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.

Comments

Choice is a Good Thing

[ricegf]

With four (count'em, four) good browsers competing for user attention, the evil days of monopoly and stagnation are ending at last. The light of the standards-based Internet is dawning, and "works best with Internet Explorer" is becoming the odd anachronism it deserves to be.

But what about plug-ins such as Flash?

[themushroom]

The real challenge/merit is whether Opera 9.5 is accepted by webpages as being able to display all the content correctly, rather than insisting a component isn't there and demanding its download only to be told it's still not there.

That's my complaint about the last version or two of Opera (and I've been using it since 3.5), that I wind up having to break out IE or FF for some pages because just being adherent to the HTML 4 standard isn't enough of a claim anymore.

Pretty good

[Eil]

I gave Opera 9.5 a whirl last week and was highly impressed. It's packed with nice features (Where do you think Firefox and IE get most of their ideas?) but still pretty fast and light. Other versions of Opera never did much for me, but this is the first proprietary application that I've run across in a long time that I would seriously consider using on a daily basis. The only areas where it's really lacking are modularity (extensions, instead of everything being built-in to the browser) and of course the fact that it's not free software.

My priority is not speed

[bogaboga]

In Firefox, my priority is not speed. I am happy with the status quo. While I love the new product, I was dismayed and disappointed to say the least when I was locked out of my favorite sites which support the Firefox 2.0 series, but do not support Firefox 3.0! I had to re-install the earlier version, which I had to "dig" out of the Mozilla site.

The fact that most of my extensions are un-installable in the latest version did not help matters.

This made me wonder...Why haven't the coders ported these extensions to Firefox 3.0 if it has been in development for a long time?

I also thought I would be in position to play live CNN streams but I was wrong! Firefox plays the commercial OK but will display a balck screen with sound when it comes to the actual content! Not good enough.

mis-match

[luckymutt]

From TFA:

But Opera 9.5 is no less revolutionary than Firefox, matching its open source rival feature for feature,

That should be:

But Firefox is no less revolutionary than Opera, matching its proprietary rival feature for feature

Do we really need to break out the list of things that Opera developed that are now taken for granted by other browsers?

The one thing that gets me...

[actionbastard]

about this release is the huge bug with the network home folders not working. I mean, come on guys, is it really that hard to test something like this in a Lin/Mac/Win environment that exists in virtually all of the corporate/academic world to see if this works. Granted the javascript performance is two to three times faster than v2, but if you release it in a state where I can't deploy it because you missed a bug in some library, it's a really hard sell to the PHB if the new whiz-bang version is fuxored.