Is Opera9 what Firefox 2 should be?
Someone @ Digg asks: Is Opera9 what Firefox 2 should be?
It’s a good question. Assuming they bring BitTorrent back, I’d say Opera has a lot of advances. Yeah I’m sure we’re going to hear about Extensions from the Firefox crew. opera:config is similar to about:config in Mozilla. There are plenty of extensions based on Opera features, so I don’t imagine anyone can complain about that too strongly. I’ve wanted a GUI for a lot of hidden features so I’m glad to see this.
I still hope for per-site preferences and a GUI for editing search.ini and, of course, full ACID2 compliance… but Opera9p1 definitely comes close.
I’m much more concerned about what IE7 will be than what Firefox 2 will be. Firefox is already a great browser. IE7 has a long way to go from IE6.
8 Responses to “Is Opera9 what Firefox 2 should be?”
on 22 Oct 2005 at 9:16 am # anonymous
Let’s hope that with IE7 being (almost) standards compliant that we’ll get decent coding from webmasters–since it will break in IE7 too, which is what the naive webmasters use.
Yay for Opera 9!
on 24 Oct 2005 at 2:48 am # Arve
Err. There are site-specific preferences in Opera 9 TP1. There’s just no GUI yet. See Haavard’s post
on 31 Oct 2005 at 9:17 pm # Eric Blade
O9 does have per-site preferences, just read the changelog. :-)
There’s no GUI for editing it.
IE7 will still be missing tons and tons of stuff that Firefox and Opera have.
A lot of enhancements in the current TP involve scripting and stuff. I was able to make a couple of my userjs scripts run MUCH MUCH more efficiently with the new things. I hope that future TPs will give us more new stuff on the inside and on the outside. :D
I hear the IMAP stuff is pretty good for those it works for.
O9 is better at ACID2 than Firefox is :)
on 01 Nov 2005 at 9:20 am # Axe
It still doesn’t support writely
on 07 Nov 2005 at 3:37 pm # argie01
I’m using Opera from version 4.
But I think you can compare specific FF plugins and Opera.
The FF plugins add much more functionality than Opera will never have.
Until now, Opera can’t do something so simple as adblock extension. Of course, I can edit filter.ini and so on. But do you really think the users gonna edit filter.ini every time they want filter and adv ?
C’mon man… :)
The Opera’s speed is the best and almost the only feature to use it instead to use FF.
regards,
Argie
on 16 Dec 2005 at 10:02 am # Russ
Argie,
hey man come on, Opera has at least a few features over FF.
First of all, you say most users don’t want to manually edit .ini files. That’s true, but most users (the bulk of which still use IE) don’t want to go download 10 extensions to get a nice feature rich browser. I am technically saavy, and one of my favorite features is that I don’t need to extend Opera for my favorite features.
Second of all, I really feel the MDI in Opera is more intuitive than tabs in Firefox. Here’s a situation where you have to edit a (basically) text file to change some of FF’s tabbing, but Opera gives menus to edit MDI prefs.
Mind you, I dig FF too, but I just dig Opera more (a lot more). And, I have to be careful of comparison (as does anyone), because who knows what extensions are out there right now. But, I feel my first point covers that.
Oh, one last thing. And, this one’s a biggie. Here’s a wonderful feature of FF that I cannot completely figure out in Opera. You can (very easliy) set FF to clear ALL personal data on exit. This is an awesome feature, and probably a selling point for some. I wish we had that in Opera.
on 04 Jan 2006 at 9:06 am # Sami
Argie, there are lot of adblockers you can use with opera… I like http://www.operaadfilter.com/ very much, just try it out…
on 11 May 2006 at 4:35 pm # sucka4Opra
I’ve been using Opera since version 3 and loving it!
As an interaction engineer I’m still amazed about the usability of this browser. The wand for instance, one control-enter and you’re logged in to your favourite site. Do you have more logins? arrow-down, enter.
The best: OPERA LETS YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S DOING! There’s a real status-bar, not just a blue rectangle moving from left to right to left to right to left, meanwhile showing a white, empty browserwindow like MS IE.
Firefox, in my opinion, is pretty cool as well. When developing a webapplication i always use Firefox because there’s this fantastic webdeveloper extension, which lets you edit styles and more on the fly and has loads of debugging tools.
Some of my customers actually care how their site renders in Firefox. I’ve never heard anyone complain about a page not rendering properly in Opera, other than myself that is. The use of Firefox, some say, went up to more then 10%. This surely will make a lot of idiots think twice before clicking crap in FrontPage. More standards compliant sites will be good for Opera.
I think everyone who ever tried Opera for their browsing for a long enough amount of time (let’s say o month) will NEVER go back. I’ll put my money on that. Plus I heard Opera’s gonna have extensions support as well!
To sum up my story with a previous post: Yay for Opera!!!