Opera vs. Firefox 2: New Age of Heroes
The years 2003 and 2004 saw me venturing through rough waters across the oceanic internet. In the beginning of 2003, I was still browsing at a crisp 14.4 kbps with AOL 5.0, but with the purchase of a cable modem came my prompt switch to IE 6.0. For some months I can recall cooly defending IE from a friend who stood by Netscape, only to discover myself that we’d both been fools.
This discovery came when I stumbled upon Mozilla Firefox, which if my memory serves me correctly, was around version .8 at the time I first started using it. I was amazed by this new sensation of “tabbed browsing” along with promises of better security, pop-up blocking, mouse gestures, and a seeming limitless amount of functionality that IE couldn’t even touch. I quickly fell in love with the program, its open-source roots made it quite the rebel back in the day and it was endearing to many a tech-geek with its campaign to “Retake the web.” At one point, I even considered buying a promotional t-shirt, but upon actually seeing someone with said shirt, I realized that browser campaigns were perhaps best left for the internet. In general, the Firefox team could do no wrong at the time.
This love affair with Firefox went on for many years, but slowly Firefox began to lose that pep and freshness that initially drew me in. It didn’t help that I’d occasionally check my memory usage to see 200,000 kb, 300,000, kb, even 500,000 KB occasionally, often without good reason. The problem with Firefox was that it had became closer and closer to that “MonSter” that it longed to defeat and eventually I started to ‘lose the faith’. Firefox had become the standard in web browsing in my eyes, but along the way, it had also become bloated and complacent.
A secret link in Netscape/Firefox releases detailing the campaign against "Mammon". Go to about:mozilla in Firefox to see it for yourself.
Like many others in my situation, I chose the “natural progression” and switched over to Opera. I had tried using Opera in the past but there were quite a few irritating transitional steps that I’d have to take and at the time I couldn’t stomach it. Now on my second try, I’ve been better and I can see why many power-users favor Opera. Firefox may be the most customizable browser on the market, in good part due to its respectable userbase, but that potential had come at the cost of the base-browsing experience. I chose Opera for its robustness, speed, and dependency and yes, it’s no exaggeration to say that many of the functions that are popular through Firefox add-ons are built-in to Opera (that Quicktime and Flash support seem built-in is a major plus). It doesn’t have that fiery, upstart attitude of the Mozilla guys, but after having been burned repeatedly, I think I can live without that.
Nevertheless, this whole process has made me realize that no browser will ever be perfect. Opera renders some sites awkwardly (including my own blog), it’s not fully supported by gmail, Facebook runs like garbage, etc., but I could probably think up a list that’d make anyone wonder why I switched in the first place. I think the silliest thing is that some of its nuances seem there only to give the browser a sense of uniqueness. The “Personal Bar”, its closest equivalent to a Links bar, is flat-out clumsy and hard to work with even though such a feature should be an afterthought by now. And then there’s Widgets, which I assume are safer than Firefox add-ons since they’re less involved with the core code, but most of them are completely useless wastes of time, see for yourself. Even after searching Google for “useful Opera widgets,” I could only roll my eyes at the results.
There was an article on maximumpc some weeks back that compared 9 browsers (some were beta versions) and it was clear from the article that no browser was clearly ahead of the others. In fact, the writer seemed delighted in such a heated, modern-day “browser war” (much like the days of IE vs. Netscape) as it showed competition to be fiercer than ever. I’d agree that competition is fantastic for such an integral aspect of computing, but I would want to see more acknowledgement from devs. of their competitor’s successes, even if it meant “stealing” functionality. Too often it seems like one group goes out of their way to do things differently, just to claim uniqueness. In reality, they’re only fooling themselves (‘sup Personal Bar). And when Opera isn’t even making the effort to increase compatibility with Facebook, you have to wonder whether they’re really thinking about their users or their own egos.
I’m going to keep using Opera for the time being, even if it means having to use Google Chrome for gmail and Facebook. This whole process has made me surer than ever that no piece of software is ever going to be perfect, and too often will the user have to make up for what’s lost rather than the other way around. But on the other hand, I wanted robustness and dependency, and for the most part, I’ve gotten that in spades. It’s as if Firefox is the hormonal teen trying to please everybody and do everything without realizing what it wants for itself, and Opera is the cool, focused 20-something who is moving forward in their life rather than around and around. I helped them “take back the web”, but now they’ll have to win me back as well.
