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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."
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 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!
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
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.
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."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