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."

Comments

Uhh... what?

[Liselle]

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.

Re:Uhh... what?

[Liselle]

... and browsing completely by keyboard, and customizable mouse gestures (I understand Firefox has this as an extension, how good is it?), and the fast forward button (brilliant!), special style sheets (like text-only, blocking certain-size images, no tables, high contrast, show images/link only, etc), the M2 mail client, spellcheck.

This is stuff I thought of right after I posted the parent, and I know I am missing more.

Re:Uhh... what?

[slaker]

He also missed the Opera's "Crash every half-hour so you can be reminded of the nifty crash-recovery feature" feature, something I've seen in every version of Opera that I've tried (up to version 7).

Nothing like having Opera crap out while you have 60 open tabs on a 9.6k modem connection. Not that that's ever happened to me four times in a one hour period.

He also doesn't mention the HIGHLY obnoxious "best guess" rendering - Opera STARTS to render a page as soon as it has any data at all, then re-renders as more data comes in. Net result? You can play tag with the page elements as they move around your screen. In my experience, Firefox starts to render pages a tick or two after Opera, but tends to finish rendering a tick or two before Opera.

Opera also uses a widely different set of keyboard shortcuts, while most of IE's and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox's overlap. Opera fans can then point out their goofy "mouse gestures" but after trying them, I didn't see the big deal and went back to my keyboard.

Opera doesn't have Adblock, Linky or Magpie. Right there, it's out of the running for my personal needs. The last version I tried (admittedly, version 7) wouldn't even import my Firefox bookmarks, which are in exactly the same format as Netscape's. A lot of the "features" Opera does have are things I don't consider particularly interesting or useful - whole page zooming, for example, or the "true MDI" nature of the program - if I wanted to manage bunches of little Windows, I'd go back to using IE.

You can say that the author of the article didn't cover your browser in the most friendly way, but in my opinion he left out some significant negatives as well. Maybe you should be thanking him for that.

Re:Uhh... what?

[diegocgteleline.es]

Firefox extensions look to me somewhat similar to unix commands, ie: "don't define policy".
Instead of a big browser which does many things, build a browser with an extense API, every function of that API does one thing, and only one thing, and does it well. How you combine them is up to your imagination, just like it's up to your imagination how to combine grep, cat, sed etc.

They move most of the "policy" completely to the extensions, and they can compete with other browser by modifying the extensions the defaults browser has. IMO it's brilliant.

Why doesn't Microsoft buy Opera?

[bergeron76]

If they did, they'd have a cross-platform browser and it could remain closed source.

Re:Why doesn't Microsoft buy Opera?

[jfengel]

Because IE has deep ties to the operating system (or rather, the window manager, for *nix users who like to distinguish between the two.)

Even if they bought out Opera they'd spend forever getting it to replace some of the thing Explorer does, such as file management. Explorer and IE are deeply intertwined.

In addition, IE's core components are used in other places, like MS Help, and they're even made available to third-party applications. Making sure that the new Opera-derived browser supported those would be ... fun. And IE provides a lot of features to those components not provided in a standard web browser, which would have to be replicated.

Finally, it would be hard to make it bug-compatible. The one advantage to IE is that it's compatible with all those IE-only web sites. Replace IE with Opera and you're going to break a whole lot of web sites.

I'm not saying IE is better than Opera. IE sucks, and part of the reason it sucks so bad is that MS was afraid that Netscape (remember Netscape) would take over the world. So they tried to offer a free be-all-end-all browser that everybody could depend on having pre-installed, which would allow other apps to build on it. That made it a monstrosity. It also makes it nearly impossible to replace it.

Summary was right for once

[RedShoeRider]

As a user of both Opera (since the 4.xx) days, and Firefox, the summary was right: it just depends on how you use your browser as to which one is better for you. For day-to-day work, I find Firefox somewhat better suited, as I come across fewer pages that misload, or don't have a lugin available. However, if I'm digging though pages and pages of pictures (such as photospot or, well, porn), Opera wins hands-down. Speed, speed, and more speed. Yes, Firefox is fast. But for flat pages or pictures, Opera (most of the time) takes everyone else to the cleaners.

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.

Re:if Opera is out..

[Richard_at_work]

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'.

Well, maybe he didn't KNOW?

[EtherAlchemist]

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.

Because sometimes a browser is just a browser

[briancnorton]

Not to be a troll, but why would MS care about opera? What uinque technology that enhances a user experience does it offer?

(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.