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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.
I was using Lynx!
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.
I've used Opera for more than two and half years on Windows and Linux. It is hands down the best browser and the most useful cross platform program available, for a variety of reasons.
9.5 is fine, once you move the New Tab button back to its rightful place on the LEFT!
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.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
If you're using Windows, and curious about Opera, I'd suggest either OperaUSB ( http://www.opera-usb.com/ ) or Portable Opera ( http://www.kejut.com/operaportable ). Both are portable versions of Opera, and as portable software they leave no trace on the host system, something that can be very convenient for testing a piece of software. Furthermore, I don't know what you're talking about with Gmail problem, either Opera rendering issues OR Firefox 'clear private data' issues. I've used both Opera and Firefox for years, on at least 3 different PCs that I've owned, and I've never had any such issue whatsoever! I'm not sure what in the world you're talking about, and certainly not with any new versions!
Frankly, with as many features Firefox has copied from Opera, it'd better be good. Don't get me wrong here, I love FF, but there's no denying that some of their "latest greatest" features are ripped straight from Opera.
If Opera was FOSS, the Firefox team wouldn't have had to write nearly as much code. (insert smiley for people who will inevitably think this is completely serious)
Cue mountains of posts pointing out, yet again that oldbar doesn't make it exactly like it used to be, just close.
Opera loads old version of GMail and that works fine, if you want the new version you need to navigate to this link: https://mail.google.com/mail/?nocheckbrowser (which also works fine in Opera)
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Am I the only one who thinks of this picture every time I hear "Awesome Bar"? It just seems like one of those things that was a placeholder name that never got changed.
Dev 1: Man, what should we call the new multifunction search-address bar?
Dev 2: I dunno, I've been calling it the "awesome bar" in the code.
Dev 1: Damn that's stupid.
Dev 2: Yeah I know, but I can't think of anything better.
Dev 1: Me either, just leave it for now.
And then, over time, everyone just got used to calling it that, and it ended up released that way.
I've been organizing the bars like that since I started using FF, and I find it makes for much better use of that space than just a gray, blank area.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I initially read this as momentarily. Perhaps this is more accurate?
Am I the only one who thinks of this picture every time I hear "Awesome Bar"? It just seems like one of those things that was a placeholder name that never got changed.
Reminds me of 'OS/2 Warp'. Ugh. I'm not sure which company was more stupid - IBM not knowing what to do with OS/2, or Commodore not knowing what to do with the Amiga. *sigh*
The fact that you have to download a third-party add-on to even resemble the original functionality shows how little respect the Mozilla Corporation has for its users.
Firefox without extensions is ridiculously barebones. I'm glad I'm an Opera user.
Speaking of stuff that's not in stock Firefox, one of the things about Opera I almost can't do without is Tools->Quick Preferences->Edit Site Preferences. So bloody useful. Oh, and the Cookie Manager in the regular preferences dialog is pretty awesome too.
You can open the Quick Preferences with F12.That way it's just Quick Preferences->Edit Site Preferences
That way you don't have to navigate through so many menus.
I rarely ever use the menu as the panel or various shortcuts provide the same function (Ctrl-F12 for Preferences, Shift-F12 for Appearance, etc).
Nice thing is that I can completely eliminate the menubar from the application, saving even more space vs Firefox. All I have currently is the tab bar and the URL bar.
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*
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.
Here's the best example I can think of for this awesome feature.
1) Go to this page in a new tab
2) Now close that tab.
3) In a new tab start typing "Warlord Tiefling" in the location bar.
4) Notice how a link is coming up and how it is highlighting the word as you type it. But if you select it and hit enter, you'll see that the words "Tiefling Warlord" do not appear in the URL.
This is the awesomeness of the awesome bar. It doesn't just search the URL of your history and bookmarks, it searches the page title as well! So while trying to remember the URL for the Warlord Tiefling page would be impossible, the awesome bar means you don't have to.
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.
You're implying that Firefox is somehow inferior to Opera (or that their devs are somehow inferior to Opera's devs) because they "copied" features from them. I'm really tired of that sentiment.
If fridge manufacturer A came up with this revolutionary technology ("not only can it make ice, it can make iced COFFEE!" or some other stupid idea like that), and if fridge manufacturer B likes the idea and puts it into their own fridges (let's put patents aside for the moment), is it still inferior?
This applies not only to Firefox v. Opera, but Windows v. OSX v. Linux, etc. I'm not advocating code "theft"*, but if some software devs implement a feature without stealing any code, are they still inferior?
Remember that the Wright Brothers didn't invent the airplane, and that Henry Ford didn't invent the car. Are they inferior to the original airplane/car inventors?
TL;DR Version: In the end, it's not who does it first, it's who does it better (in most cases, anyway). Of course, if some people "copy" the feature and still end up short of the original, feel free to laugh at them.
* Could you really call it that in the case of open source software?
Opera can disable scripts per page or globally, and you don't need a plugin to do that.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
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?
Yet Opera 6.5 runs GOOD, whether Firefox 3 won't run or just takes ages to start. Only/main advantage of FF is that it's customisable, with all the addons to 'improve the browsing-experience'.
I really appreciate OSS but at the moment Opera is the best browser for my older machines. My 2 cents.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
They're similarly capable, but Firefox is FOSS
So? Opera has been free (as in beer) for a long time now, and the guys developing it actually made an excellent work of porting it to several OSs/architectures; it works as good and snappy on Windows, Linux and MacOS. It's small, very fast, rock stable and packed with a lot of useful features (a.k.a, not bloat). FF3 is very nice on its own too, yes, but the more competition the merrier. What's not to like?
People dissing Opera because it's not FOSS are missing on a great browser, and perhaps the best UI available on this kind of software.
That's nowhere near the functionality of NoScript. On this page there are 3 JavaScripts that want to run, but I'm only running 1 of them (the slashdot one).
Also wasn't the awesome bar suppose to be stolen from Opera as well? If so, where is it?
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.
Sig this!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
knows they'll cry bloody murder with ANY change (and the loudest are the easiest to hear!). It can be ridiculous, stifling real development and useful enhancements.
That said, if you throw in too many of these you can simply kiss your user base good-bye..
I'll keeps on trying to get used to the awesome (??!) bar but I'm sure as I type this SOMEONE is creating a brand new shiny add-on to *truly* revert the behavior for those who feel the need it (oss, beauty eh?)..
I applaud the developers for the innovating work that they've done and wish them luck in their continuing success in finding the right balance between innovation and usability.
Quack, quack.
Both Firefox and Opera?
Ignore this signature. By order.
Opera's awesome bar goes a step further, not only does it search the URLs and the titles of your history, but also the content. If I type Warlord Tiefling in Opera 9.5's address bar, I get this page as one of the results, because you motioned it, aussie_a.
Doesn't the Awesome bar just search the "URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history"
/. typed into the address bar.
Opera searches the full text of the page as well as all those (well there aren't tags in opera but the description of the page in the bookmarks is searched as well). I can start typing in the text of a slashdot article I've visited a while back and it will display in the dropdown from the address bar. I can also assign certain bookmarks keywords such as slashdot being
I do admit that the learning feature that the awesome bar supposedly has (never used it enough to see) seems like it might be nice if it knows that a site you visited once doesn't have the same importance to you as one you've selected from the awesomebar 100 times. I've grown to like learning things like that once you get them trained (such as Launchy). I don't know if Opera does this (again, never used that feature enough to see).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's called humor. See this and this for an explanation.
Not easy? Okay, so it has "extract" in there, but it's basically the same as a Mac:
Mac: dump application file in location, run application.
Firefox/Linux (since they mention tarball): extract application in location, run application.
Okay, so they used a couple of techie words, but it's not exactly rocket-science (or even make scripts) to use it.
BAH! Who uses the keyboard anymore? It's hold right-click, move down, let-go. Mouse gestures all the way, baby!!!
And yes I will be filing a bug report.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
Simple way to disable the horrible "awesome bar"
about:config
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults = 0
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Yes, this is why all Firefox users run it on Linux, and there are no Windows or OS X Firefox users, because they prefer free software. It's also why whenever there's a story about OS X, it's full of people complaining that it isn't free software, so we shouldn't use it.
Wait, no that's not true at all. In fact, it's not true for any other commercial software company. It's only Opera that seems to have the long queue of people whining that it isn't open source.