Firefox or Opera?

[aofl]

My company has finally gotten around to supporting Firefox with our product, so I have the satisfaction of pointing out to my co-workers, when they run into a limitation with IE that they should start using a real browser.

It's always funny to see everyone's task bar bursting at the seams with IE window after IE window, and all I ever have is my one Firefox window open with many many tabs. Wouldn't want to live without tabbed browsing.

Haven't used Opera in a long time, but I remember liking it. It just didn't work with our product so it just wasn't useful for me.

DB

 

[moopet]

In the interests of historical fairness I'd like to point out that for those advocating Firefox because it has these wonderful tabbed windows... well, they copied it off Opera. It's better now, though
And obviously rendering pages with a biro and the bag of a cigarette packet is likely to be more accurate than using IE, so comparisons there are like mocking the afflicted.

 

[cesium]

I use firefox-
It is free
Tabbed browsing
Works on mac (better then safari [uggh.])
Has cool extension-plugin things
Mouse gestures
People paid apple to put thier web addresses perminantly in the history, so even if you clear your history, you will see websites come up when you try to type in an address.

 

[Psi Baba]

I use Firefox. . . . And I don't want my browser to handle my email, etc. If I wanted that I'd get Mozilla. It's just wasted space.

moopet, browserwise, do you prefer Firefox or Mozilla? I know they're made by the same people but they do look different. I've used both briefly, but haven't really tested Firefox vigorously. Are they basically the same? Is the Thunderbird e-mail client preferable to Mozilla's?

 

[chrisqqgx4]

Interesting, intelligent responses.

I use both, but prefer Opera. Proviso: I use AdMuncher (and thus didn't pay to buy Opera), but I find:

- Opera is quicker to load a page (subjective I know, but I load the same half-dozen newspaper sites every morning and do random tests). This might be because of AdMuncher though I'm not taking it out just to try!

- Firefox loading (and especially reloading) of a page is awful with images. It doesn't seem to hold an image holder and so the page I'm looking at (whilst it's still being loaded or reloaded) keeps jumping away from me. Not with Opera.

- If I reload halfway down a page, and since I first loaded it other comments have been added (like in a busy JREF forum page) FF loses where I was and puts me at a spurious place within the page. Not with Opera.

- This might be my settings. With Firefox there's no 'Tab' toolbar viewed until I open a second tab. That sends the paging all out again. And it takes the Tab toolbar away when I close the second window meaning another internal rejig of the page within the browser. Real annoying.

- I think Bookmark management is easier and more intuitive with Opera.

- The elusive "Look and Feel" is so much better with Opera. Can't define it, but I can do things better and find obscure things quicker and easier with Opera.

- Firefox is better with the extensions (begging the question that they should have been in in the first place) but twice I've had problems installing them. The third-party site timed out and the other said I needed a newer version (the one that I was already using!) Put me off third party extensions.

- Firefox is better at compatibilty, but I've only had a problem with Opera maybe, twice, three times the last year. Certainly can't remember the last time. But never any problem with FF.

Horses for courses I suppose. Some of the above might sound like niggles (but I do need help with that Tab toolbar!) but they make all the difference. Still, can't say there's anything wrong with Firefox.

Edited for typos

 

[Donks]

Horses for courses I suppose. Some of the above might sound like niggles (but I do need help with that Tab toolbar!) but they make all the difference. Still, can't say there's anything wrong with Firefox.

Edited for typos

Everyone's welcome to their opinion. Yours just happens to be wrong In any case, Tools>Advanced>Tabbed Browsing, uncheck "Hide the tab bar while only one web site is open." You may need to restart Firefox.

 

[chrisqqgx4]

Everyone's welcome to their opinion. Yours just happens to be wrong In any case, Tools>Advanced>Tabbed Browsing, uncheck "Hide the tab bar while only one web site is open." You may need to restart Firefox.

I may in the future admit to being wrong, but I see no such option. This is FF version 1.0 on Windows XP no SP2.

I'm guessing you mean Tools>Options>Advanced>Tabbed Browsing. Under "Advanced" I see this

+Accessibility
+Browsing
+Software Update
+Security
+Certificates
+Validation

Wish I could attach an image.

But I do see Tool>Options>Tabbed Browsing, but under that there's no Advanced. And certainly not that option you mentioned above.

Worst of all, when I search under Help with either "tabbar" or "tab bar", there's no results. Firefox is good, but it doesn't help you to help yourself.

 

[chrisqqgx4]

I may in the future admit to being wrong

And I do. It's there under Tabbed Browsing. Been using FF for months, and never found it until now.

Mark one up for FF this time, but having used both browswers and marking them for:

- Ease of setting the various options
- Ease of getting useful info from the help system

It's Opera all the way. Yes, I didn't spot that option, and that puts me off FF even more. I don't find it intuitive.

Edited for misspelling

 

[Donks]

I don't remember how Opera does settings, but I'll readily admit that some of the Firefox settings are freaking medieval (Just not in this particular case). For some you have to create a user.js text file and write a particular string, which of course is not really documented.

 

[moopet]

moopet, browserwise, do you prefer Firefox or Mozilla? I know they're made by the same people but they do look different. I've used both briefly, but haven't really tested Firefox vigorously. Are they basically the same? Is the Thunderbird e-mail client preferable to Mozilla's?

I prefer Firefox and Thunderbird. I've not used Mozilla for a few months actually, though it used to be one of my standard browsers. I like having a small, simple browser that I can customise with the extensions I want, rather than starting from a big package which contains things I don't use.
Neither seems better or worse in terms of bugs, particularly, either.
One thing I will say is that since about version 0.7 or thereabouts, the startup speed of firefox has suffered noticably. They no longer use the quickstart feature in windows (where the program remained loaded and sat in the system tray) which is an option I miss.

 

[ihaunter]

I've been using Opera for a while and I love it, except for the few sites that it chokes on. I thought I might give Firefox a try, too soon to comment, but I do have a question.

Is there a way to set it up so that when I click a link that normally pops up a new browser instance, such as clicking a link on this forum, it instead just opens a new tab? I know about right clicking to open a link in a new tab, but if I don't know ahead of time that the link will open a new window, I will still end up with a bunch of windows cluttering my desktop.

 

[ssibal]

Firefox

 

[aofl]

Is there a way to set it up so that when I click a link that normally pops up a new browser instance, such as clicking a link on this forum, it instead just opens a new tab? I know about right clicking to open a link in a new tab, but if I don't know ahead of time that the link will open a new window, I will still end up with a bunch of windows cluttering my desktop.

I don't have an answer, but this is on my short list of complaints about Firefox. It would be great to have a solution to this problem.

DB

 

[Interesting Ian]

Choosing between Firefox or Opera is like choosing between the silver or the gold Rolls Royce. Compared to a IE which is a turd-brown rusty Lada.

Yes, but the only browser that works with a lot of stuff is explorer. So you have to have explorer and another browser (I have Netscape).

 

[garys_2k]

I don't have an answer, but this is on my short list of complaints about Firefox. It would be great to have a solution to this problem.

DB

http://www.pryan.org/mozilla/site/TheOneKEA/tabprefs/

Features

The features offered by TBP are as follows:

* open URLs in the URL bar and searches from the search bar in new tabs

* open the homepage in every newly created tab

* select tabs by moving the mouse onto them, instead of clicking on them

* moving the tabbar to the bottom of the browser window

* opening URLs from the Extension/Theme Manager and the Help window in new tabs

* opening the throbber in a new tab

* control the focusing/unfocusing of various tab-creating functions, such as the File->New Tab command

* per-tab locking, to force left-clicked links to open in new tabs

* compatibility with Tab Clicking Options

 

[ihaunter]

Thanks garys_2k. That was one of my primary turn offs for Firefox. Still too early to fully endorse it. (Still need to load in some plug-ins) There still seems to be some sites that don't work. (might be because I don't have the plug-ins)

 

[moopet]

Thanks garys_2k. That was one of my primary turn offs for Firefox. Still too early to fully endorse it. (Still need to load in some plug-ins) There still seems to be some sites that don't work. (might be because I don't have the plug-ins)

And to anyone else suggesting you need to keep IE:
The problem is, generally, that the sites are written badly, not the browser. There are a good few of us who simply don't have access to IE in any case.
A properly-written, standards-compliant site should display correctly in every modern browser and be accessible to other clients such as braille terminals, speech systems, print-outs, impaired-vision systems, small (phone) screens, etc. All this without resorting to hacky browser-detection scripts - it should just work, and what's more, it can.
The problem lies in convincing people not to just keep churning out slop that works ok in IE. The learning curve isn't really that different.
In my opinion, the diversity of browsers can only encourage such writing, which is good news for the future of the web

It's got to grow up a bit in the next couple of years into a more structured system than our current HTML anyway.

 

[iain]

The problem lies in convincing people not to just keep churning out slop that works ok in IE. The learning curve isn't really that different.
In my opinion, the diversity of browsers can only encourage such writing, which is good news for the future of the web

Hopefully this is getting easier. When I encounter a site that doesn't work with Firefox (or, even worse, blocks Firefox though it might work if they let it try) I drop them a short, polite, note saying that I couldn't access their site and mentioning that over 10% of people (and growing) use browsers other than Internet Explorer.

For companies, annoying a few geeks might not be a big deal; annoying (and perhaps locking out) 10-20% of your potential customers is.

 

[Zep]

I agree - there IS a standard for HTML, so it would be good if everyone stuck to it.

And here's the tabbing options in FF 1.0. I haven't tried them all yet - could be some cute tricks in there?

 

[Darat]

Was a long time Opera user, then upgraded to one of the 7s and had a lot of problems with Opera not completely rendering pages and indeed locking up at that point. Firefox was in its Beta phase then so I started using it, really liked it and although occasionally still use Opera I've kept with Firefox through to version 1.

I use Opera on my P900 (phone) and its excellent at rendering to the very small screen even complex sites like a forum page.

(I’ve just downloaded the latest beta for Opera and you never know I may return to it.)