I find this very useful when comparing two web pages and preventing pop ups (which are not always unwanted) from opening a new window. One example is blogger.com comments, they will always open in a new window in Firefox or, if forced, the tab will not have the appropriate dimensions.

The characteristic of Opera which I find the most addictive is the ability to click on a tab in the tab bar and de-select it, switching to the previously selected tab. It is incredibly useful yet simple and it’s sad that there’s no way to get this functionality in Firefox.

What surprises me about Opera is that it makes you feel that it was designed by people who actually spend lots of time using lots of websites.

Firefox is great in many respects, and I think it’s easy to forget that it is intended to be a simple and pure browser, which also happens to act as a platform if required. I think that extensions are unique to Firefox, the same way that additional “applications” already bundled (like mail, rss reader, irc…) is unique to Opera. Personally I would love to have the power of expandability and support from Firefox mixed with the subtle details from Opera.

Well, tell me how I can copy formatted text in Opera? HTML, RTF – any format? As far as I can tell, it just isn’t possible. A lot of Opera-users claim that this feature is not needed. I certainly need it – and Firefox is much more useful to me for that reason (although I much prefer the userinterface of Opera).

To me, the Note-feature in Opera is plain silly because of this. Most of the time the text copied to the Notes-panel is horribly jumbled. Firefox has a extension which does everything the Note-feature in Opera does – and much, much more. First and foremost it will copy text formatted. You can also highlight copied text in various colours, add annotation-boxe’s etc. It’s called Scrapbook.

- like i said, very very fast, much faster than firefox, especially when there are a lot of tabs opened. When i installed few extensions in FF (and those were really simple and small ones) Firefox was slow as a snail compared to Opera, and since my pc is really slow this is really important to me.
- I love that you can drag-and-drop tabs, i always missed this in FF
- tab forward/backward with right+left and left+right mouse click
- i have no problems with funky page loading/rendering (gmail, yahoo mail) like some here mention
- mail client is excellent! I abandoned thunderbird and Opera is now my default mail client, while i’m surfing pages i just press ctrl+k and it automatically checks my email!
- i don’t understand how i lived without save sessions and ctrl+z (undo tab close) options before..
- block content works great
- great that you can add buttons as shortcuts for your drives (harddrives, flash drives, cd/dvd etc.)
- thumbnail preview of a tab when you hover over a tab – great option
- links menu is also pretty nice and can come in handy
- i always like to modify keyboard shortcuts and this is done really good in opera, you can modify most of the shortcuts…

here are some things that i wish were done differently in opera (does anybody know if this could be done?):

- i would like if i could use the scroll-button click (you have to use shift+click) for opening bookmarks in new tabs (like you do when you click on a “normal” link), also for buttons
- i would like if each tab had it’s own load progress “icon” or something (like in FF) so that i can see the load progress of all the tabs in the background without selecting them

Anyways, these “flaws” are really minor to me, i would never go back to Firefox

I have read through the article and comments. I admit you guys mentioned some important points. FireFox and Opera have good and robust cores and both are top browsers. Use whatever you want… while it’s not Internet Explorer.
I mostly use Opera and sometimes use FireFox. Imho, a great feature Opera brings by default is the mouse gestures support which lacks in FireFox. Actually you can download a plugin for FireFox to provide the mouse gestures support but it ought to be a default plugin. Again, it’s only my point of view since lots of people use keyboard shortcuts for browsing. But you quickly get used to this functionality because it’s simply convenient. In fact I even happen to accidentally try mouse gestures to go forward/backward in explorer.exe while browsing my folders after using Opera for a while
By the way, try this test: http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html. Opera 9 passes, FireFox 1.5.0.6 and 2.0b2 fails. I hope FireFox 2 will be able to render this test correctly in the final release.

Take care.

The search engine feature is much more customizable and ESAY OF USE than in Firefox! (I’m totally biased, I aknowledge it)

Waiting for the third row!

You said that Opera did not have the history feature…
Ctrl-Alt-H or Tools->History…

Just my 2 cents…

though I agree with your article most of the time (what’s kind of a miracle, since I’ve been a hardcore Opera user since one of the early 6.0x versions), I don’t understand this statement:

“The search box in Opera is very cumbersome and unusable.”

Why? You say it’s because of the Find-In-Page, but then you say there’s a better way to do so – so just don’t mind the search box for find-in-page.

Quite contrary to your findings I think the search engine customization is much better in Opera. I never could add search engines easier as in Opera 9: Just right-click into the search box (on the website you want to add) and click “Create search”. Now you can add a shortcut (let’s say “wen” for wikipedia in English) and that’s all it. Then you can type “wen Opera (web browser)” into the adress bar and there you go. Once again, I never found a feature that useful in Firefox.

But as you say, everyone needs something different. I use Firefox sometimes as a side browser, but as I use all the other programs integrated in Opera (IRC, mail) very heavily I could never switch. And for me the RSS display couldn’t be better.

But otherwise a nice review, especially from a long-time Firefox user

I’m surpised my a/v didn’t affect ff either, but I’m scrapping real time protection anyway, as I just don’t think it’s worth the processing power, I do regular scans of my system as it is. Good luck with solving the probs for your friends!