Using Opera - being the 0.6 percent of the world - Firefox3 YM9 oh yeah, big hypes..

    update: Opera 9.62 was officially released!

Opera 9.5 - beautifully engineered

About Firefox 3.0: It reminds me of Yahoo Messenger 9.0! Look at all ‘enhancements’ made from YM 8.1 to YM 9.0. None of them is big enough to make version jump. For Firefox3, the situation is even worse when 90% of my existing extension are no longer compatible!!
Opera was humble when making a move from 9.28 to 9.50. Firefox was boasting. Yahoo was lying.

I have been using Opera for more than 2 years, and have never switched back to Firefox, Maxthon, or even Internet Explorer.
Last week a friend told me “Look at this chart and tell me why you use Opera”

Opera is simple, ugly, and fast. With Opera 9.50 Kestrel, Opera is not ugly anymore. Unfortunately, it is getting faster. Damn fast.
For example, for this integrated Speed Dial functionality, Firefox developers implemented Speed Dial add-ons. I tested this addons on Firefox 2.0 and it took me 3 seconds for every load (for Opera it takes 0.2 second).
sd
Same story with the forward/backward functionality. In Firefox a back/forward takes at least 1 second, while in Opera it takes 0.2 second without reloading the page. Page reloading can be configured in Opera. My default setting is 1 day. Normally if the page is more than 1-day old, I don’t care reloading. The world is not changing that fast, isn’t it?

The major drawback of Opera is java applet support, which turned me to Firefox many times. Don’t say Opera does not support Java applet; in most cases it’s because the applet does not support Opera D

The next time anyone asks me why I’m using Opera which is only used by 0.6% of the world, here is the answer:

“It’s because 76% of this world is using Internet Explorer”.

Refer to this link for a comprehensive list of Firefox extension incorporated into Opera:
http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/09/opera-and-firefox-extensions-ii

2 Responses to “Using Opera - being the 0.6 percent of the world - Firefox3 YM9 oh yeah, big hypes..”


  1. 1 Vo Minh Chanh Vo Minh Chanh Aug 8th, 2008 at 12:48 am

    I agree with ngxtri that a lot of Firefox extensions are still not compatible with Firefox 3. But the autozooming feature of FF3 is worth the upgrading. In FF2, I need to do a lot of zooming in on my 22-inch LCD. This feature is like this: when you zoom-in a webpage in a tab then you switch to another tab which displays a webpage of the same website. FF3 will automatically zoom to exactly the same proportion.

  2. 2 ngxtri ngxtri Aug 11th, 2008 at 5:46 pm

    FYI, the “autozooming” feature has been there in Opera since I could remember (around 4 years ago).. Anyway FF3 deserves a praise for that.
    I am getting bored by software industry. New softwares are over-advertised, just like movies… Next topic won’t be software-related, that’s for sure )
    Thanks for your comment.

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