Opera v. Firefox v. IE

[DaGaffer]

OK, can anyone give me any compelling reasons why I would/should use Opera rather than Firefox or IE? (and can we avoid a "IE is shit Firefox r0xors" type debate?)

I do have a reason for asking this, which may become clear in time

 

[Louster]

I've never used Opera, so can't really contribute in any positive way, but lately I've found myself resenting Firefox in quite a few ways and have been tempted to try and find another alternative.

Downloading files seems to entirely lock up all Firefox windows until it's either resolved the download URL or timed out, which is retarded - it happens often enough that the host is slow to respond (or whatever) that it's really quite painful. Similarly so waiting for pages to load at times, it seems. Waiting ages for any browser window to start responding again gets really, really tiresome.

Firefox also seems to handle animated images horribly badly. For example, loading http://juggling.eusa.ed.ac.uk/, my uni juggling society page, seems to make my whole system less responsive. Switching focus between windows takes about half a second with this open. I have no idea why this happens. My system isn't shit by any means. What the hell. (Edit: actually, now it just seems to not animate it at all. Uh? Anyhow the point is that with animated gifs or whatever, Firefox gets a bit shit. Not that this is a major problem as animated gifs are shit in and of themselves, but I'm just saying.)

On the other hand I wouldn't go back to using IE if you paid me. (Well okay if you paid me I would, obviously, but it's just a phrase, okay?! Okay.)
So yeah. Browsers suck in general. And if anyone has any ideas why the above things happen and hence how they can be resolved, if at all, feel free to let me know.

This could all be totally irrelevant to whatever your reasons are for this thread of course but oh well, shit happens, y'know?

 

[babs]

That site opens and works perfectly and quickly for me here. It may be worth doing a reinstall of Firefox, especially if you've just installed 1.5 over the top of an old install.

I couldn't live without my Firefox and extensions now (ok, an exaggeration), I find them so useful. Primarily I stick to Fasterfox, Adblock and the automatic Filterset.G extensions nowadays, to keep things shipshape and fast. Featureset-wise, there's very little to pick between Firefox and Opera for most people, but I personally find Firefox sharper and faster. The other *huge* point for me is that Natwest supports Firefox natively for online banking, whereas Opera (at last try) wasn't.

I also love the amount of configuration options available to firefox. Try opening about:config in the address bar and have a look

 

[Louster]

What about the "waiting for a response" lockup of all browser windows? Is that something inherently built into Firefox, or another symptom of my allegedly screwy install?
(And yeah I did upgrade to 1.5 over the top so you might have a point.)

 

[Shovel]

Opera is a strange beast, but I've never been able to put my finger on why.

It's an extremely capable browser, it's very, very fast (noticably faster than Firefox) and its web standards support is also very good indeed. It gets updated regularly too (probably recieves more frequent updates for features and rendering-engine updates than the other browsers).

The oddities start in the UI, really. 'Tabs' are 'Pages', there seems to be a lot of fluff in their UI design too (every submenu of the Bookmarks menu starts with a 'Add to Bookmarks Here' shortcut). Ultimately, their interface is completely non-native (whereas Firefox tries hard to feel like a native Windows app, and is different on the Mac and Linux to fit in with the common UI on those platforms as well).

Opera is free these days (as in, proper free beer with no ads) so the best bet is to try it - and be prepared to try customising the interface a bit

 

[VampiiricMist]

opera is purely best.. based on these facts


1. opera is safe
2. opera is fast
3. opera isnt "bloatware" it will run smooth on a p1 90 mhz, and it will run smooth on a p4 495834874 ghz.
4. you have so much utility in ONE program in such small size.. you have mail, irc, rss, newsgroups, voice-recognition, popupblockers, safe-url-thingys (to protect from phishing or whatever its called", mousegestures..

all this you get in one package.. instead of having to download and install whatever you want .. and still its.. about 4 times smaller then firefox .. i know some of you linuxphr34ks prefer to download and install every little bit of utility you want .. but i prefer to have a program that does everything i want in one package..

 

[Teren]

I'm a linux user, and I love Opera, it is much faster than FF, these days I keep FF only for testing my webdev projects.

 

[Penguin]

I did try Opera when it became free, but, i'm so used to FireFox now it didn't seem worth switching, i love my extensions in FireFox too, FasterFox, IE View, HTML Validator and GMail.

However, seeing as a few people here have chosen Opera above the others, i may give it a go again

 

[KevinUK]

You've sold me, I'll try Opera now. I'm currently on Firefox now as I can't live without tabbed browsing and RSS (only use RSS for uni cos their site sucks though)

I dont like how Firefox always has the highest memory useage out of all my applications...

 

[Escape]

I dont like how Firefox always has the highest memory useage out of all my applications...

I'm finding that too, although Azureus was using the most memory until I switched to uTorrent!

FF doesn't seem to like some Flash ads and jumps to 100% CPU usage. It's rare after the past coupole of updates, but still something to annoy!

 

[Ch3tan]

While opera is small and fast, there is something about it I just dont like. Maybe its the UI as shovel has already commented on.

Firefox just feels nice to use. The fasterfox extension is very nice, hadn't seen it before till babs mentioned it here.

I remember an alternative to firefox, which was meant to be faster and less resource hungry being pimped on theinq, but cant remember its name.

 

[babs]

Opera may well have all those bits and pieces as standard, but to me that makes it more like bloatware than anything else. I for one do not and will not use a web browser for email (webmail aside), IRC, voice recognition, newsgroups, etc.

Try a clean install of firefox 1.5, stick on fasterfox, adblock and finally filterset.G updater (auto configures adblock and keeps it updated). For my money as it is at the moment, there isn't a faster, cleaner safer more ad-free browsing solution (Lynx doesnt count ). I'm also loving the google preview extension at the moment, it gives you thumbnails of webpages next to google results.

Plus the Javascript Console is a godsend for web-dev.

 

[Joor]

http://www.deepnetexplorer.com/

Deepnet Explorer, the world's first browser with RSS news reader, P2P client integration and phishing alarm. The browser's superior security, functionality and usability, still makes Deepnet stand out from the crowd. Switch now to experience browsing like never before.

 

[Kryten]

Theres something about that I just don't like. Then again, I'm suspicious of all software requiring some form of good looking young lady to advertise itself. It's either about as much use as a fish in a bowl of treacle or it's just coded by a group (or one of) teenagers who really should be at school.

 

[Joor]

After trying it for 1 day I uninstalled firefox..its that good

 

[JingleBells]

After trying it for 1 day I uninstalled firefox..its that good

After trying it for 10 seconds I uninstalled it as it uses the flawed IE rendering engine

 

[Joor]

what are u talking about?

 

[Shovel]

http://www.deepnetexplorer.com/

Deepnet Explorer, the world's first browser with RSS news reader, P2P client integration and phishing alarm. The browser's superior security, functionality and usability, still makes Deepnet stand out from the crowd. Switch now to experience browsing like never before.

As JingleBells says: It uses the Internet Explorer rendering engine. e.g. It's not as good as Opera/Firefox/Safari.

The other thing that struck me from the screenshot on the front page was "Oh my God it's got the biggest toolbar in the history of the universe!!111". Then I came back here to say so.

Most of it, bar the Phishing filter, looks pretty standard fare. Phishing is something that Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera are actually working together on in an effort to produced a unified and consistant protection system. Little coloured spots on tabs doesn't strike me as the best solution and I know nothing about their 'trust partner' who verifies sites.

As for the integrated Gnutella client.... Phhhhhhht. I can see a genuine use for including BitTorrent support in future browsers since there is a reasonable amount of legitimate real-world BitTorrent use that it would be worthwhile. Currently µtorrent is excellent and light weight on Windows, although Transmission on the Mac seems to achieve the best minimism:function balance.

In that respect, Firefox 2.0 should be interesting to see. They're planning a mid-year release and it's going to be 100% user interface updates, with very little (if anything) done on page rendering. They've got some interesting ideas brewing for replacing the conventional "Bookmarks" and "History" system with something rather clever. Who knows what else, though.

 

[Draylor]

Yeah lets all add a shit P2P client to a shit browser (does anyone even use gnutella thesedays? heh).

Except since its just a wrapper around IE (bringing in 99% of the same bugs) its not even worth calling it a browser.

 

[Shovel]

Yeah lets all add a shit P2P client to a shit browser (does anyone even use gnutella thesedays? heh).

Except since its just a wrapper around IE (bringing in 99% of the same bugs) its not even worth calling it a browser.

Ultimately there are so many IE-based browsers because Windows makes it very easy to use the Trident rendering engine in applications. If you just need quick+dirty HTML display (such as for a help system) this is quite handy. But I can't really see the appeal of IE-based third party browsers. In the time before Firefox I can appreciate that hacking something together with tabs was beneficial, but post-Fx I don't see the point.

The other key lesson from Firefox, for all third-party developers was that there're rewards to be had if you actually plan your feature-set. Opera become a much better browser in recent years because they've got their feature and UI design under control, where before it was sprawling. Firefox built a new application which did its job very well. They didn't build in the kitchen sink, P2P clients and superfluous statusbar stats, they built something that was designed to be used.

I've never seen any of the IE-based browsers learn from that. They just think that something like 'integrated-P2P client' sounds cool and they hack it together. There's nothing to be said for being the 'master of none' when it comes to features.

I mean seriously, if you were in a discussion about web browsers and someone said "Ahh, Ahhhhhhhhh, but does yours have an integrated P2P client?", what the hell do you say? It's as bad as the Microsoft demo of Windows Vista last week where the presenter demonstrates their implementation of Konfabulator/Dashboard by going: "I have pictures from MSN Spaces friends here, I have news headlines here, I have sports scores from ESPN here... <pause>... I even have an egg timer" - WHAT??

Anyway, I've taken this off on two many different threads now.

 

[Embattle]

Generally I've always used IE, bar a short while many years ago when I looked at Opera and a small period at FF, and will remain using it until there is a genuine problem/reason that really makes a difference.

 

[Draylor]

Ultimately there are so many IE-based browsers because Windows makes it very easy

Heh, how observant of you.

Firefox ..... They didn't build in the kitchen sink

They did, it was mozilla. It was slow, bloated and to cut a long story short not too great. Basically noone other than anti-MS types used it if their platform of choice had a decent browser available.

It took years for someone to start work on cutting out the crap to create a (comparatively) small browser.

 

[Shovel]

They did, it was mozilla. It was slow, bloated and to cut a long story short not too great. Basically noone other than anti-MS types used it if their platform of choice had a decent browser available.

Mozilla Suite is not the same piece of software as Firefox though. Hence I specified Firefox. Yes, the Mozilla Suite was a mess.

 

[Draylor]

Suite was their first attempt - the kitchen sink approach. (builtin IRC client? WTF almost as bad as integrated P2P)

FF is the result of someone getting pissed off with the mess, hacking out the crap, and others realising very quickly that this was a far better idea.

 

[Shovel]

Firefox was started from the ground up though, as opposed to being hacked out of Mozilla Suite. Anyway, details.

As for the IRC client (ChatZilla), within the context of Mozilla Suite it was probably quite useful. For a long time they were effectively building a browser only for other techs to use. Substantial amounts of Mozilla development discussion (being distributed across the world) is done over IRC. So whilst they were lacking a consumer demographic to target their features at, the people who did use early Mozilla Suite releases probably had a use for the integrated IRC client.

Definitely misguided and I wouldn't have done it myself, but it was probably more useful then than an obsolete P2P client is now

I read the other day that Opera had BitTorrent support built into its download manager, but now I can't find any information about it. Does anyone know if it's true?