I always type them in or go thru www.ask.com.
I only use favourites when I am at work using my company intranet.
I generally get them from the drop down list in the address box. I only use favourites to record sites I would otherwise forget. When my dropdown gets messy I go to regedit and fix up the TypedUrls and put back the 20 or so I use all the time.
I do my best to spruik ask.com. and you are the first to reply …
A bit similar to don’t ask, except that I have my homepage set to a hard coded HTML document with the dozen or so sites I used the most. This page even has the various SDMB forums on it, so I will change forums by just clicking ‘home’ and then the new forum, rather than having to scroll down and find the forum from the SDMB site. So that’s for the “first tier” sites.
The next most commonly-visited ones I tend to access from the drop down menu on my address bar, and the favourites is saved for stuff I don’t want to forget but seldom access.
Most of my favourite sites I access with the bookmarks bar at the top of the browser window (I use FF). The rest are in the drop-down list (which I do need to clear out at some stage, but I know where stuff is). That way, I can easily switch between my 'Net “home”, a Kiwi board I hang around at, and the SDMB, right up at the top of where I’m looking. 
Start typing, then arrow down in the dropdown box.
I use the SBC Yahoo browser (highspeed - not having dial-up anymore is God’s great gift) and it can load as many pages as you want the minute you login. So, when I open my internet connection I have four tabs that automatically come up. My Yahoo news page, my Yahoo mail, my AOL mail and the SDMB. Pretty nifty if you ask me! I also use the “bookmarks” quite frequently. Easier than typing. Hardly ever look at the drop-down address field.
It’s these great features that led me to cancel AOL (cept for the “free” AOL) and go with SBC completely. It’s cheap (around $20 per month) and it’s quick and I’m quite pleased.
It’s been a long time, won’t try to guess how long, since I actually typed in a URL for a website – any website. My regularly visited sites are on my “Links” list under “Favorites.” I have my “Links” on the same bar as “Address” but reduced in size to just the header “Links.” I click that and a list of maybe 20 places drops down and I click on the one I want.
After that, if it’s another regular site, it’ll be under “Favorites” and in a folder called “My Links.”
Otherwise I will work off Yahoo! search for a website name and click on whatever URL shows up. That method is only needed now and then, as 95% of the places I visit on any sort of regular basis are covered in the previous paragraphs.
If it matters, I’m still on IE6, updated with whatever the latest patches are.
I use Netscape 7.2, and I have a Personal Toolbar across the top with my most frequently-visited sites. Then I have an extensive list of bookmarks. I have auto-complete turned on, so if I want to go to amazon.com all I have to type is am, and the last several amazon URLs I visited show up in the dropdown list.
I use grouped tabs for sites that are related to each other (like all the SDMB sub-forums, or a collection of news sites, etc.)
For individual sites, I use keyboard shortcuts (what Firefox calls “Aliases”). I type “gm” for Gmail, “gq” for SDMB General Questions, “amz” for Amazon.com, and so forth. This is much faster for me cuz I don’t have to remember which bookmark folder I put the stupid thing in and I don’t have to wait for the sloooow menu to scroll through the long lists.
Guess I’m an oldschool, keyboard kinda guy… to get online, I don’t even use the mouse (Windows button -> down arrow to Firefox icon, enter, alt-D to address bar, gm to Gmail, ctrl-T to new tab, gq for the next site, etc.)
Instead of ask.com, I use Google™ for sites I have not yet visited. If it turns out to be a site to which I may want to return in the future with a specialized function, (language, religion, esoteric maps, etc.) it goes into an organized Favorites folder. The dozen or so sites I hit all the time just stay in the address bar drop down list and I avoid cluttering it by dropping the others into Google™.
For places that I visit daily, I usually just hit in the first three letters of the address and let auto-fill take care of the rest. For anything else, I have a del.icio.us extension for firefox that makes handling lots of bookmarks extremely easy.
With my pants around my ankles, generally.
For the past few years I’ve used a customised homepage with all my favourite links organised into categories (stole the idea from a former doper after we discussed it at a Melbdope), but in the last week I’ve taken the plunge and started using a customized Google homepage with my links on it. So far, the jury’s out.
Ha! That’s neat. Now I can delete messed up urls without having to clear everything. Woo!