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Opera or FireFox?

(This was crossposted at OperaWatch)

With my interest in Linux and other OSS programs, I had people ask me why I use Opera as my web browser instead of an OSS alternative such as the new FireFox. Therefore I wanted to take a few lines to describe why I picked Opera over Firefox, and some of the things that I would like to see in Opera.

PRO #1 - SPEED!!!!!!

Opera is by far faster than Firefox or any other browser I had ever used [with exception of lynx of course ]. Even with optimizations, Firefox still takes longer on my machine, both in Linux and Windows. And its not even the page rendering that is faster, even the menus and the rest of the GUI is much faster in Opera than Firefox, which I suspect is due to the use of XUL in Firefox.

PRO #2 - IMAGES OFF BUTTON

Opera is the only browser that I know that allows to disable viewing of images (or partial viewing) on page by page basis. For someone who often works over slow dialup or wireless links, this is a godsend.

PRO #3 - STRICT JAVASCRIPT

While it may sound funny, but Opera seems to have to follow the Javascript standard much closer than any other browser. Case in point - the fact that Gmail does not work in Opera since the XmlHttpRequest object required by Gmail is not part of any standard. Being a web developer among other things, I use Opera for my JavaScript testing for that specific reason. Additionally, Opera seems to pick up the exact line locations of JavaScript errors EVEN on pages were both IE and Firefox failed to do so.

CON #1 - PRETTY BAD PLUGIN INTERGRATION

I don’t know why but Opera seems to have pretty bad way with plugins. Java seems pretty slow in both Linux and Windows, Adobe’s PDF reader doesn’t work at all, and Flash works without sound on Linux. Additionally, for some reason extensions are not as nicely intergrated into the Opera GUI as Firefox. For example, I happen to be using Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extension for FireFox which intergrates very nicely into the browser. Every comparable Opera extension messed up the GUI so badly that I couldn’t use it.

CON #2 - HARD TO USE JAVASCRIPT CONSOLE

For programmers and web developers this is pretty important. Unlike Firefox and Mozilla Suite, Opera’s Javascript console is pretty hard to work with being that it is a popup window that covers the page. On Linux especially it is even more difficult since the “minimize” option doesn’t always work. I would love to see something like Firefox’s console which can be optionally hidden away and simply display an icon when something goes wrong.

UPDATE: Andrew Gregory pointed to a panel that he wrote that addresses this issue. Thanks!CON #3 - Better popup blocking GUI

Tags: opera. firefox —

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