update: Opera 9.62 was officially released!

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).

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