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Comparing Firefox 3 With Opera 9.5 On Linux
Joe Barr writes "Mayank Sharma has two recent stories on Linux.com; one evaluating the performance of Firefox 3, and the second comparing it to Opera 9.5. Which is better? For most people, it's probably more a matter of familiarity or personal preference, but these stories provide hard performance data to consider as well. Sharma notes, 'In terms of rendering JavaScript, Firefox 3 had the edge over Opera 9.5 in the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, which has an error range between +/-0.8% to +/-11.3% depending on the type of test. In the JavScript Engine speed test, Opera 9.5 scores over its peers when it comes to error handling, DOM, and AJAX.'"
Slashdot shares a corporate overlord with Linux.com.
Replacing old features with new ones has nothing to do with lacking respect for users, it's about trying to improve the user experience. Not everybody is going to like them, sure; that's true of just about any change you make. The fact that it's possible to download an extension and get pretty close to the behavior people complain they no longer have isn't a strike against Firefox, it's a sign of the robustness of the extensions and community. Apparently extensions aren't permitted to drill so deeply into the core browser that they can change how things are looked up--at least I assume that's why the extension isn't quite the old behavior. That may be good or bad depending on your perspective, but it's certainly safer.
More to the point, most of the posts seem to be: "I just downloaded Firefox and I fucking hate this new address bar!@" I thought we were supposed to be reasonable people here? What happened to giving something a chance before you spit on it and declare Mozilla to be disrespectful of its users for ever having implemented it? For that matter, if these people ever bother to actually give details about what they don't like about it it seems to be basically the order it's returning the results. For example, lots of people complain that typing "en" is no longer bringing up "en.wikipedia.org" as their first result. For one thing, this behavior can be mirror even more closely with a configuration option. It's not in the GUI; bitch about that if you want, but it's there. Beyond that, it's simply more proof that they haven't bothered to give it a chance. The search results are adaptive. The more you type "en" and select "en.wikipedia.org," the more it learns that's what you want. Sounds like a feature to me. All it takes is patience, but clearly most people have none and would prefer to rant about it on forums like this one.
Or bloated, depending on who around here you ask. That alone should clue you in that it's nothing more than a matter of perspective. But let's play along and say you're right. All that goes to show is that there are two camps with regard to things like this: One who believes the best stuff should be merged in or included by default with the browser, and one that believes the browser core should stay as lean as possible and let this functionality be done with add-ons. Opera tends to the former, and Firefox is a bit of a hybrid but tends to the latter. So what? If you really can't be bothered to customize things to your liking, that's fine--use Opera or whatever else you find that suits you. That's really what it's all about in the end. That doesn't mean that the alternate perspective is wrong, though.
Well, you're certainly free to use whichever browser you prefer for whatever reasons you prefer it--I just hope you have better reasons than "default Firefox is barebones," which seems to be all you said here. That smells a bit too much of zealotry to me. At the end of the day I guess it doesn't even matter what it is. *shrugs*