I am working on an article and doing a bit of research beforehand, so I’m posting this here and a few other places. I am not interested in debating, just gathering some quick information; therefore, I do not plan on countering any claims (different for me, eh?).
My question is why do you not use Opera? Just one main reason and try to sum it up in as few words as possible. Also post what browser and OS you do use.
If you use Opera please feel free to explain briefly the main reason that you use Opera.
A very good question given that Opera is closer to the standards than either browser they are using. Perhaps they like using proprietary tags that standard compliant browsers don’t support.
I use Opera as my regular browser, but if there would be any reason to not use it, it would be for using sites that are botched up in Opera.
I am also dismayed at Opera’s lack of portablilty. When I went on vacation a few months ago, and wanted to read my RSS feeds, I ended up copying one of the files relating to mail settings or something to my laptop. Why doesn’t it have OPML support?
Vinnie - I wanted to clarify that I have much more trouble with Windows Firefox than Mac (even on my PowerPC mini with - lots of spinning beach ball time - due to having little RAM - but it almost never crashes) crashing - both are up to date but even with a gig of RAM on a Wintel box Firefox crashes a lot.
So my crashing peeve is with Windows Firefox specifically - the Mac version is pretty much even to Safari in speed on my setup (and equally stable) - and that means it is pretty solid.
I’ve been using Opera, it was all good except one little detail – the connection speed. On any decent connection, it would probably not be a problem, but on my rather slow connection (256kbps) it was always suffering hiccups; especially when loading pages with lots of images – that used to take several refreshes to load. I didn’t like that, so I switched to FF – no problems ever since.
Opera rules my online world - no other browser even comes close.
It’s the most user-centric browser, giving you far more detailed control over what websites are and are not allowed to do (you can even set display and behavioral preferences on a per-site basis), and giving absolute control over the UI. With Opera you can make the browser look and behave exactly how you want - button by button, field by field, image by script.
It has more comprehensive status information, more thorough script debugging, more sophisticated management of bookmarks, better keyboard navigation, built in user scripting, built in mouse gestures, easy options for things like disabling JS and images that you can put right on the toolbar.
And it handles history navigation properly - when you click “back” in Opera’s history it doesn’t reload the previous page, it literally re-creates its previous processor snapshot, which is invaluable for form-based interfaces, not to mention speeding up average load times by optimizing caching behavior.
And those “cool new” features in Firefox, like restoring a session when restarting the browser, and drag/restore of tabs - Opera’s had them for years!
To be honest, I “hear” brothercake. Other things I like about Opera are that you are shown useful information when hovering over a tab and the fact it uses a ridiculously small amount of memory - something like 10MB when Firefox is using about 100. How Opera does that and be so responsive, fast to load and on top of it all have instant back support galaxies better than Firefox’s is beyond me.
It’s just a very intuitive, well thought-out browser. Despite all that, I stand by my original post - I like my extensions too much. Firefox isn’t a bad browser at all and I’ve becomed accustomed to it. I’ve also customised it to my heart’s content and understand what’s going on in its insides it fairly well. I can customise on a site-by-site basis with userContent.css and Greasemonkey (yes, I know it’s built into Opera, like so many other things that are only available as extensions for FF). In fact, the only real gripe I have with Firefox is its enormous memory footprint (I only have 352MB of RAM according to Windows, 384 according to me) and its annoying unresponsiveness. This is especially true when, as a page is loading, I click on another tab and it doesn’t actually show me the contents until the original tab has finished loading.
vgarcia, you’re reason is a bit vague. Care to elaborate a bit on why you prefer Safari over Opera? I can think of a few (the lack of OSX like stuff in Opera is the top on my list).
r937, I believe I recall you saying you use IE? Is this true? You just did not post this, so I want to make sure.
Good stuff so far, and what I expected. Then brothercake sounds like my clone. Of course we were both mentioned in some recent sitepoint blog post as Opera lovers, lol.
From a web developer perspective I place this
browser on top of the others. When coding
and testing on other browsers something that
makes logical sense coding wise does not respond
well in other browsers. Firefox rarely has issues.
Its been awhile since working on a web project so
I can’t speak for IE7.
Of course we were both mentioned in some recent sitepoint blog post as Opera lovers, lol.