Undoubtedly the two most primed browsers available on both the Windows and Linux. Firefox has stolen the limelight very much so from Opera and there is good reason for this. Firefox is Open-Source (the buzz word of the past two years), Firefox is highly customizable, has a plethora of extensions and Firefox is cuddling up with Google. All of these factors and of course an excellent piece of software contribute to it’s ever increasingly popularity. But what about Opera?
When Opera dropped its inline advertising and become a free browser it leaped to the attention of a lot of users. As its popularity rose I decided to take a closer look and to determine if it was a good enough replacement for Firefox as my default browser.
Opera has a far nicer GUI than Firefox. Both interfaces are customizable but at default face value the Opera look out shines it rival greatly. A hidden sidebar menu, a drop down “Favorites” bar under the address bar and a general smoother feeling surpasses the weary and grayed interface of Firefox. One of the benefits of FF over Opera is the extensions that are available. FF provides many add-on Opera-esque features at a click of a button such as The All in One Sidebar, Copy URL+ and Window Resize. I’m not going to include these separate extensions in my overall judgment as I’m concerned with the base install of both applications, don’t get me wrong the Extensions are an excellent feature but we are comparing two browsers here. If I was to consider Firefox with an armory of Extensions then it wouldn’t be a specific battle comparison between two browsers.
One of the main features of both browsers is tabs. Opera’s use of tabs requires a lot less resources to operate over its rival. I currently have seven tabs open in both Opera & Firefox, FF, at 170kb, is chewing 5.5 times more memory than Opera, 30kb. Firefox has a major problem with memory leaking. But it can be curtailed to a certain extent.
Opera has another hand over its rival in relation to the caching of your last tabs before you close the application. If I were to reboot my PC and load up Opera it would display the last tabs I had opened. This is great for remembering where you last were with your browsing activity. Firefox has no such feature but it can provide you with a warning if you attempt to close down the application while you have tabs open.
Opera is not the best at rendering AJAX or CSS in the browser. From my development experience I have found that it can misinterprut many CSS2.0 tags. Accessibility is becoming more important than ever. Firefox is the de-facto CSS2.0 browser. Another downside to Opera is its lack of support for AJAX. AJAX is the “hip” language of the net at the moment and is constantly being deployed by Google in their Web Services. Firefox has no such issues with AJAX.
When it boils down to it performance for me is critical in deciding which browser to surf with. Opera in my opinion has the edge on Firefox on this front, however FF is more accessible from a designer/developers point of view. I’m currently juggling between the two. Firefox for development and Opera for general leisure browsing, but because development takes up about 70% of Internet usage I use Firefox more often. If Opera can support AJAX and clean up some of its CSS then it would replace Firefox as my default.
Firefox 2.0 is currently in beta. 
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3 responses so far ↓
interesting comparison, but it seems that your ranking Opera over Firefox on the basis of performance and the fact that it lets you reopen on the same place you left. I think the extensibility of firefox along with its support for AJAX puts it above Opera straight away. Gmail is my primary email client, hence without that support in place, i can indeed view my emails but it doesnt go as far as to let me chat through the web based version. I dare say google will roll out more apps shortly which will too require similar support…. Opera will have to address this.
I don’t think i ranked Opera over Firefox too much, both browsers have their strengths and weaknesses. I probably focused more on Operas strengths than FF though, but this was because most people would be more familar already with FF’s strengths.
I see the benefit of using two browsers at the same time, but i will will continue to lean towards Firefox. I’m using Beta2.0 at the moment so i’ll have some thoughts on that in the near future too and of course on FF’s extensions!
Thanks for your comment Chris.
U can use a nice email client embedded in opera to view your email messages. Its lets cluttered then gmail design. Its my default setup and i dont have worry too much of extention for ordinary browsing
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