Switching Back From Opera to Firefox
I was wowed by Opera 8, so I abandoned Firefox 1.0.5. At the time this was due to rendering speed, UI-responsiveness and features that Firefox lacked.
Opera 9 wasn’t as good, I recall liking some of the new functionality, but suddenly there was lag when you clicked tabs, and created tabs, and pages took longer to load, and most infuriatingly, every few minutes the browser would hang, and you’d have to wait a few seconds for it to recover. This drove me crazy as it happened so often, and often in the middle of a mouse gesture, so the gesture failed, and I couldn’t be sure if this due to malcoordination or Opera being hung. Also, although I remember a time when if you didn’t use Internet Explorer, a lot of sites would be broken and more would just look funny, this is no longer the case, but still it’s worse for Opera than Firefox, and mostly with cool AJAX stuff like Google Writely.
Firefox 2 is awesome. UI-lag is absent, they obviously worked hard since 1.0.5 as I remember it lagging in places. Page loading is fast, very fast. Perhaps Opera still renders faster than Firefox, but who cares if it takes 3 times longer to get all the data. Firefox feels like magic here. Firefox 2 looks stunning, lovely subtle gradients, perfect spacing and minimalism, pretty web2 icons and curved edges. I love it. It even imported my bookmarks, history, everything from Opera, well everything but my RSS feeds, which will be a small pain to deal with. Firefox 2 starts up fast. Opera 9 takes minutes sometimes. This depends on how many tabs I had open last time, but it’s still crazy. It’s even worse on my Linux box at home.
Also since Firefox got spell checking (that is fast and perfect), and session-saving, there’s not much left I need from Opera. Installing the mouse gesture plugin brings the functionality I used in Opera equivalent in Firefox.
I’ll update as my experience grows.