Wednesday, March 01, 2006

A Week at the Opera: Finale


Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I stand before you here today trying two different internet browsers. On one hand we have the Firefox browser and on the other we have the Opera browser. Now throughout the course of this series I detailed many different positives and negatives of Opera in comparison to Firefox.

Let me list the different characteristics of Opera.

Positives:
  • Address bar panel
  • Zoom
  • Wand
  • Sidebar
  • Lots of keyboard shortcuts
  • Voice
  • Good clean interface
  • No memory leaks
Negatives:
  • Cache
  • Not being able to post through blogger
  • Not as fast
  • RSS reader
  • No standard Ctl+T for Tabs
  • Voice not technologically up there yet
  • Not as great of a community as in extensions and skins
The Opera browser is an amazing browser but does however need some tweaking. I absolutely love some of the things that it brings to the table such as voice which really is a good foundation for the future.

As you know the reason for this experiment was because I hated the Firefox memory leaks. When I first started this series I honestly thought that I would give it a shot but in the end go back to Firefox. Opera, to its credit, has made it extremely difficult for me to think so.

For me I live off RSS feeds and speed. Those, however, are the two things that Opera is lacking. I've decided to stick with Firefox HOWEVER if Opera were to fix these two problems than I would jump at them in a heartbeat.

The Opera browser really is a great browser. I love it, however, I love Firefox more. The reason for the speed differences may be my internet's fault. Everyone has different types of internet and my happens to time out a lot. Theoretically, speed may not even be a Opera problem just my problem.

I noticed from some of the comments that some people do prefer the Opera RSS way of doing feeds. I think Opera should allow you to switch between the two to make the experience even better.

I just would like to say thank you to everyone that followed the TechWrap's first ever series and I just hoped you enjoyed reading it as much as I loved doing it.

Final Verdict: Firefox

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