Convince Me To Switch to Firefox

[megamanXplosion]

Go To Tools->Preferences. On the left, choose 'Search'. On the right side it'll have a list of the search-engines already builtin which shows the keyword. To do a search, just type the keyword then the search term.

Google = "g search-term"
AllTheWeb = "a search-term"
etc. etc.

No need for all of those search bars, you've already got one that fits all circumstances

http://www.schrode.net/opera/search/search_ini.html

That will show you how to add more searches to it. I have one set up to search my Everything Capcom Message Board (link in signature). "ec search-term"

[DougBTX]

That will show you how to add more searches to it.

This is the only place where personally Firefox has something over Opera. Being able to put %s in a bookmark is easier than the ini method for Opera. Hell, even IE supports the %s method without editing text files (For IE, see: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/...cess/ie5wa.asp I wonder why it never made it into the full browser, those are tools designed for IE5...)

Douglas

[megamanXplosion]

Yeah, FireFox does have the advantage there. I remember seeing a thread about this on the MyOpera forums, to give an interface for easy search-engine additions. I'm about to bump it back to the top of Opera Wishlist forum

EDIT: It seems that they have a partnership with all of the search-engines already listed and they don't want people to (easily) remove them because it could be seen as Opera cheating their partners. That sucks.

[moagw]

ah.. yea I added the extension and now I can do most of what I liked about opera in FF.. I dunno, I will keep using it and we will see..

[cfm]

The reason IE (and shells above IE) look so "lean" is because part of the memory/CPU power is being used from other Windows processes, so in all actuality AvantBrowser is probably using more than Firefox's 30MB of RAM in total.

Fix your machine.config file then. While you're in there, fix it for Opera too .

I don't have access to machine.config... shared server.

[Zvi]

I'm using FF for oevr a month now, and I do like it a lto better over IE for many reasons listed in this thread
One thing is one some large HTML pages it's beign noticeably slower (scrolling/loading) than IE.

[redemption]

Nope, FireFox doesn't have this capability. The way FireFox works, is that it's only a tabsheet with the 'viewing port' (where you see the document) inside of each page of the tabsheet. For example, rightclick on your taskbar then choose 'properties' and look at the dialog that pops up, you'll see a tab-sheet with 2 tabs. That's how FireFox works. Opera, on the other hand, is a window which controls child-windows instead of pages in a tabsheet. This allows much more control, because they're actual windows and not unmovable tabsheet-pages. Just try dragging a tab in FireFox off of the application, won't work. FireFox also doesn't have a Windows menu.

I think you still misunderstand my question. I'm asking whether Opera can have its MDI interface turned off so that child windows are not MDI children, but rather another window (like how it is in Firefox). I know fully well that Firefox doesn't have MDI capability.

Edit:

I read moagw's post and I know now that child windows can be pulled off Opera into their own windows.

[redemption]

Go To Tools->Preferences. On the left, choose 'Search'. On the right side it'll have a list of the search-engines already builtin which shows the keyword. To do a search, just type the keyword then the search term.

Google = "g search-term"
AllTheWeb = "a search-term"
etc. etc.

No need for all of those search bars, you've already got one that fits all circumstances

http://www.schrode.net/opera/search/search_ini.html

Ah... this is good to know. I've been looking for a way to "add" search engines so I can do a custom keyword search like in Firefox.

EDIT: It seems that they have a partnership with all of the search-engines already listed and they don't want people to (easily) remove them because it could be seen as Opera cheating their partners. That sucks.

Yes that does suck.

[Firestorm2003]

I was trying to install some skins for it, and it crashed
Firefox and everytime I open it gives me an error, so I reinstalled it but it does the same. So I uninstalled it! Any help?

[tonyskyday]

Just downloaded and installed Opera 7.5. It seems to me to be much faster at loading pages than Firefox, btw.

One more advantage I just noticed about the Opera MDI over the Firefox tabbed browsing, if you click on a link that opens a new window, it opens in a new tab, where on Firefox, you get a new window, which sort of defeats the purpose of having the tabs in the first place.

One thing I don't like is the toolbar layout. It looks more like Outlook than a web browser. Haven't played around with it yet, but I imagine that it is pretty easy to make it look more like a "normal" browser?

[megamanXplosion]

Yep, Opera didn't get the title "World's fastest browser" for no reason. I've done benchmark tests between IE, Opera, and FireFox. Opera came out as the winner for 10 out of the 11 tests. The one that it wasn't the fastest, is where a page was constantly reloading 10 Iframes. Of course, you'll never run into ANY kind of site like that so that benchmark test was pretty pointless. I also noticed that it's JavaScript engine was 2x as fast as the other browsers'. The 'Fastest browser on Earth' statement could've also come from the fact that you can get things done on Opera faster than other browsers and may not even relate to the rendering engine (Presto) at all. Anyways...

Rightclick on ANY toolbar then choose "customize toolbars...". From the dialog window check the "show hidden toolbars while customizing" box. You should notice that the main tool-bar while be shown to you (they have the browser buttons next to the address bar for some kind of experimental GUI, I hate it that way). Simply switch to the "buttons and fields" tab in the customize-toolbars dialog and drag the buttons you wish to use on the main toolbar then set the placement of the main toolbar to "Top" (it's default Off). Then, remove the toolbar buttons next to the address bar. That should change it to be closer to the normal browser interface. I can't remember everything I did to change it back, so you might need to do a little bit more than that.

[HarryF]

Know you're already convinced but here's more, just in case you're ever tempted to go back.

but it has several functional failings, notably ActiveX for Windows

...unless you get the Mozilla ActiveX plugin: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm

I myself don't like the Firefox name (liked Firebird a lot)

You might enjoy this humourous add on.

Here's another nice feature - Custom Keyords as explained by Simon. If you have site where the URLs are well organised, it's great. Can use this for the PHP manual for example. If if want to look up a PHP function like header() I can just type "phpdoc header" in the address bar and I'm there.

Otherwise there's a ton of handy web development tools and funky bits to add on to Firebird at http://www.mozdev.org and all over. Here's some some other highlights;

http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/
http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/
http://www.brownhen.com/DI.html (Dom Inspector tutorial)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/venk...lkthrough.html (Venkman JS debugger tutorial - to the best of my knowledge, Venkmann is the most advanced debugger for JavaScript out there)

[HarryF]

I was trying to install some skins for it, and it crashed
Firefox and everytime I open it gives me an error, so I reinstalled it but it does the same. So I uninstalled it! Any help?

Sounds like something got installed under your profile that's causing the problem.

If you open up a DOS prompt and type;

echo %USERPROFILE%

That will tell you where your profiles directory is. Under there you should find a directory "Application Data" below which is the firebird directory where it keeps stuff like your bookmarks - perhaps just rename the directory.

[laserlight]

In Opera if you want to open a new tab (or should I say, child-window) you can middle-click on the tab-bar and it'll open a blank child-window. In Mozilla, you have to rightclick->new tab.

Actually, in Mozilla Firefox, assuming the tab bar is already open, one can simply double click on the tab bar for a new tab.

Still, that isnt my point here.
I use Mozilla Firefox almost exclusively for normal web browsing, but I still think that Opera is a much better web browser, and will probably still be somewhat better even after Mozilla Firefox's 1.0 release.
In this case, it is because I only like the minimal use of tabs (without extensions), and the simple default interface (excluding a slight change in theme) of Mozilla Firefox.

In other words, this very much depends on personal preference.
I'm too lazy to bother customising my browser, others want to customise certain things in certain ways.
I like the community at mozillazine.org forums and elsewhere, others might not.
IMO it is better to take an apologetics approach concerning this sort of advocacy rather than a full blown evangelistic approach and engage in holy war.

And that, I think, is what the original poster wanted.

[megamanXplosion]

I was not being an evangelist but an advocate (advocacy consists of organized efforts and actions based on the reality of "what is.") for an accurate comparison between the two major browsers. This brings about your point of personal preference, why should someone make a personal preference while only hearing one side of the equation? About the "holy war" comment, there hasn't been any kind of argument in this thread, let alone one that was started by my advocacy for Opera, there have been debates but that should be expected on a discussion forum.

[Mihai Bazon]

I'd give more reasons than only the fact that Firefox (or more generally, Gecko) makes a better job at W3 standards. The most important is that IE must loose popularity.

For users like you, who need to be “convinced”, I put together a site (currently in “draft” state) for this. You can visit it at www.DropIE.com; I tried not to be biased towards a certain browser, although I personally prefer Firefox.

Beware though that DropIE.com is a site that more or less flames Microsoft, so should you have a problem with that, better not read it ;-). Currently I believe that IE is that buggy exactly because it's popular, and it's popular exactly because it's buggy, therefore things won't ever change and Microsoft will not take the trouble to bring a Web-standards compliant browser, unless it loses popularity. And I believe that a monopol in the browser area is much more dangerous than a monopol in the OS or “Office” area, that's why I really hope more people will make this change!

Happy Firefoxing! ;-)

[Ciced]

Agreed laserlight.
I'm a moderate user and don't want to spend weeks learning a bloated interface and hundreds of shortcuts. The only reason I use FF over IE was the speed of it's rendering cached items and it's simple tabbed browsing.

Though there are two things which I miss alot from IE.
Right Click -> Show Image.
URL Autocomplete.

[Brian Puccio]

IE sucks for MathML and ChemML (aka CML). It lacks native support, unlike Firefox which will only tell you to view all of the funky symbols that you'll need to install ~3 fonts. And even with the MathPlayer or Tech Explorer plugins, it STILL won't be able to properly handle an XHTML 1.1 document with inlined MathML, unless you go out of your way to make it work for IE. (That's something I've given up on doing. I have perfectly valid code. If your browser doesn't even attempt to render it, let alone render it properly, that's your issue. I met the standard, get a browser that tries harder. I'm tired of catering to every single US there is. I cater to the spec now, let your browser do the same.)

[mmj]

Though there are two things which I miss alot from IE.
Right Click -> Show Image.
URL Autocomplete.

Actually, the URL autocomplete in firefox is better than IE, in my opinion. In IE it is sorted alphabetically, so that the first matches are always the ones near the top of the alphabet. In Firefox, I don't know how they're sorted, but the one I want, or the ones I visit most frequently, always seem to be at the top.

If you're not seeing URL autocomplete, maybe you need to turn that feature on somewhere. It works for me.

[biggazillakilla]

Actually, the URL autocomplete in firefox is better than IE, in my opinion. In IE it is sorted alphabetically, so that the first matches are always the ones near the top of the alphabet. In Firefox, I don't know how they're sorted, but the one I want, or the ones I visit most frequently, always seem to be at the top.

If you're not seeing URL autocomplete, maybe you need to turn that feature on somewhere. It works for me.

Yes, I like this, too. The sites I visit the most pop right up on top.

[redemption]

Actually, the URL autocomplete in firefox is better than IE, in my opinion. In IE it is sorted alphabetically, so that the first matches are always the ones near the top of the alphabet. In Firefox, I don't know how they're sorted, but the one I want, or the ones I visit most frequently, always seem to be at the top.

If you're not seeing URL autocomplete, maybe you need to turn that feature on somewhere. It works for me.

The URL auto-complete is sorted by number of times accessed, then recency, then alphabetically, if I'm not wrong.

I'm don't know how it can be turned off or on, but you could check that you're saving your browser history.

EDIT: Have to mention too that you will be able to delete auto-complete results in Firefox 0.9. Just press Shift-delete. This is already in nightly builds if you're interested. Nice to have when there're some dubious auto-complete results you'd rather not have other people see.

[Ciced]

Ah thanks chaps, my history was set to 0 days. Working great now.

[redemption]

Ah thanks chaps, my history was set to 0 days. Working great now.

What does Right-click -> Show image do in IE?

[burkul]

As far as I know, you cannot install google toolbar to firefox. This is the major drawback for me. Any way to use google toolbar with firefox ?

[mcg_sg]

What does Right-click -> Show image do in IE?

Loads images when they are turned off...
56kers knows the best of this i dare say...
(and a significant reason i use Opera over Gecko)

No google toolbar?
Because there's no need to anymore.