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Which is Better, Firefox or Opera?
Roblimo writes "Firefox and Opera are the two most popular cross-platform Web browsers. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Kris Shaffer tested them side-by-side on SUSE Linux 9.1, Mac OS X Panther, and Windows 2000, and decided that your choice may depend more on what you *do* with your browser than anything else, unless (as is the case for many of us) Opera is off the table from the start because it's not open source."
They've already got a cross-platform closed-source browser - IE for the Mac.
And IE for UNIX. Of course all of the aforementioned products have been abandoned.
Unlike Opera and Firefox, the IE for Macintosh and the IE for Windows are really completely different browsers with different code, different sets of bugs, and the same name.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
it'd make slightly more sense if he'd said halal instead of Kosher (Ethiopia=borderline Islamic, Kosher is the Jewish food guide.. not that its much different), as the Qu'ran says that eating non-Halal food out of necessity to avoid starvation or sickness is no sin in God's eyes.
Disclaimer, IANAM - I just read the book out of curiosity
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I really like Opera, except for adblock of course, and mostly because of its weak client certificate handling. On my work I have to use 3 or 4 different client certificates for the Intranet and 2 more for external sites. Most browsers select a client certificate to present to the server automatically, and only offer a selection box if there is more than 1 possibility.
:).
Opera however insists of me having to select from all 6 certificates, often they are presented such that I cannot distinguish between them. Also after that the cancel button is selected by default.
I am very sure that Opera developers never use client certificates or they would not put up with this horrible handling. Change requests have been ignored under the pretence of security, which is absolutely nonsense (I deal with client certificates professionally, I know at least in this area what I'm talking about
I believe there is an option in Firefox to make it always open in tabs.
"open tabs instead of windows" or some such.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Last I tried IE for Mac It was hopelessly broken, rendered pages as strung out messes, and crashed frequently. It looked like a truly halfhearted (assed?) attempt at a Mac port. Also, it has been discontinued by Microsoft
To throw that into the ring with real browsers would just be a pointless exercise in Microsoft bashing.
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
No doubt. When I saw that it had been modded down, I thought; "Maybe Opera doesn't use ads for the free version of their browser anymore". So I downloaded and installed it. It does have ads. They still annoy me. I then uninstalled Opera. Huh.
If these walls could talk they'd probly still ignore me. --MF DOOM
[nt]
I used to be an avid opera user until I was hired by a company that does web development. I had to switch to firefox to evade ridicule.
.part, and delete them if the file fails to transfer fully. Redownloading a several hundred meg file is irritating, so I find I use wget just to avoid going through firefox whenever possible.
I have found extensions to do most of the things I liked about opera. But there is still stuff missing, such as reorganizing tabs (supposedly taken care of next ff version). The quick prefs thing is a really big thing for me, but for some reason firefox users don't care. FF doesn't let you control cookies as easily as you are able to in opera. The disabling of images is something I used a lot more than I thought I would. Saving sessions was awesome. I'm sure there's an extension for that somewhere. Crash recovery was nifty, though crashes were rare. Opera also overrides the replacing of the status bar text, so you always know what you are clicking on before you click on it.
And the transfer window is a big pile of crap in mozilla. Seriously that would probably be my number one gripe. That and its habit of saving files as
Another thing that aggravates me is when I'll open a bunch of links in separate tabs to read in a few moments, then 2 minutes later a window pops up saying the server couldn't be reached. But when I go over to the tab, the url bar is blank, so I have no idea which links I clicked on that couldn't be reached. In Opera, even if the page doesn't load, the url bar still has the location you tried to visit, so you can see if the link was typoed or if you even care in the first place.
Opera never registers right clicks on web pages that pop up those copyright notices because it interferes with mouse gestures. There's no way to disable that in firefox that I'm aware of without finding the javascript options in prefs.
Lastly, I hate that firefox doesn't obey normal unix copy and paste rules. There's no option to right click in a text field and delete everything in it without highlighting the text that is already there. In opera you just click in the box and type ctrl+U. This is particularly annoying when I'm messing with phpmyadmin.
But at the end of the day, here I am using firefox. What can I say. The price is right.
The only thing that bothers with with my opera 8 is that it segfaults about one or two times a day.
You may wish to try out the 8.01 preview if you can. That is, if it's already available for your platform. It's in prerelease stage, but already considered more stable than 8.00. You can find links to it on the my.opera.com release forums.
What I like about Opera is that it's speedy, small and slick (at least in Opera 8), even smaller than Firefox, but with more features that don't really get in the way. Bloated UI was a problem in Opera 7, but that's simply not a factor for me anymore.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Its not a browser, its an add-on for IE.
From their website "Based on the IE engine"
The Anti-Blog
Here's the HTML:
<HTML>
<BODY>
<IMG SRC="./imagecrash.jpg" width="9999999" height="9999999">
</BODY>
</HTML>
My local bank's online checking/savings management as well as every credit card I have. It just works. Please let me know which banks DON'T work with FireFox so I can avoid them if they send me a sweet 0% balance transfer deal. Thanks,
Blar.
"Another thing that aggravates me is when I'll open a bunch of links in separate tabs to read in a few moments, then 2 minutes later a window pops up saying the server couldn't be reached. But when I go over to the tab, the url bar is blank, so I have no idea which links I clicked on that couldn't be reached."
Pike's Show Failed URL will take care of that.
http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/?extension=sfu
1. install the extension
2. Type about:config in the addess bar
3. in the filter type xul
4. double click on browser.xul.error_pages.enabled to change to true
5. restart Firefox
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
"But there is still stuff missing, such as reorganizing tabs (supposedly taken care of next ff version). "
:)
.part, and delete them if the file fails to transfer fully. Redownloading a several hundred meg file is irritating, so I find I use wget just to avoid going through firefox whenever possible."
:)
:)
miniT extension does that
"The quick prefs thing is a really big thing for me, but for some reason firefox users don't care."
Care to elaborate what quick prefs are? The ability to adjust preferences somewhere different than tools->options? I really am clueless...
"FF doesn't let you control cookies as easily as you are able to in opera. "
Have you tried cookie culler extension?
"The disabling of images is something I used a lot more than I thought I would. Saving sessions was awesome. I'm sure there's an extension for that somewhere."
To block _anything_ you can use RiP (remove it permanently), and you can use adblock to blocks images (specifically ads, but any other image too). Saving sessions is achieved through 'session saver'
"Crash recovery was nifty, though crashes were rare."
Session saver also recovers your browser from crashes.
"Opera also overrides the replacing of the status bar text, so you always know what you are clicking on before you click on it."
Firefox has an inbuilt 'annoyance eliminator' that does the the same thing.
"And the transfer window is a big pile of crap in mozilla. Seriously that would probably be my number one gripe. That and its habit of saving files as
Okay, I'll give you that one =)
"Another thing that aggravates me is when I'll open a bunch of links in separate tabs to read in a few moments, then 2 minutes later a window pops up saying the server couldn't be reached. But when I go over to the tab, the url bar is blank, so I have no idea which links I clicked on that couldn't be reached. In Opera, even if the page doesn't load, the url bar still has the location you tried to visit, so you can see if the link was typoed or if you even care in the first place."
This is EXTREMELY aggravating in firefox and made me exhibit great bouts of anger. Until I found the 'show failed URL' extension. Now it behaves like you'd expect it to.
"Opera never registers right clicks on web pages that pop up those copyright notices because it interferes with mouse gestures. There's no way to disable that in firefox that I'm aware of without finding the javascript options in prefs."
The extension you're looking for in this case is called 'allow right click'
"Lastly, I hate that firefox doesn't obey normal unix copy and paste rules. There's no option to right click in a text field and delete everything in it without highlighting the text that is already there. In opera you just click in the box and type ctrl+U. This is particularly annoying when I'm messing with phpmyadmin."
That's the only gripe I don't know an extension for. But I'm sure one's available
In conclusion, as long as you familiarize yourself with all the available extensions, firefox is great. But the fact that you have to manually add them, can be either a pain or a pleasure, depending on whether you like tweaking
As far as the client side CSS editing, there's an extension for FireFox that allows for that and so, so much more. I believe it's called "Web Developer" or something, and you can find it in the Developer section of the FireFox extensions on mozilla.org somewhere.
As a web developer, this is a must have tool for me.
IE exists for Macs, you ignoramous.
Very true. Until MSIE properly supports CSS, it's just not ready for the enterprise.
(Don't notice anything funny about the above link? Then try again with IE!)
Say no to software patents.
check this page out
After applying it's really fast=]
Opera works mostly OK. Some quirks I have encountered one time or another are:
- Well Fargo has an ill conceived attempt to block access from non IE or Netscape browser. The big irony is they claim they do this to improve security (by forcing me to switch from Opera to IE!!!) Latest version of Opera is doing fine now.
- Citibank has a neat Virtual Account Numbers function that at one time requires ActiveX. Works on Opera now.
- When logging in some of Fidelity' site, identify as Mozilla or IE to get pass the user-agent checking. Once logged in, it is safe to switch back to identify as Opera. All this switching can be done easily by the F12 menu.
Finally this year I used Firefox to file my tax with Web Turbo Tax.That's actually changable. You can change when the page is rendered in the Windows tab under Preferences.
As Seen On TV's? Come back!!!
"RTFM!" was never more appropriate. Seriously, there is no good way to introduce all this advanced functionality to the user without the user playing an active role. I mean, Opera has a very good documentation, it has great tutorials. If you don't make the effort of at least checking all menu items, can you really blame the software? I mean, do you really want Opera to add an annoying "Tip of the day" alert or a Clippy lookalike that would go all "It looks like you...." every minute?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
And on many points (not all of them though, there are lots of IE5/Mac specific bugs including some that were fixed in the last version of Tasman... which was never updated to IE5/Mac), it's still ahead of IE6.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
, but just because it doesn't jive with the slashdot "groupthink"
I believe you meant to use jibe meaning "To be in accord; agree: Your figures jibe with mine."
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Undo Closed Page is one of the best features of Opera. I can't tell you how many times i've accidently closed the wrong page in IE or the wrong tab in FF and cursed myself for it. However, with Opera, you can simply click the trash can and instantly bring back any recently viewed page, as well as its history (IE: you can re-open it and hit back a few times if needed). All of this is deleted when you close the entire browser, so it's not a privacy issue, just a matter of convinence.
Spatial navigation and caret browsing are two vastly different ways. With spatial navigation, you move across the links in mostly visual order, with caret browsing you move a cursor around text on the page.
In addition to spatial navigation, you can also navigate using the following keys
In addition to the mentioned keyboard shortcuts, Opera allows navigation of elements inserted into the document's head, using <link /> elements, and the entire keyboard setup is customizable to your own liking (you can even use emacs-style keybindings if you want).
http://virtuelvis.com/
There are a bunch of ways to block ads in Opera, one is a beta port of adblock to Opera 8 being developed by opera forum members.
My preferred method on windows is proxomitron with grypen's set - amazing, one install, and forget. Update occasionally, and you're done.
These are just 2 out of I think 7 methods figured out on the Opera forums (some do require other software like proxomitron).
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3