's no mechanism for adding file format support in modern GUI browsers (like simply adding another image library to the list of image rendering options).
Modern GUI browser basic interface functionality is insufficiently configurable -- though IE 5 was better than anything I've seen since, in that regard.
I'm sure I've forgotten a few. These were just off the top of my head.
. . . and that doesn't even address problems with each individual modern GUI browser, distinct from common problems like those above. For instance, the Firefox memory fragmentation problem, the IE/Windows integration problem, the problem of utterly crappy keyboard shortcuts in Opera, the massive library-interdependency issue with Konqueror, and so on.
"You say 'modern' GUI browsers suck, which gives me the impression you think older GUI browsers were superior; why?"
It's not necessarily true that older browsers were superior, except in that some of the first browsers were much better on many of the above-noted issues. They also lacked a lot of functionality that modern GUI browsers have -- functionality I'm not prepared to give up in some cases, so they're not really options any longer. The other alternative to "modern GUI" is text console based browsers, which are not effective replacements for GUI browsers, but tend to be better within their niche than modern GUI browsers are within the niche of the GUI browser.
"And what Windows-based browser would you recommend I use?"
That really depends on your specific needs and preferences. In general, however, Firefox is still the best of a bad breed in my opinion. When most browsers rate a one or two on a scale of one to ten, the fact that Firefox is a three for most purposes means it stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. Being fifty percent better than the next-best is pretty good, relatively speaking.
As Mozilla’s famous browser goes into its third version, there are inroads yet to be made for major adoption in the enterprise.
