Giving Opera a try
I've recently become interested in the new Firefox 2 (which is currently in RC2 I *think*). Whilst I won't be using the beta, I have been keeping a keen eye on it's development.
You can't help but notice when you read any discussion on browsers the number of people advocating Opera as far better than Firefox (and by proxy IE). Some of you may remember my previous brief flirtation with Opera. However, I didn't find it an altogether pleasent experience. You may remember my shock at the discovery of a clock widget that changed skin when you clicked it. And you clicked it to drag it...
But maybe I judged it too harshly. After all, I did only use it for one evening. Maybe I really will use all those features I've never needed to use before. Maybe it will eventualy prove to be faster and use up less memory than people claim (currently I estimate it to load pages 1.5-2 times as slow, and take up twice as much memory as Firefox on an otherwise pretty idle machine).
Part of the problem is that compared to my streamlined Firefox interface and experience Opera seems positively schitzophrenic. The website claimed to have the largest browsing region of any popular browser (IE, Firefox and Konqueror most likely). However, as you can clearly see below my Firefox setup gives you almost the biggest region possible. No other browser will allow me to customise it like this.
The other thing that drives me up the wall is the terrible middle-click scrolling support. In most Windows apps, Firefox included, middle-click scrolling will take place under the cursor. However, Opera insists on moving the cursor to the center of the screen. This seriously jars and disrups your train of thought.
Add to this Firefox's far superior search and you can see how my Firefox experience is much smoother and streamline than Opera to date.
About the only feature that I really like in Opera is the Zoom. Rather than meerly increasing the text size (which is still possible in Opera, through a peversly long Prefrences process) you can pseudo-zoom in on the page. This has the benifit of making websites with annoylingly narrow article space a lot nicer when you want to make the text bigger so you can read whilst lounging in your chair. However, whilst it often means less scrolling, it can mean more scrolling in some circumstances thanks to the pseudo nature of it. I guess the next week will tell which was the balance swings.
I feel I should mention some of the other features though, such as possibly the best sessions saving currently in a public release (though Firefox 2 will add this), a spellcheckers for a lot of text entry fields (also added in Firefox 2), a much better RSS aggregator and download manager (including the abillity to download torrents) than Firefox and, if it floats your boat, some fancy widgets (including the aforementioned clock).
I love my Firefox experience. I tollerate IE6. I've not tried IE7 (longer than half an hour) and I'm irritated by Opera. However, I'm willing to let that change. I'm going to try using Opera almost exclusively as my only browser (ironicly I will be using Firefox for Vox as Opera has a terrible time with it. This is my second time writing this post) for a week and a half (until the end of next week).
I will report on how well it goes, of my ups and downs and everything in between. Who knows, maybe I'll make the switch (shock horror :O I'll be using Linux next!)
