Firefox 1.5 vs. Opera 9
Update: Read part two of this article here.
I’ve been a diehard Firefox user sense before Beta 1. I wrote my Firefox Guide earlier this year, once that page hit Slashdot there were several comments about how Opera does all of that and more, without the need of the extensions that Firefox has. I put a mental note that I should check this out. Well a few months later and Opera 9 has been released. Well I guess now is a good time to look at this Opera vs. Firefox talk that everyone flamed about. So the goal in this article is to see what is better under different environments. So let’s give it a go.
Both Firefox and Opera have many more features than Internet Explorer. This isn’t about tabbed browsing, having a search box on the right of the navigation bar, added support for extra features, or anything else we’ve come to expect in these browsers. My goal in this is to go into the features that Opera is showcasing and to see how well Firefox holds up.
Features
BitTorrent Client – Well I am honestly not sure what the point of this feature is, none the less it is a feature. I am usually not the type of person that goes for a once size fits all application. I like to have a different application for each use, web, email, irc, ftp, and more. I do tent to leave programs open for a century or two and I only reboot my box when it’s totally necessary. I am currently using uTorrent as my default torrent application so I went to grab a CentOS ISO file. I do not have the exact memory usage of both applications but I can say the memory usage jumped a bit on Opera and I think uTorrent was around 10-12MB. Well Opera has Firefox on this, 1 this feature is built in, and 2 there isn’t an extension that adds a BT client to Firefox.
IRC – Setting up IRC was very straight forward. I actually liked it a lot. I am not going to go into details on how to configure an IRC client, but it works great. For an IRC client in Firefox the extension ChatZilla works well, but I honestly have to say I like this much better, and would actually use it. I currently use mIRC.
Add Favorite Search Engines – This is a very standard feature although I do like how they did the layout of the menu.
Content Blocker – This I thought was an awesome idea, just not implemented very well. An example I was on Digg and wanted to see if I could remove the ads on the homepage. I right clicked, and went down to the content blocker; well in short it said hit the shift key when clicking on the time. It didn’t work. Firefox doesn’t have a built in feature that does this, but the extension AdBlock/AdBlockPlus does this very well. You are able to block any element of the page.
Thumbnail Preview – When browsing with lots of tabs I often wonder what one tab is when I am trying to find a certain page. I often use the Ctrl-Tab shortcut in Firefox to browse through tabs. Well Opera has gone many steps above Firefox in solving this problem by showing a thumbnail of the webpage when you hold the mouse over the tab. Check out the screenshot below. There is an extension for Firefox, Viamatic foXpose that displayed thumbnails of all the pages on a separate tab. I used that a few times but found it to be slow and cumbersome and removed it very soon afterward. In writing this article I have already found this feature to be very useful.
Transfer Manager – This is very similar to the Download Manager in Firefox, except its in a tab. Very cool implementation and reduces the number of windows open.
Fast Forward – This is a very interesting item. I am not quite sure what to say about this, I haven’t found it very useful at all. Fast Forward will detect the most likely "next page" link and greatly simplify navigation in multi-page documents such as search results and image galleries. Although I must admit I haven’t been on forums, Digg, Slashdot, photo galleries, or Google much this afternoon. Maybe when I start browsing those sites I’ll fall in love with this feature.
Notes – Save text from web pages or write notes for later viewing. I’ve been looking for something like this forever. I’m in love.
Sessions – Saving sessions is very important to me. Incase you don’t know what it is, saving sessions basically allows the user to have for example 5 tabs open. Close Opera. Open it again and all your pages are where you left them. This is a wonderful tool, although right now I rarely close Firefox because it lacks this feature. I do use an extension, SessionSaver, but in some instances I have found it to be very unreliable. The only time I use it is when I need to restart Firefox after a few days to recover the memory lost in leaks.
Mouse Gestures – I personally haven’t ever been a fan of these features. There is a Firefox extension, Mouse Gestures that basically has the same features that Opera has out of the box. For the people that love this feature this probably kicks totally ass to have it built it. For me it’s cool but I don’t use it.
Trash Can – I know that whenever I close a tab I didn’t mean to a few words start coming to my memory. Well Opera has what they call the Trash Can. The extension in Firefox I use for this is TabMixPlus, I also use that to drag and drop tabs around. Opera has drag and drop support built in, as well as the feature to drag and drop tabs across different windows. I’ve even used that today a few times.
Speed / Memory Usage
When running Firefox I usually have at least 10-20 windows open at any given time. Therefore memory usage is a big deal to me. I have been using Opera for about 8-9 hours at this point so my experience is nothing like my experience with Firefox. When browsing I noticed the CPU usage was very minor compared to Firefox rendering the same page. RAM usage with 28 tabs in Firefox and 22 in Opera was 89MB and 69MB. Opera as you can tell was much better on ram usage, and over time seemed to stay lower even though I had more tabs open.
Screenshot of the 28 tabs I opened.
Innovations
There are a few innovations that I really found handy and useful. First off when clicking on the address bar this nice box drops down with Hope, Top 10, Bookmarks, Search Box, and Price Comparison. This saves a bit of time of having to move the mouse all over the place to find these items.
Using Ctrl-Tab to switch menus is very fast, but often I will fly right past the window I need or have to go through them all when searching for a window. Opera has a nice menu that drops down to display all the page titles for you to see and browse.
Disappointments
I often double click on a word to highlight it so I can copy the text or for some other usage that isn’t coming into my brain right now, but in Opera a menu pops up. For some reason I find this very annoying and unwanted.
I love the scroll wheel on my mouse. I often use it when trying to find something on a long webpage where scrolling is required. Duh. However in Opera whenever I click the scroll wheel on my mouse the cursor jumps the exact center of the page and then starts scrolling. Another annoyance is when I am middle clicking links to open then up into a new tab and I miss the link and the cursor jumps to the center of the page.
Safari, the web browser bundled with OS X and Opera both have the button to close the window on each tab. I personally love having it on the right side of the window, like Firefox has it, unless you use an extension to have it on each tab. I wish there was a way to change it to be like Firefox, but then again I guess it’s something that in time will grow on me.
I am sure there is a way to turn these annoyances off, I just haven’t found out how to, yet.
Widgets
Just like in MacOS X 10.4, Opera has the ability to have them to. I browsed around the Widgets page on Opera’s website and didn’t find anything (yet) that really struck me. I think widget support is needed, but not nearly as powerful as the extension support in Firefox.
Conclusion
I am sure many of the shortfalls in Firefox that have been fixed via extensions will be added in Firefox 2.0. Firefox 2.0 is currently in Alpha and Beta, but I am not including anything on because I want this base fully on finished products.
In short when I first opened Opera I expected another Firefox. After using Opera most of today, and going through all the features I can think of I am starting to like it more and more. Maybe it’s time I start an Opera Guide like the Firefox Guide.
I am officially torn on what browser to use; only time will tell. What I can see if Opera being a replacement to Firefox due to the amount of built in features, but Firefox has many powerful extensions that might take some time looking for replacements. Look for an addition to this article with widgets to replace some of my beloved Firefox Extensions.
Resources
Read part two of this article here.
love the post.. NOW i must try this opera again. I think i tried it about 2 years ago and it wasnt that bad but a lot like netscape.. kind of like firefox? lol.
Firefox WILL rock though for sure.
[…] read more | digg story […]
You missed a few things that really drive me to prefer opera over firefox:
* Bind any keyboard shortcut you want (the actions available are extensive and pretty flexible: you can combine them, cycle them, etc.)
* Search engine keywords are separate from standard nicknamed bookmarks, and are defined in a neat preferences panel (this settings page is new to version 9).
* True MDI: you can set different mini-windows in different arrangements. No need to make new windows entirely.
* True drag-and-drop tabs out of the box.
There are simply a plethora of other things, big and small, that compel me to use Opera. I must say, however, that the Google Browser Sync tool really gives Firefox something Opera lacks completely, and that web authors rarely compliance-check with Opera due to its lower share of users.
Have fun with Opera!
Extensions for Opera: http://userjs.org/
Customizing Opera : http://www.pallab.net/2006/04/12/extending-opera-the-ultimate-guide-to-customizing-opera/
One thing the Opera will always lack is extensions. That is the main reason I have not switched to it. I love Firefox and the extensions that I can use to improve the browseing of my favorite websites.
The fast forward button you don’t know about is really awesome, works on many places… google, digg, etc… I use my mouse to keep going… doing the left click right click combo… I find it that whenever I’m doing investigations and just plain browsing the web, reading diggs and all of that all those mouse shortcuts are very very useful. Plus I love that it opens tabs much faster than Firefox.
Opera has been getting much better each release… I’ve been using Opera since 5.0
To have the close button on the right side of Opera, you need to go to tools-preferences-advanced-tabs and uncheck “show close button on each tab”. Then it should be to your liking…
To prevent the menu from popping up when double clicking text: Tools > Preferences > Advanced Tab > Toolbars > Uncheck “Double click to display context menu”
Try to use Tablane browser, its Lane feature is very powerful.
Unless you secretly opened exactly the same tabs on Opera as you did Firefox in that 28 vs 22 tabs ram usage moment, it’s not an entirely valid comparison. Extensions, plugins, the content on the pages, etc, can all affect how much ram is used. It’s extremely unfair to pitch one browser against another with completely different types and amounts of content open on each.
One thing everybody seems to forget is that Opera’s most terrible weakness is that many pages are not properly rendered. Also try Yahoo! Mail Beta and see what answer you get. Blogger is useless in Opera. Opera doesn’t have many extensions I use everyday (Yahoo and Gmail and POP3 checkers, Colorzilla, SwitchProxy, Foxytunes, etc, etc)
Go to www.betanews.com and read what other users are saying about this browser.
I would pick Firefox over Opera any day. There is the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar (Opera’s version was not as good when I tried it). Plus all of the other extensions:
X-ray
Adblock
MeasureIt
Colorzilla
NoScript
HTML Validator
PageRank tool
Customize Google
and many more…
600 - 700 Firefox extensions available.
[…] First, you may take a look on how Will Langford talk about the latest release version of Opera and compared with his beloved Firefox. You might want to check on his ultimate guide on Firefox, which is very useful for Firefox like me. He has installed quite numbers of extensions, so from his guide, you may find the extensions which suitable for you. […]
Either the math or the wording need some work on the memory usage numbers:
There is almost no diff in resourses used unless my calculator is busted.
Defenitely Firefox is nowadays the best. Hope Opera improves it’s performance to have another option in the market.
Opera has problems with websites featuring heavy javascripting. (Google many services, Blogmad, Yahoo Beta mail, Jetix, etc.)
[…] From:http://willlangford.com/2006/06/22/firefox-15-vs-opera-9/ […]
Opera was the first web browser I used in Windows (Lynx was the first I had ever used). But Opera was quite good but lacked much in comparison with the bigger browsers (IE and Netscape at the time). I used IE, and more recently transferred to Firefox when it first began getting acclaim. However in more recent time, I’ve been wanting to go back to Opera - the only problem is that Opera is one of the least accepted browsers, most dynamic content filters out browsers and generally only accept IE, Netscape and Firefox.
Even so, Opera looks really good and their decision to make it free makes it all the more desirable. Firefox is becoming a tool of the past, a program that inspired developers but ultimately will meet its demise in the fact that it suffers from way too many problems (memory issues only became prevalent in the more recent incarnations of Firefox builds, and gradually get better). Extensions with Firefox help patch the differences between the browsers, but note that every additional extension causes the memory usage to increase exponentially. Try using adblock + mouse gestures + fasterfox and you’ll find that your browser memory will jump well over 100mb with only 3-5 tabs open in less than a 30min interval.
Also several exploits still exist to circumvent FireFox’s popup blocker and to crash the browser!
I’ve been alt-browser curious for awhile now but I will say that what made me decide to switch to FireFox INSTANTLY from IE6 is Google Browser Sync. What a great little extension. Try it you will LOVE it.
I agree about the tab close button. By putting the close button in a fixed place, it’s easier for the user to find it without thinking, rather than rooting around the open tabs. Unfortunately, I believe Firefox is set to mimic Opera when 2.0 comes out.
I think Opera’s geting better. For me, it used to be a case of installing it and then switching off all the stuff I didn’t want. It appears to have taken a leaf out of the Firefox book by simplifying the default UI. This is a good thing. Like most users, I find some of the features fantastic, others useless (MDI anyone? And the address bar drop down box that you quite like annoys the hell out of me.) What tends to happen is that some developer will write an extension that mimics the Opera feature, or even improve on it (e.g. Scrapbook is a thousand times better than Opera’s notes), and then you can install it if you really want it. Firefox is just better design. (However, I do agree that the thumbnail preview is better than Foxpose . . . but you’ll note that no-one’s bothered writing an extension that gives Firefox a ‘true MDI’ . . .)
I don’t know. I’ll give Opera a run out again, but already I have the feeling I always have with it. It’s like a lovelorn friend who just won’t stop tugging your sleeve to show you something else. You just want it to shut up and let you go on with things.
I just recently switched from Firefox to Opera. I had been using firefox for a long time, but the thing that made me switch was the firefox took so long to load up (even though I had the firefox preloader) and the amount of memory it took up. Opera is much faster on my computer on both regards.
However, something that I really liked that no one has really talked about is the Find option (Ctrl-F). I love how firefox has a realtime find as it starts highlighting parts of the page as you type and is located at the bottom of the page so that it doesn’t block the text. Opera opens up a new window, and is not as easy to use.
[…] Read more here… […]
About the ctrl-tab menu, you can hold down the right mouse button and use the scroll to very easily scroll back and forth in the list, this is usually much easier as you already have your hand on the mouse, plus it doesn’t annoy by having you scroll past the wanted site.
Will,
Good article. Just wait until you have used Opera for a couple of days, you’ll hit the “make Opera your default browser” button. I did after only three days.
Watch out for version 9’s stability. It crashed on me so many times that I changed to Opera v.8. I like Opera 8 better than Firefox. Some of the extensions for Firefox really drag down it’s speed. Speaking of speed I’ve never used a browser faster than Opera. It, like getting a faster cable connection.
I put a link to your story on my site’s Forum at:
[url]http://overvolt.proboards98.com/index.cgi?board=software&action=display&thread=1151139327&page=1[/url]
(clean that up for me if this doesn’t accept tags)
Thanks for the article. Good job.
Russ
“Using Ctrl-Tab to switch menus is very fast”
Hold right mouse button and scroll down/up, this is the sae feature, but much easyer to controll.
To all users reading this having no opera experience, if opera suprised you here, read more guides, maybe from someone who isent using opera for the first time.
Firefox as a browser itself (no extensions) is incredibly second-rate when compared to Opera, I think everyone can agree to that.
And as for memory usage, try it yourself, get a fresh copy of Firefox, and Opera 9 and open 30 of the same tabs in each, Opera9 will have nearly a 1/3rd less memory usage.
Firefox’s Sync extension however gives it a major edge over Opera9, (although there are rumors floating about of a similar feature coming up soon).
In the end just use both, Firefox for developing, gmail and anything else Opera doesnt render right.
The last time I tried Opera it didn’t handle cookies correctly and I couldn’t log into my home page, so I stopped using it. I assume that has been corrected?
I was die-hard fan of FireFox but after such a praising review of Opera by you, I may reconsider my decision.
Also on a separate not, Nice Bog
I’d like you to visit mine to. It’s www.x-x-x-x-x.blogspot.com. Don’t worry, it’s no porn.
Regards
(Siddharth Razdan)
Check the google extensions for saving session, syn bookmarks between diferent computers, and save notes…
If sessions are important to you, I recommend using the Google Extensions. Using these, I can work with my private laptop, close Firefox and open it up on my company’s laptop and there they are.
http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/index.html
use flock dudes
One reason it’s good to have a close button on each tab is that you can close a tab without switching to that tab first, as you have to in Firefox.
Opera 9 has all the features of all the Firox extensions I really would ever use; it is faster than Firefox in all aspects, slicker, and it is in deed “big small”; been using it since 2003.
A few tips, and comments.
I like Opera for its built in mail client, the way I can go backwards and (fast)forward by using only leftclick->rightclick or rightclick->leftclick, and the fact that all my paged are still there when I close and open it again.
I can even save these sessions, and open them later..
The trash can, or simply Ctrl+Z when you accidentally close a tab, is a life saver.
To avoid the scrolling past your pagen when using Ctrl+Tab, try holding you right mouse button and scrolling your mouse wheel.. Much faster, and easier.
Middle clicking a link to open it in a background page, and midle click a tab to close it, is widely used.
I m sure I can do most these thing with extensions i firefox, but I really haven’t got around to customizing it yet, as of now, it is really only used for testing my we pages for compatibility.
Good luck with your Opera experience!
If you don’t want the page close buttons on every tab, it’s easy to change: Tools/Settings/Tab
I don’t have english lanquage version in use, so the names may not be exactly those…
Hi,
Regarding the Thumbnail Preview, Firefox provides it thanks to an extension called Tab preview: http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/tabpreview/
I’ve been using it for a while and it’s much more reactive that the new built in feature of Opera.
Regards
Hub
Great Comparison. I tried to use Firefox, coming from Opera, last year and I struggled to add the features that I wanted. You might want to have a look at the transfers panel, rather than having your transfers in a tab you can have a list on the side.
The mail/rss client is excellent, though I use other clients now I found both extremely useful, especially when I used to have Opera open all the time.
I feel I must respond to Comment #12 (Alfred)… Opera’s page rendering is as good as firefox’s as is their JavaScript support. What you may find is that the site designers have not taken into proper consideration the browsers in the market and many times when developers try to make their sites work better in IE they stop working in other browers. There is currently no browser that gets everything (wrt. rendering) right!
Did you know you can activiate the Thumbnail Preview function in CTRL-TAB too? You can activate them via opera:config#UserPrefs|UseThumbnailsinTabTooltips.
[…] will langford dot com » Firefox 1.5 vs. Opera 9 […]
[…] will langford dot com » Firefox 1.5 vs. Opera 9 […]
If you’ll effectively spend some time studying Opera’s features, you’ll realize that it is like clay: you can customize almost everything, and create everything you want. As an example, it’s possible to disable the close button on the tabs, they will be closed with shift-click or the close icon on the upper-right side of the screen.
Or, you can use UserJS, they’re better than greasemonkey because they’re loaded before the page loads, so some more possibilities are opened. As I can see you love to take notes, I suspect you should try e.g. the userjs that makes “the other direction” (I’m sorry I am not so good in javascript coding so the setup steps are rather boring and manual, but I’ll find the time to optimize the code and let it work by simply putting the file into the right folder
Sticky notes for Opera:
http://7ref.com/2Uh
Bytheway, your annoyances are mostly things that cannot be resolved by widgets, but by UserJS. Take a look at the site www.userjs.org and discover all new kinds of stuff to add to Opera!
@william: you can turn off the context menu when you doubleclick via Tools - Preferences - Advanced - Toolbars - Uncheck “Double click to display context menu”.
You can also remove the close button on the tabs, and place it to the right via Tools - Preferences - Advanced - Tabs - Uncheck “Show close button on each tab”.
You should also use the mouse gestures more often, it’s really _the_ best feature since mankind invented the wheel!
Overmore, you forgot to mention Opera’s Speak function (select a word and press V) and Opera’s ability to be controlled via your voice.
@LFT: most of the extensions you name can be added to Opera via UserJS or custom toolbars (http://my.opera.com/community/customize/panel/). You can design your own toolbars, so the Web Developer Toolbar you use in Firefox can be put in Opera as well.
@Alfed: I don’t know which build you used the last time you checked Opera, but Yahoo! Mail Beta and Blogger are working fine since Opera 8.54.
@Justin: Firefox names it ‘Extensions’, Opera uses Widgets & UserJS for this (which is more extensive than the GreaseMonkey plugin for Firefox).
Furthermore; Opera 9 includes a search engine editor, but it isn’t that extensive yet. Use Opsed (http://opera-info.xorg.pl/en/) instead.
My biggest gripe with Opera 9 (I’m still using a beta) is it doesn’t work with Google maps
Update: Well the zoom slider + and - buttons don’t work or the navigation arrows, so half marks!
cool review, and there is more: opera is highly configurable (*.ini files). the programm stays in my program partition, my mail and my bookmarks are in my home partition (cool for backups)and can be used by windows and linux so they are allways up to date, even if i switch systems.
@LFT: There is a HTML validator as part of Opera, just right click and select ‘validate’ (18 errors occur on this page). Try http://nontroppo.org/wiki/WebDevToolbar for some great web developer tools for Opera, I find them just as good as Firefox, you just have to get used to the differences.
Those finding problems with Opera on certain sites should try using the ‘mask as’ option on the site preferences. Masking Opera as Mozilla will make most sites work perfectly in Opera, for example Gmail.
Features I love about Opera, that seem to have been missed here, are the RSS Feeds feature, modes tool for transforming the appearance of the site, and the zoom and voice tools.
I have been with Opera for a year now, and prefer it to Firefox. Firefox’s extensions can be useful, but I found they reduced the browser’s performance, and are really annoying when they stop working due to a FF update. Opera is really worth a trail run for a month. I did it and didn’t look back.
[…] read more | digg story […]
And you forgot one other feature that is badly missing in opera:
decent forms history
They have been lacking that for quite a long time, and trying to tell people to use horrid crude hacks in stead of that.
Hm, Look good. Although I have always said that about opera and keep on coming back to firefox. for some reason with firefox you get a sense of absolute control, (oh and all the greatest extensions), whereas with opera, although it has more features, it just doesn’t seem like it’s doing what I want it to.
oh, the scrollweel one is a major stopper to me… I just hate it moving my mouse pointer around
Yes Opera is nice but how do you manage to keep Firefox’ memory usage so low? I usually keep one main window open for like the whole day ( sometimes even more ) and just open new tabs and close the ones that I don’t need. Well I’ve seen Firefox use well over 500mb ram and this is just scary. Opera 9 dose no such thing but there are minor annoyances like Ctrl+H does not open the history but hides all Opera windows, downloads open up in a tab and other things like that. Also there is open in a new tab and open in a background tab which was weird at first but after a day with Opera you get used to it. Overall though Opera 9 is very nice and seems to be of very high quality ( which unfortunately isn’t something that I can say about Firefox ). Yet Firefox has that feel of an old friend and requires a lot less adjustment. Oh yeah I noticed that Opera 9 has problems displaying some ASP pages which is pretty bad ( Firefox works fine with the ones that I tried ). Well I remember what Firefox used to be back in the 0.8 days and how you had a special form for reporting display problems ( idea borrowed from Safari’s dev team ). So there’s only hope for opera.
Firefox really is a memory hog. At one point I had Opera open with upwards of fifty tabs, and it only consumed about half of the memory that Firefox did with only about five tabs open. All of the tabs in Firefox were just HTML, CSS, and in some cases tables.
The Opera tabs contained plugins, music, a bunch of JavaScript effects, and the stuff in the Firefox tabs, yet Opera still used less memory.
There is a Firefox extension that allows for simple tab previews, it’s called (unsurprisingly) Tab Preview and is available here
http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/tabpreview/
[…] An in depth look on how Firefox 1.5 holds up to new Opera 9.read more | digg story […]
Opera 9 comes off to me as a browser that has “cool” features. It’s not an everyday browser like Firefox is.
There are a couple of p2p Firefox projects going on at the moment; AllPeers and MozTorrent. I’d rather have it like that where it’s optional (as an extension), rather than something forced on me.
Widgets are not necessary by any means either. I don’t understand why they had to incorporate that into the browser. I currently use the Yahoo Widget application for that. Vista will have its own, and the Mac OS does so right now.
What’s fair though…is to compare Firefox 2 when it comes out in a couple of months to Opera 9.
Maybe it’s time you stop whinning and help implement those features on Firefox.
Google Notebook provides a Note feature to Firefox plus your note data is stored on Google’s servers, so if you are like myself and have Firefox at home, and PortableFirefox for work, you can take your notes with you.
You spend so much time on this article and you haven’t got the guts to declare a winner?
Yeah, extensions are the power of Firefox. I really don’t care about everything that is built-in Opera. I like to be able to add and remove features as I please.
It’s clear from this guide that you like having things separate, rather than a one-program-to-rule-them-all approach, however the mail client is definitely worth a mention. It’s easily one of the best features. The fact it’s not based on an archaic folder system is the biggest plus for me - filters rock. I wish they’d make the filters a bit smarter (a la Mail on OSX) though.
You also (unless I’m going blind) missed out Mouse Gestures. These are absolutely brilliant, and I use them in all apps now via StrokeIt (a program inspired by Opera’s mouse gestures). You can get mouse gesture support in Firefox, I believe, with an extension, or StrokeIt will allow you to use mouse gestures in FF>
Opera will never be good enough if you have a dire need for a popup recipe search window that displays the current tide levels of the Pacific ocean with a cute icon on a statusbar. It is, however, a lot more extensible than a lot of Firefox users expect. For example, to address the above post, Adblock, NoScript, HTML Validator and are all included\easily added functionality for Opera.
In regards to the original annoyance of the close button, switching to MDI mode on Windows solves this problem, or on a Mac where MDI is unavailable, the “Close Current Page” button at http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons can be dragged into the top right if you would like. This is actually one of the things Firefox just can’t compare to Opera with - the sheer customisability of the UI through dragging and dropping, or the complex commands that buttons, gestures and key shortcuts can be assigned to.
Widgets aren’t really an appropriate equivalent to extensions, except I guess for the weather and email notifier ones. I personally find the concept of widgets a bit dumb (but I’m on OS X and have dashboard already.) You’d be better off checking userjs.org or userscripts.org for Opera and Greasemonkey user javascripts to install, or checking to see if Opera does what you want already (many popular Firefox extensions just replicate Opera’s existing functionality.)
I do not find many pages fail to render in Opera. Since 7.x or so, I’ve had few issues with rendering problems. Also, it’s pretty well established that Opera is much smaller in terms of program size and memory footprint than Firefox. The example given in the blog post really wasn’t that hard to imagine - do your own testing with identical pages and Opera always tends to have lower memory usage.
Sorry if this post seemed a bit one sided, but I wanted to add a bit more information in support of Opera to the comments here.
downloaded a beta version of bon echo and it looks to have some pretty cool features (close button on each tab, embedded spell checker, as you type in the google search box on the upper right hand, it’ll list suggestions and they’re pretty dead on).
I went to betanews per Alfred’s post and found nothing but a bunch of disjointed whining from f4n b01z with no real information or even the minimum ability to compose a rational sentence. Thanks, but I really don’t think I’ll waste my time there.
You could also use Internote to duplicate Opera’s notes feature on Firefox.
Forn taking notes in firefoxL scrapbook
Saves text from web pages or write notes for later viewing.
Nice post - definitely going to give version 9 a go.
With regard to Opera not being tested by developers… There was a time when web developers were only concerned with how the sites looked in IE, now times are changing and the growing user-base of Firefox has forced developers to make sure sites look good cross-browser.
I admit, as a developer myself, that Opera is not normally on my radar due to the lack of users, but as more people begin to adopt it, more websites will support it.
[…] Will Langford has written a good article comparing the features of Opera 9 and Firefox 1.5. My goal in this is to go into the features that Opera is showcasing and to see how well Firefox holds up […]
Nice post!
I’ve been using Opera for a long time. It’s the browser that I recommend to my friends.
Mouse gestures are awesome and if you give it enough time it will grow on you. All actions are initiated by holding the right mouse button and moving the mouse. For example, when you’re on a page with lots of links that you want to open, say, digg.com, just hover over the links and move the mouse down-up. It’ll open the link on a background tab… then move the mouse down-right to close the current window or up-down to refresh. It accelerates the browsing a lot. Same with the “next page” thingie. Mouse gestures and Google, best friends evar
To navigate between tabs I use the keyboard numbers 1 and 2 (previous and next tab). Much faster to keep pressing one than moving the mouse and seeing the thumbnail.
About sessions, there’s a “save this session” feature that’s very cool. Open a few tabs for your favorite news site and save them… easy access to open all tabs later.
If you are using Firefox and you ctrl-tab too far, you can press ctrl-shift-tab to go backwards in your tabs, just like shift-tab will go in the reverse direction when switching between fields in other programs.
Will- thanks for a great post here. And an Opera Users Guide would be greatly appreciated by the masses.
I think there is no question that Opera has arrived as a frontline browser player and stands above any other browser in the way that we work on more devices than either IE or Fx. That will be a very significant advantage as we enter the Web 2.0 era.
Thanks again.
The main difference between Firefox and Opera is philosophical. Opera wants the user to be able to open the program, and have every featire set up right there for you to use.
Firefox wants you to open it up, and then pick which unusual features (extensions) you want.
So with Opera, you get a much easier set-up with the trade off of less customizability.
There are many extensions I use in Firefox that provide features that Opera, to my knowledge, can not match, but for a lot of my friends who don’t love messing around with settings, Opera is the best way to go.
Opera looks good, but I personally like Firefox.
you sould really try flock,
it cant really be comperd to any of those but its great
How the hell can you do a review of Opera and not mention the page zoom?
For anyone with a large, hi-res screen it makes Opera the only choice.
I like firefox… but I guess I’ll try opera again…
Theres no question which is the superior browser: Firefox is.
The whole point of extensions is to give YOU the ability to choose what features you want, not the maker of the browser. I for one have no use for half of the features in Opera and there is no way of disabling most of them.
Features are great, but choice is better.
A number of the features you listed as poorly supported by extensions: rearranging tabs, session saving, and something similar to a tab trash can can all be found in Tabbrowser Extensions (http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_tabextensions.html.en). It includes all three of these, plus a number of other tab control features that I’ve found very useful.
I haven’t used Opera since the days that the free version was adware, but I don’t see anything in it to pull me from the ever-customizable Firefox.
I`m using Maxthon, a chinese one, try it?
http://www.maxthon.com/
flock can be compared to firefox seeing as that’s what it’s built from. flock is interesting for what it is. if you want immediate access to flickr, del.icio.us, and your blog, then it’s kind of cool. but IMO not worth the trade off of losing what opera has to offer. i can’t count how many times ctrl-Z has saved me from swearing.
You don’t like Mouse Gestures because you have tried it on Firefox and it’s bad there.
On Opera it is a tottaly diferent game and much better, I suggest you try hold your right button and move your cursor down to open a new tab instead of ctrl+t, or hold your right button and then press your left mouse button to go back.
I use Opera since it’s 5.something and I always prefer it over any other browse.
I like Firefox, but I’m using FLock now as my secondary browser, since it does everything Firefox does for me but with less Ram Memory usage.
But hey, I forgot to mention.
Your article is great! Congratulations for doing that! And I’m glad that you found your Opera experience a good one.
Hope you stick with it.
[…] Firefox 1.5 vs. Opera 9 http://willlangford.com/2006/06/22/firefox-15-vs-opera-9/ Published Saturday, June 24, 2006 3:55 PM by rtrent Filed Under: Internet […]
One thing I *really* miss in Firefox are the 1 and 2 hotkeys to switch between tabs. In Opera I switch tabs quite alot and I usually do this by pressing the 1 (previous tab) or the 2 (next tab). I’ve searched for an extension for FF to do this but couldn’t find it.
No one likes the “CTRL-Z” feature? I find it super-useful! It is the “UNDO”, and works here and there in Opera, changing its behaviour based on the context: e.g. it’s nice when you accidentally close a tab (or you quickly change your mind), rather than going to the trashcan, keep your hands clean and just hit “CTRL-Z”!
Or when you delete a mail, ops no it was the other one… so just “CTRL-Z”! and you have it back again…
Sorry gakk, just seen you already said the CTRL-Z tip.
I agree and love all the other tips you list, you wise user
Lets remember that the best features of Firefox are extensions created by the community and not out of the box Firefox features. Opera 9’s strongest features are reliable because they’re created by the Opera development team. Not to knock Firefox developers, but as Firefox changes builds, what extensions will work and what wont? We won’t know. Opera 9 rocks.
Just a quick note about ALT+TAB: You can use the “1″ and “2″ keyboard buttons to switch between tabs in the same browser window.
And to go back or forward in history, depending on the direction you want to go, click either left- or right-mouse button followed by the opposite mouse button slightly after, i.e back = right+left mouse button, forward = left+right button.
You can have Firefox’s download manager as a tab using the download manager tweak extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/256/
It allows you to customize the download manager in a few other ways, but the tab part is what makes it for me.
Opera has rendering problems with websites like blogmad, google maps, blogger, yahoo mail beta, live mail, etc, etc
Opera is the ultimate browser since version 7.54
Why didn’t you tell us about the excellent e-mail client, the RSS and Usenet clients?
Lets not forget all the Firefox Myths
http://www.FirefoxMyths.com
Many have to do with Firefox and Opera