Last week I installed Opera for the first time, to make sure my site was usable to Opera users. Well there is some weird cookie/caching thing that makes it difficult to switch back and forth between text-only and full-graphics versions of my site, but other than that I only saw one thing that didn’t render the same as Firefox (and that turned out to be an ambiguity in my css that is now fixed). In fact, I haven’t yet found a site that doesn’t work in Opera (of course, I haven’t really been looking very hard).
I was not “won over” by Opera, in the way that I was with Firefox. Firefox was basically aimed at IE users who wanted a modern piece of software. I mean, they don’t advertise it like that, but if you look at the keyboard shortcuts and the menu layouts, they’re practically identical. Opera... not so much. I mean, I rely on Ctrl+Enter finishing a URL in the address bar-- I can’t remember the last time I had to type “www.” and “.com” in the address bar. And I rely on URL auto-completion in the address bar. Opera lists URLs that match what you’ve typed so far, but hitting tab doesn’t select the first item in that list.. meaning, I have to use the mouse too much. And Ctrl+T doesn’t open a new tab-- another shortcut I use all the time. Of course these are all ergonomic issues associated with using new software, and it may very well be that Opera has better ways of doing these things.
The good thing I noticed about Opera is that it’s fast. I mean, really fast. It was the first thing I noticed. I had long thought that something was wrong with either my server or my PHP code because Firefox often pauses briefly during a page load. Not with Opera. When I looked around the Opera site, I found that this speed is (not surprisingly) one of their selling points. I’m still not giving up Firefox, but now every time I use it I am painfully aware of just how slow it is, whereas before I was blissfully ignorant and assumed that’s just how the internet worked. On the plus side, it looks like the latest Gecko engine has undergone some big performance improvements, so maybe Firefox 2.0 won’t suffer from the same slownocity as 1.5.
PS- The sky looked pretty cool the other day so I took some pictures of it. I thought they were pretty so I put them on the site.
June 17, 9:00 am
What performance increases have you seen mentioned for Firefox 2.0? I was under the impression that Firefox 2 would use the same Gecko engine (1.8) as Firefox 1.5.
June 17, 9:09 pm
You’re right, I was going by this discussion of the topic, which is older than I realized. But the speed difference isn’t all that much, but still enough that I noticed it. At any rate, I’m not willing to give up all my precious extensions. :)