jallison's Journal: Firefox and Opera

I've been using Firefox for quite a while now and like it a lot. So why look for a new browser? Just because you never know what you might not even know you want until you see it. So I tried Opera 9, which is free just like FF. There's nothing wrong with Opera, but I don't see any reason to switch from Firefox. Opera does do some things that Firefox doesn't, but I don't really care about any of them:

• Opera has an email client. But it's kind of a joke. I use Thunderbird for my mail.
• Opera has a chat client. So what? There are plenty of chat clients.
• Opera has mouse gestures. I don't care; others do I guess.
• Opera treats tabbed pages as 'real' windows. I just find this handling annoying and I don't derive any real benefit from it. I like Firefox tabs just fine.

But it's the little things that keep me on Firefox. Flashblock, Adblock, and Noscript make browsing a pleasure. The Google toolbar puts the words I searched for on the toolbar so I can just click on them to find them in the current page. The Firefox proxy settings page lets me set a subnet that won't use the proxy. I couldn't figure out how to do that in Opera, and the help didn't.

So I'll stick with Firefox. Trying beta 2 right now.