Battle of the browsers. Muhahaha.

[Days of Empire]

Opera, anyday.

I do quite like Firefox, it's quite a nice little browser. Efficient. But Opera is quite simply the best I've ever used. It is a little heavier on system resources than Firefox, but for my money it's worth it.

Ultimately, all the browsers are pretty good, at least to the point of being useable.

Except IE. Which is not so much a browser as a series of loosely connected security holes, though you never see them in action, as you can't see past the popups, and if you do, it'll probably crash.

I mean come on, it doesn't even have tabbed browsing! Or Mouse-gestures! Or an integrated mail-client! You can only have one homepage!  

[Arivel]

Erix Griffon

Opera, anyday.

I do quite like Firefox, it's quite a nice little browser. Efficient. But Opera is quite simply the best I've ever used. It is a little heavier on system resources than Firefox, but for my money it's worth it.

Ultimately, all the browsers are pretty good, at least to the point of being useable.

Except IE. Which is not so much a browser as a series of loosely connected security holes, though you never see them in action, as you can't see past the popups, and if you do, it'll probably crash.

I mean come on, it doesn't even have tabbed browsing! Or Mouse-gestures! Or an integrated mail-client! You can only have one homepage!

*is seriously beginning to consider changing browsers*  

[Days of Empire]

I just opened up my copy of Firefox to make sure I do remember what I'm supposed to be talking about - tabbed browsing is always good (Opera has that) but it's still lacking mouse-gestures, god's gift to the lazy.

In Opera, if I click the right mouse button and flick the mouse:
Left - I go back
Right - I go forwards
Up - I stop loading
Down - I open a new tab
Up then down in one go - I refresh

A lot of the other features I couldn't say for sure whether Firefox has, but I can't see them yet. But it doesn't show you the speed a page is loading at, and only gives you a rough approximation of how far done it is. And I'm sure it actually loads pages slower than Opera...

It has just as many "Warning - you have just opened a web-page! Are you sure you want to continue?" messages as IE does.

The skin is fairly pretty, but a skin is a skin. I know for a fact there are truckloads of Firefox-style skins for Opera.

It doesn't have an inbuilt advert like Opera does if you haven't sent them money, but since Opera started giving you the option of Google text ads instead, that's not that intrusive. And I'm sure I could crack it, if I could be bothered.

I can't drag important links onto the toolbar so I can go back to them quickly later.

And it doesn't seem to have the auto-recovery function either. If Opera were to crash, or the computer were to lock, or even if you just closed Opera by accident, you can tell it to 'Continute from Last Session', and it brings up all your pages again.

Looks like it does have a mail client of some kind, though I'm just skimming through it here.

Can't see a way to save sessions either - when I open Opera it automatically loads about 6 tabs - 4 forums and two inboxes.

There's no auto-refresh function - granted it's forbidden on Gaia on pain of being banned really hard, but it's very useful elsewhere.



Edit - just realised I've been using v7.54, when v8 has just been released. *downloads*


Edit 2 - Go and get Opera 8. Now. It's even better than 7.54. Much faster and lighter. It's just destroyed Firefox's one advantage.


Edit 3 - If you do download it, you may think it doesn't block popups, and takes up ludicrous amounts of screen space. I've had Opera 8 installed for about 2 minutes, and I've got all unrequested popups blocked, and trimmed it down to look like this: http://tinypic.com/4r6dyh  

[Gaulia]

I have mouse gestures with FireFox.

Yay@extensions.

But yeah, Invi, Arivel, MAKE THE SWITCH! biggrin DD

And I can't help but feel the 'weird topics' thing is my fault for bitching about the lack of variety.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, we're also meant to learn how to summon demons in this thread.
Maybe it's an extension. O: xd  

[Invictus_88]

My PC was made sometime between the Middle Ages and the reign of Elizabeth the First, will it be able to cope?  

[Nebelstern]

Invictus_88

My PC was made sometime between the Middle Ages and the reign of Elizabeth the First, will it be able to cope?

Probably. I risk no further comment. It IS only a web browser... sweatdrop  

[mattyp]

Firefox, however I have been hearing good things about the latest verion of IE.

But it took them so long to improve it and they only did because firefox is better, so I wont go back while firefox was as well as it does  

[Wiggster]

Netscape 7.2 is so much faster than firefox and has a better pop-up blocker as well as the ability to instantly clear browser history if necesary.  

[Boolean Julian]

Erix Griffon

I just opened up my copy of Firefox to make sure I do remember what I'm supposed to be talking about - tabbed browsing is always good (Opera has that) but it's still lacking mouse-gestures, god's gift to the lazy.

In Opera, if I click the right mouse button and flick the mouse:
Left - I go back
Right - I go forwards
Up - I stop loading
Down - I open a new tab
Up then down in one go - I refresh

A lot of the other features I couldn't say for sure whether Firefox has, but I can't see them yet. But it doesn't show you the speed a page is loading at, and only gives you a rough approximation of how far done it is. And I'm sure it actually loads pages slower than Opera...

It has just as many "Warning - you have just opened a web-page! Are you sure you want to continue?" messages as IE does.

The skin is fairly pretty, but a skin is a skin. I know for a fact there are truckloads of Firefox-style skins for Opera.

It doesn't have an inbuilt advert like Opera does if you haven't sent them money, but since Opera started giving you the option of Google text ads instead, that's not that intrusive. And I'm sure I could crack it, if I could be bothered.

I can't drag important links onto the toolbar so I can go back to them quickly later.

And it doesn't seem to have the auto-recovery function either. If Opera were to crash, or the computer were to lock, or even if you just closed Opera by accident, you can tell it to 'Continute from Last Session', and it brings up all your pages again.

Looks like it does have a mail client of some kind, though I'm just skimming through it here.

Can't see a way to save sessions either - when I open Opera it automatically loads about 6 tabs - 4 forums and two inboxes.

There's no auto-refresh function - granted it's forbidden on Gaia on pain of being banned really hard, but it's very useful elsewhere.



Edit - just realised I've been using v7.54, when v8 has just been released. *downloads*


Edit 2 - Go and get Opera 8. Now. It's even better than 7.54. Much faster and lighter. It's just destroyed Firefox's one advantage.


Edit 3 - If you do download it, you may think it doesn't block popups, and takes up ludicrous amounts of screen space. I've had Opera 8 installed for about 2 minutes, and I've got all unrequested popups blocked, and trimmed it down to look like this: http://tinypic.com/4r6dyh

Erix, why haven't you managed to become God yet?  

[Days of Empire]

xd I'm working on it!

I just did a little test. The Opera website provides a test-page, which is basically lots of text, and a box telling you how long it took that page to load. I've never viewed it before, so it's not cached.

I loaded it with Opera, IE and Firefox.

Opera: 90ms
IE: 8062ms
Firefox: 6539ms

That's on a 2mb internet connection.

Try it out yourself: http://nontroppo.org/test/Op7/loadtime.html  

[Zoutout]

5734

Firefox takes a while to load up on my old system at home, but it's worth it.  

[Dragoon Warrior Hawazit]

i dnt have firefox, but i was round a mates of mine and saw he had it, i must agree that it is the best ive seen, im stuck with internet explorer i think crying  

[Days of Empire]

Why are you stuck with it? Why not go to http://www.mozilla.org/ or http://www.opera.com ?  

[Nebelstern]

And so, Firefox rolls over the 50 million download mark. As the e-mail I received did tell me.  

[Gaulia]

That's because firefox blatantly pwns.