Opera 9.0

[Budyzir]

I gave up on Windows IE several years ago and switched to FireFox. For several months now Firefox has been acting really quirky and locking up so bad that I have had to do hard reboots. Earlier this week I read this review on eweek.com about the new Opera release:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1980533,00.asp

I just installed it and so far I am really digging it. Anyone else using Opera?


http://www.opera.com/download/

[B54]

I have never had a problem with IE Explorer. It is my default browser. I have Firefox and Opera installed, but I rarely use them.

[Warfarer]

I have installed Opera on both my Powerbook and my desktop and didn't like it on either. I understand that it is supposed to be the fastest browser on some tests but it always seemed slow to me.

[LZMF1]

me likey likey opera 9

[PestCoast]

Eh... Opera is ok now but it's nothing special.

Most of my Opera gripes come from a developer standpoint. Opera used to be a pain in the ass because it identified itself to websites as IE and websites would feed it IE code that it wouldn't render properly. This was only really obnoxious because the stupid Opera coders said "that's because web designers are lazy" when in fact it's because they didn't want to take a chance of websites not recognizing their browser at all so they masqueraded as IE.

From a browsing standpoint it doesn't truly render any faster than IE or Firefox. It will load some elements out of order and look faster, but from the first page request to the final element render it takes about the same amount of time as IE or Firefox. And it's reallllly slow with Flash for some reason and suffers the same memory drain problems that both IE and Firefox have.

I don't want to slam Opera but it gets too much hype mostly because "it's not IE" but it doesn't really bring anything significant to the table other than tabbed browsing which many other browsers also provide.

[Budyzir]

Eh... Opera is ok now but it's nothing special.

Most of my Opera gripes come from a developer standpoint. Opera used to be a pain in the ass because it identified itself to websites as IE and websites would feed it IE code that it wouldn't render properly. This was only really obnoxious because the stupid Opera coders said "that's because web designers are lazy" when in fact it's because they didn't want to take a chance of websites not recognizing their browser at all so they masqueraded as IE.

From a browsing standpoint it doesn't truly render any faster than IE or Firefox. It will load some elements out of order and look faster, but from the first page request to the final element render it takes about the same amount of time as IE or Firefox. And it's reallllly slow with Flash for some reason and suffers the same memory drain problems that both IE and Firefox have.

I don't want to slam Opera but it gets too much hype mostly because "it's not IE" but it doesn't really bring anything significant to the table other than tabbed browsing which many other browsers also provide.

So I guess my next question is what is the best browser? My original switch form IE to Firefox was due to security issues I was reading about. When Firefox was first hyped in the media one of the strong points was that it was more secure. I also really liked the tab feature. Now I switched to Opera because Firefox became a slug on my computer.

Any of you techies care to opine?

[PestCoast]

Use what you like. It's pretty much 6 of one, half-a-dozen of another.

IE defaults to having ActiveX enabled and ActiveX has many holes that can be exploited. This became an easy target for other browser makers to say "we're more secure". But ActiveX itself is not a problem, it's visiting sites that maliciously execute code via ActiveX and try to hijack your browser, install software, use your machine as a "zombie" box, etc. To use a stupid car analogy- Ant's Cadillac has a better alarm system than my Lincoln but if either of us parks our vehicles in a shit neighborhood they'll both get broken into. If you don't take your computer to shitty "neighborhoods" you don't have much to worry about regarding browser security. If you click a link to some porn site in Russia you have a much more likely chance of being attacked than if you go to playboy.com

Phishing also seems to get lumped into browser security even though it's really a social engineering problem. For example, if you type wellsfargo.com into your address bar you'll end up at Wells Fargo's site and you don't have to worry about getting a virus, but if you click a link in an e-mail directing you to a site called wellsfargo.com (http://www.we11sfargo.com/) that looks just like Wells Fargo's real site you're probably getting phished and the site is either hoping to trick you into divulging personal info or exploiting your browser and installing malicious software. Firefox hypes their anti-phishing features (the address bar turns green for https sites, etc.) but all the warnings in the world won't protect the user if the user ignores them.

Personally, I use IE (7b2) for most things. IE and Firefox both have preloaders that will load parts of their libraries into Windows' memory when you start your computer so they'll appear to load faster than Opera (or other p'ograms). If you have too many tabs/windows open in any of these 3 you'll start to notice significant system slowdown (this seems to happen most quickly with FF, but it is also very noticeable in IE). I rarely use Opera except to test sites for rendering errors and apply hacks accordingly. It's not that Opera or Firefox are bad browsers, but short of tabbed browsing they really don't offer any special features to put themselves above IE. The nerd community has been blasting Microsoft for years because IE hasn't had a new feature added since Netscape died but Firefox & Opera don't seem to offer much else other than tabbed browsing which I don't find to be very innovative at all. It's certainly nice to have alternatives, but at the end of the day the best browser for you is the one that you feel most comfortable with.