Firefox and the failed clone wars

I think I've mentioned before how I hate Firefox. If I had the choice between IE and Firefox, I'd obviously choose Firefox, but just because its better than IE doesn't make it good. I use Opera on a day to day basis and find that it does almost everything better than Firefox. Firefox has been trying really hard to catch up to opera, as is really obvious with version 3.0 release, and while they have implemented a lot of features, they aren't always well implemented. My only gripe about Opera is that sites aren't normally built for it, but often enough you can disguise Opera as Firefox and get away with more stuff, like the Google Labs features in GMail.

So what do I mean about not implementing the ideas properly?

Well again, Firefox 3 is slower than Opera 9.5, even though a lot of benchmarks seem to show loading time to be quicker, its not just about loading time. Response time on the interface matters a lot, and Opera is lightning fast.

Firefox is fat!! I use both browsers on the Asus EEE. My wife keeps Firefox for work ( and she likes it for some reason, even though it randomly crashes on GMail ). And I use Opera. She even uses opera for a lot of searching although won't normally admit that its nicer for searching than Firefox. Anyway, having only a 4GB harddisk, its really difficult to maintain free space ( especially using a big distro like openSUSE, with both KDE 3.5 and 4.1 installed ). So we install Firefox 3 ( go through the complicated process that is the upgrade, involving downloading a tar.gz file and extracting it to /usr/local, as per site instructions ). A week or two later, the 200mb free on the /home partition is gone. How? Why? I spend a few days searching and notice that Firefox has a massive ( 180mb ) folder with a really random name in .mozilla/firefox called u0o9g2w7.default ( said it was random ).  So I think, well that must be the cache, since no one is stupid enough to store anything important in a randomly named folder ( except maybe a virus or Windows ). Which is a valid thought too, cause any developer who thinks its a good idea to store important stuff in a folder called u0o9g2w7.default shouldn't work on a project with me or any of my previous software managers and colleagues. So I delete the folder, open FF again to find all of my wife's extentions and bookmarks are gone. By this time she's pretty pissed. Luckily it wasn't too long after we first installed it, so there wasn't much there. After a 3 days this time, /home partition is full. This time, I'm more careful... luckily for Linux and ls -lRS ( list all files recursively ordered by size ), I find the culprit. Its the url histroy sqlite db file. After 3 days, its already 50mb. WTF???? Seriously, how? My wife is a writer, and has to do a lot of research for the stuff she writes, so I expect her to browse a lot, but how can Firefox allow this to happen. Its claim for mobility and being able to run on anything is invalidated by stuff like this. Out of the box Firefox is great for looking at HTML+CSS sites for 1 day, but thereafter it degrades rapidly.

They seem to have a fast dial addon which sucks. Opera's speed dial is 10x better, and syncs with myOpera/Opera Link. Which brings me to another point. There is no decent equivalent to Opera Link. I understand why to some extent. If FF adds it, it detracts from the plugin creators, since they can't add a custom synchronize, but honestly all you need is a simple server sync of some thngs. And note that I say some things, not ONE thing. I like the fact that Opera Link takes care of Speed Dial and Bookmarks, and this was acctually one way we recovered some of my wife's lost bookmarks. Before we left South Africa she used Opera a lot, and her bookmarks were accessible from my.opera.com. In fact if someone made a Firefox plugin for bookmark sync with my.opera.com, she'd probably use it for her bookmarks.

Session management in FF3 is epic fail. Yes when you exit FF it asks to save the session, and yes this works. As long as you exit FF. This is inherently an issue. What if it crashes ( and it does, a lot ). So what does Firefox do in this case. It loses the session you were working on. But you say, this is expected no? NO. If you are used to Opera, you get used to a session choosing dialog that has a "Continue from last time" option, along with listing your other previously saved sessions, and the default session. This means that when you're looking for a site for 3 hours, find it and the browser crashes, you don't need to look again ( yes I have a bad memory, I won't remember the URL ).

So again, while Firefox is better than IE, I have arrived at the conclusion that the latest Konqueror with session management that works is better than Firefox, and I'll only use it as a last resort. Opera is way ahead, and I really want people to realise this. I have introduced many people to Opera, most of them can never go back to Firefox anymore. For the sake of tehnological advancement, try Opera today!

Opera

Today I had another conversation with a few friends at work about internet browsers. Actually it was about apps in general, and which apps we prefer for certain tasks, but it started with browsers. I do a bit of freelance web dev, and getting sites to work in certain uber commercial browsers is nasty. The Mrs and I spent a whole day just getting a layout to look the same in that one browser as it does in Firefox and Opera. So this is what I was telling my friends. Then we veered off into a conversation about Opera, and why it is the best browser but is virtually unheard of outside of mobile standings.

Its fair to say that Internet Explorer and Safari are well known because of being bundled with the OS. But why Firefox???? I hate it. Ok, its not as bad as the other two, and if you move from IE6 to Firefox (ff), you'll be in heaven. But honestly, why not Opera??? I can't use another browser anymore. My friends arguement about why he uses ff is that he likes the amount of extensions. And fair enough, ff owns the extensions market in browser land, but the fact that half of the extensions you install are just to bring it up to the functionality of Opera makes it rubbish.

I cannot browse anymore without mouse gestures. In all fairness at first I was sceptical, as I'm sure most ppl are. But once you learn a few basics, you cannot go back. Its impossible. The gestures such as close tab, forward and backward are life savers. Everytime I sit at a pc with ff on it ( or fsm save me single page per window ie 6 ), I end up moving the mouse around out of habbit and getting confused about why a menu is popping up. Yes there is an ff extension for it, but not everyone uses it, so it's much easier to sit at another pc with Opera on and have gestures without needing to install something.

Then there is bookmark syncing. In all fairness Opera does a lot more than sync bookmarks, but to me this is the most useful so far of what it does sync ( i heard somewhere that session management syncing is in the pipes, that would be amazing. ) With ff 2, you have to dl some extension for it. But with Opera, I sit at my wifes pc, type in my username and pass, and there are my bookmarks. Easy. No hassles.

The Opera 9.50 beta that I have been using has an awesome feature, namely the indexing of text in pages! So you can just type in the address bar some key words from an article you read recently, and there you have it, a list of all pages you have read recently that contain those words!! Its awesome!

The Trash Can. I've never been a fan of the concept of recycle bins, but this one is amazing. It took me years to work out what it does, but once you use it, you miss not having it. The little bin icon next to your tabs keeps a list of reccently closed tabs and opera windows!! Accidently close a tab/window, just Ctrl+z, orpop open the bin, and select it from the list. It is a handy feature even though you might not realise how often you would use it.

Stable as a horse. Firefox 2 crashes. I don't care what anyone says, but the Opera 9.50 beta 1 was more stable than any Firefox I have ever run. Every browser breaks. My mom ( a 50 odd year old woman with no computer knowledge ) has been converted to using Firefox ( on Linux ), and everytime she uses IE on a friends pc she complains about how unstable it is. Opera is even better. The fact that I have been using a beta for months now across 3 pc's and never thought twice is huge credit to the programmers at Opera.

Speed!!!!!! After using Opera for a few weeks you will not be able to stand how slow other browsers are in rendering a page. I don't know how or why, but they have something in Opera that makes it the fastest html rendering engine around. By a long shot. 

One other kewl thing with Opera is the availability of the browser on mobiles and the Wii. Although this might be unfair that other browsers do not enter this market, it really does serve as a great way to hype the popularity of the browser, and may very well be what makes them succeed in the long run. Everyone I know who browses the net on their phones uses Opera mini. The fact that I can sync my bookmarks to it too is amazing, nevermind the outstanding mobile browser technology!

All in all, the only reason I can see that people are not using Opera is because people are still building websites for browsers that are not standards compliant. So this is a plea to all developers out there to just make sure their sites look and work well in Opera. Its free, and clearly superior. Go now. Fix your site.

www.opera.com