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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."
I'm an Opera fan (you wanna fight about it?) and I was eager to read this article. Am I the only one who felt it ended pretty abruptly, without actually covering anything? All TFA covered was look-and-feel, RSS, and a couple of little things like ad blocking and Opera's Quick Prefs.
He didn't touch Notes, of the panels, or the hot bar, or the way they each handle tabs, cookies, the Wand, granularity of popup blocking, proxy servers, the Transfers window (and how Opera/Firefox handle downloads in general), the user-customizable CSS and link style in Opera (does Firefox have something comparable? I wish he covered it so I would know!), Opera's Zoom, quick enabling-disabling of images, methods of caching (including Opera's "delete private data" button), Opera's in-line search functionality, saving "sessions", crash recovery, little neat things like making a page printer friendly with one button...I could go on all day!
I mean no offense to Mr. Shaffer, but this article is really lacking in content. I expected something more along the lines of the 30 Days to Becoming an Opera Lover site (which is for version 7) in terms of depth. Very disappointing. I hope that Slashdot's Opera/Firefox lovers can at least turn this into a nice discussion in the comments. I missed a ton of features, but you can use my little rant up there as a starting point.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Opera - Ad supported Firefox - Free take your pick
No stupid ads.
If these walls could talk they'd probly still ignore me. --MF DOOM
If they did, they'd have a cross-platform browser and it could remain closed source.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
The other side-advantage to using Opera for visiting less-than reputable sites is that chances are the site doesn't know how to exploit Opera, as it's (sadly) not really on the general populus's radar screen. I've waded though stuff that would require hip boots with Opera and came out smelling like a rose.
True, if it were open source it would be that much more wonderful, but as for closed-source programs, IMHO it's an example of a company Doing It Right.
Chris Knight is my hero.
Personally I put the people who refuse to even consider a closed source application for purely ideological reasons (as indicated in the slashdot blurb) into the same little box as those corporate IT managers who refuse to consider opensource applications 'just because'.
What does it have that Firefox doesn't that is worth the expense?
OS issues aside.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My biggest problem trying to use Opera was simply the overwhelming amount of stuff it does. All that stuff you mentioned- Notes, Transfers, etc, I wasn't even aware of.
Opera seems to have a lot of bang for the (big) buck, which is good, I just wish there was an easy way to use it all.
R(k)
If proprietary program Y doesn't have a functionality that I need, then the only thing I can do is beg and plead for them to add it.
IMHO, the dream of Linux as a desktop OS died pretty much around when Slashdot started getting flooded by people asking when various driver or applications would be written.
That's when if finally sunk in that normal users don't modify the software they use. If it fails to meet their needs, they wait for somebody else to modify it for them.
This came as a bit of news to old-school Linux and BSD users, who usually responded to an itch by scratching it themselves and then sharing their results. In hindsight, it was naive to ever assume that this ethic would expand as visibility of the OS expanded.
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 situation must be the same with Windows Media Player for the Mac as well. Although it recently got updated to play the WMV9 format, its a horrible application. With some WMVs that I double click on it asks me to "Check the filename" or some crap and does not play. You can't play more than one movie at a time or queue them or put them in a playlist or anything. Its amusing that when you launch multiple WMVs from the command line 'open' command or by selecting multiple ones in the finder and launching them Windows Media Player will decide to only play the last one for you.
The thing that bothers me the most is that I'm finding WMVs becoming more and more popular on the web for some reason or another and its gotten to the point that I won't download one unless I'm morbidly curios about the movie, but I only expect it to work 50% of the time with a horrible user interface 100% of the time.
I'm not sure what MS actually gains from having their own video codec, but I can say that I definitely don't gain anything from it. MPEGs are fine. While I'm on the subject, Apple's Quicktime Player is almost as bad as the Windows Media player, with the exception that Quicktime player is also nagware.
Turn on the page-fitting in Opera 8 (Ctrl-F11). It fits any page to the width of the window, text/box/spacing sizes are adjusted, images are resized, no more scrolling left-right. Moreover, it moves around the blocks to a more vertical fashion as the page gets more narrow. It's amazing when you take a bloated page and go from width 1280px to width 80px. Now that's formatting!
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
And to add, back when IE was able for Solaris/Unix, mac IE5 != win IE5 != unix IE5. I remember using all 3 and seeing that even Microsoft's homepage looked different in each. Even though that was a long time ago, it still seems like IE browsers don't have much in common with their counterparts on other OS's.
IE for Unix disappeared and I wonder if IE for Mac would be around had it not been for the anti-trust allegations. Even then I wouldn't be surprised if MS wanted to stop supported it also.
Linux Resources
(say "security" and watch the firefox crowd blush) I hate to say it, but you have to be a real nerd to appreciate the miniscule differences between browers. All the new features do is detract from the web content. (after all, the web is about content, it's not a fashion show)
I will argue that content is king, and the ability to access that content without a hassle is the only selling point that matters. Look at google. It's a dirt simple interface, you type some keywords and you get what you want, no hassle.
From my preferred stat provider, IE is actually back UP in marketshare to 91%. I think that this reinforces my concept that amount of hassle, not # of features, is what sells.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Ideologies can be ok when they're dealing with human rights and if they're grounded in reality. However we're talking about software. And we're talking about nerds, not your average user. I'm a nerd, but I also take a pragmatic approach with technology. If a $50 software package does what I need and does it better than a free one (don't forget that time is worth much more than money), then that company has my business. As far as "freedom to extend" (which most people do not care about), many closed source applications adopt cool "grey box" type extensibility features, meaning you can write your own plugins without the nightmares of forking a codebase or trying to roll up a patch into a CVS tree with a thousand other developers.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Right! With free software I know the software works for me and nobody else. I can stand quite a lof of bugs, bit I really can't tolerate suckiness intentionally put in there.
A prime example is when acroread tells me I am not allowed to copy text from a document. This is how the OSS world takes care of such issues:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62513
Opera seems to be a bit more efficient than Firefox, and certainly is usable for example on my old 120MHz Compaq Armada laptop with 32MB RAM (Debian 3.1, Xfce 4.2) which I configured today.
Oh, and may I recommend naim as an AIM client? Talk about efficient chat!
This is due to the philosophies behind the features included in both Opera and Firefox. Opera crams in everything useful they can think of (or at least, it appears that way), and Firefox includes only the features they feel everyone will benefit from to avoid bloat, while leaving the extensions up to others.
Now, I'm not saying Opera is bloated. It's just that the Firefox developers felt that the average user doesn't care about mouse gestures or quick prefs, or doesn't use the browser enough to care. Most Opera users I know started using it because of the extra features.
The big problem with extensions is they're never guaranteed to work with the current release, and some conflict with each other. Maybe the Mozilla team will come up with a package of "officially sanctioned" extensions guaranteed to work, but I doubt it. I'm sure they have their hands full working on the features in the next release.
Sure I have. Told my financial adviser at that place about it (who obviously couldn't help much), but he helpfully redirected me to their helpdesk.
The Helpdesk was not very helpful when I phoned them, but somehow they were careless enough to tell me the phone number of the lead developper of the application (Vincent Friedrich, +352 49924-5550). So I phoned that guy. He was (understandably) rather astonished about how I "found out" his number... He gave me the usual bull about IE having 99.99% of market share and all that, and finally suggested that I send them my complaints in an e-mail... which I did (that mail contained all the technical details about Visual Basic checks, and server-based user-agent checks.)
The e-mail stayed un-answered for about a month, so I phoned Mr Friedrich again. He was not there, so a coworker of his took the phone. I was forwarded among three or four guys in the department. They re-assured me that those checks were certainly there for a reason (but couldn't tell me which one...), and that that reason was certainly not to shut out non-IE browsers. They promised to investigate and answer my mail (which they still had: one of the guys read me parts of my mail) for "Friday in a week". That day passed, without an answer...
I guess, I'll have to phone them again, or maybe send a paper letter about the issue to their top management.
I have found that some companies actually take this feedback quite seriously (there have been a few ignorent few).
Well, not so here in Luxembourg. The other bank, where I have my main account, also has a rather bizarre system. It does work with Firefox, which is good, but strangely enough it blocks Konqueror with a browser check (javascript based). This can be circumvented by setting up an alternate login page (copy of their code, minus the offending javascript browser check), which I did. This page was on a public web page (so that my fellow Konqueror or Safari users can use it too), but eventually the page got noticed by the bank, and I got a rather threatening call from them about this violation of their intellectual property....
Yet another bank has a link to a java applet that doesn't work (reference to non-existant class). A call to their help desk revealed that they are aware of the problem, and the guy even suggested me two alternate URLs, which both do work. After I asked him the obvious question "Why don't you put those on your main page", the answer was rather surprising: "if we put more than one web banking URL on our site, we would be hinting that our system has issues, and this would damage the trust that our customers place in us". I was baffled! What strange customer has more trust in a company that hides problems rather than putting them out in the open?
However, on the bright side, they (BCEE) did promise that "by end of 3rd quarter 2005" they would have a truely crossbrowser pure-HTML version. Let's wait and see...
I doubt that I was the only one who commented, but you need to start with one comment :)
Well, 1 1/2 years ago, we (Lux Linux user group) staged a complaint action at a national computer trade fair, where the banks were also present: each participating LUG member would visit the bank's stands individually, and complain....
As a result, at least 4 banks have improved, or are improving their ways (things are moving slowly though, the "fastest" still took about a year to get ready...).
The nicest success is ING, who is now running its " full com
Say no to software patents.
It used to be on unix as well.
but it's not because it's open-source. don't get me wrong, i used to love opera until Firefox came along. the problem with Opera i have right now is that it will actually *HANG* my X session after using it for a few minutes. otherwise, i love Opera and would use it more often!
i suspect it may have something to do with either QT or the nVidia drivers. but i have no idea.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!