Which is Better, Firefox or Opera? 937
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."
Uhh... what? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [tntluoma.com] 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.
Ad Supported (Score:0, Interesting)
Firefox (Score:1, Interesting)
Why doesn't Microsoft buy Opera? (Score:5, Interesting)
Summary was right for once (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Uhh... what? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is stuff I thought of right after I posted the parent, and I know I am missing more.
Re:if Opera is out.. (Score:5, Interesting)
what is Opera's value add? (Score:2, Interesting)
OS issues aside.
Re:Why doesn't Microsoft buy Opera? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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.
Well, maybe he didn't KNOW? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:what is Opera's value add? (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera renders pages much faster than FF in my system - not only that, it feels more responsive. Why, it escapes me, but it just does. Even scrolling a page is smoother on Opera.
It's memory footprint is way lower than FF. It might not be important to many in these days of +512MB systems, but i use my machine for more than browsing, and being able to have over 50 pages at the time with a minimal performance hit is a plus to me.
And Opera's UI... well, i have to agree with someone here at
There's a lot of other stuff that makes it very useable for me; for example, being able to change the browser ID, disable popups or plugins on the fly ("Quick preferences"), or to load pages without images with a single click. The search system is incredibly useful - f.ex., you type "g query" and it does a search for 'query' in Opera. "x" does the proper for GoogleLinux, "z" for Amazon, and so.
Re:Silly (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Two most popular?? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:it's simple... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Two most popular?? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why doesn't Microsoft buy Opera? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, IE for Mac use(s|d) an entirely different rendering engine from the Windows version of IE. In its time, it was one of the most standards-compliant browsers out there. Of course, it has now been superceded by Safari, Firefox, and Opera (and IE 6.0 for Windows in some areas).
Because sometimes a browser is just a browser (Score:5, Interesting)
(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 [thecounter.com] to 91%. I think that this reinforces my concept that amount of hassle, not # of features, is what sells.
Re:Uhh... what? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:if Opera is out.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Uhh... what? (Score:3, Interesting)
o Non-free (ok, an ad banner isn't too tough to cope with)
o Lack of NTLM negotiation (all corp sites are inaccessible, *including* our dev boxes)
o Lack of Socks proxy option (I tunnel socks outbound from work over SSH to protect my network traffic)
Things that make me wish I could use Opera:
o Excellent CSS support
o That awesome zoom (that zooms the images too)
o Ability to edit cookies in the UI (used for testing, honest -- I'm a web developer)
Re:Silly (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [gentoo.org]
Re:Because sometimes a browser is just a browser (Score:3, Interesting)
Someday, you'll be privy to what everyone else already knows - IE isn't SAFE. You're asking for trouble by using it.
Re:Uhh... what? (Score:1, Interesting)
Opera gives great flexibility in customizing the look, feel, and functionality of the application. I've haven't found anything that I wanted to do but couldn't.
Re:Uhh... what? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't understand people like you. You changed browsers cause the people at work thought you should, even though you preferred your old browser. I would be proud to be using the system i think is the best for whatever reasons (ideological usually) and I cannot comprehend how you could so easily be beaten into submission. Are you not proud of who you are? You should let your colours shine!
Opera better on older PCs (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and may I recommend naim as an AIM client? Talk about efficient chat!
Re:*All* your gripes can be fixed with extensions. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:FireFox handles all my online bank sites. (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [www.bgl.lu], 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 [www.bcee.lu] 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 [www.snet.lu] alternate [www.snet.lu] 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 [www.ing.lu], who is now running its " full com [lesfrontaliers.lu]
Re:Have you guys heard about (Score:3, Interesting)
Not all banks support IE (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera is out for me... (Score:3, Interesting)
i suspect it may have something to do with either QT or the nVidia drivers. but i have no idea.