<lj-cut text=”Late Saturday night browser rant”>OK, so a debate constantly rages between users (or, better yet, *fans*) of Firefox and Opera, the two cross-platform alternative-browser heavyweights. Opera fans fault Firefox for its seemingly-instatiable memory hunger (“its a feature!”) and its failing of the Acid2 standards test for CSS rendering (which Safari passed first), while Firefox fans fault Opera for being closed-source (the company doesn’t see the need for it) and its lack of Firefox’s extendability (Opera aims to be an all-in-one internet suite like Netscape Navigator, a Firefox ancestor).
I guess that they both make up for what the other one lacks. They both have Dashboard-like widgets (Firefoxit and Opera Widgets), for example, but Opera’s widget feature gets far greater press than its Firefox counterpart. Opera also has in-browser Bittorrent capability (which I should probably try out sometime); maybe they should do like Shareaza and also add support for the other two heavyweights of Peer-to-Peer filesharing (Gnutella, used by Limewire; and eDonkey2000).
At the same time, I have my gripes about both browsers. Marketing, for most people, eventually gets old and dry (unless its a Google logo; those never seem to get old with Photoshoppers); the same goes no different for both Firefox and Opera. I thought that the Firefox Flicks thing was an unnecessary waste of time, and many people looked upon the increasing zealotry with a greater sense of disgust. Opera, I think that the logo (a big, red “O”) and the name (Does this browser sing?) just doesn’t give that much of a description for this browser’s much-vaunted capabilities (unlike the others, such as Explorer, Navigator, Konqueror, Safari, Firefox, Camino, etc.).
And let me just say that, even before I used either Firefox or Opera, I almost always stayed away from IE; at the time (early 2004), our ISP was MSN (first dial-up, then Bellsouth DSL coupled with MSN’s services), and we primarily used MSN Explorer. True, it didn’t have tabbed browsing and all of the niceties of FF which I now take for granted, but the email feature (for MSN mail rather than Hotmail) was actually far better than even today’s Windows Live Mail. I look back at MSN Explorer (which won’t be included in Vista or with Windows Live) with a pining nostalgia, albeit a weakened one as time goes by.
So yeah, browsers and stuff…..</lj-cut>
Yea, that’s how we started off. MSN Explorer was interesting. XD; We used Netzero for a while, until we realized the free-ness of it was only for 10 hours a week, and I killed that in two days. Dad ended up going to Bellsouth DSL, then Mom switched over. Now that Dad lives with my stepmom, we have Cable internet, but I’m gonna see if we can keep the DSL line at my Mom’s because Bellsouth allows for server usage, whereas Cox bans it.
About the Firefox vs. Opera… I prefer Firefox I think. Even if it’s for some very stupid features. The main one, is the image preview in it’s tab’s icon. Opera can’t do that as far as I’ve seen. The only thing I can’t stand about Firefox is that you have to close everything and restart it every so often to keep it from eating your memory. Last night, I had some 10+ tabs open, and I afternoon I had been browsing and downloading images. It was up to like… 175000 K size. Might have been 200000 but I can’t really remember.
Opera, I did the same and it glided through it. I’m assuming that Firefox stores as much of the web content as it can into the RAM so when you visit the site or something again, it loads much quicker.
Anyway.. yea.. just wanted to give my opinion on that. ^^