Laurabelle’s Blog

Since I installed Opera a few days ago, I've been exploring it and especially comparing it with Firefox. Here's my tally of pros and cons:

Opera

• Screenshots
  • Side panels closed
  • Side panels open
• Pros
  • Cookie-acceptance dialog has lots of options, so one can choose exactly the terms on which one will accept each cookie.
  • Free as in beer.
  • Very standards-compliant.
  • Address bar has a drop-down list of Top 10 visited sites, among other widgets.
  • Not Internet Explorer or Firefox, so it promotes application diversity and makes any exploit developed for a specific application less dangerous.
  • Trash can of closed tabs so you can resurrect accidentally-closed sites.
  • Different modes provide options that enhance accessibility. For example, high-contrast options allow one to browse in either black on white or white on black, no matter what the site's author intended.
  • Tabs can be detached, rearranged, etc. Detachment is cool if one wants to look at two pages at once, but I haven't been able to figure how to re-attach a page once it has been detached.
  • Keyboard shortcuts are customizable. I did this for Ctrl-T, which had been assigned to New bookmark. (Huh? How does that make sense?)
• Cons
  • Occasionally crashes unexpectedly, merely while browsing the Web.
  • Takes about 5 seconds longer to load than Firefox (23 vs. 18 seconds)
  • Browsing is not particularly faster than Firefox.
  • If the behavior isn't in Opera natively, I'm out of luck.
  • Proprietary.
  • The default user-agent string is Internet Explorer! This behavior lies to webmasters, including friendly and standards-compliant ones like myself, about what browser people are actually using. Lying about one's user-agent string should be an optional feature (forced by idiot webmasters who require one browser or another), not a default.
  • This is a personal thing, but I just don't like the navigation bar below the tabs. I don't think there's any way to change this.
  • No bookmarks toolbar. There is a Personal Toolbar, but if I put more bookmarks in it than it can hold, by default they shrink together rather than cascading off the end as in Internet Explorer or Firefox. Playing with toolbar customization fixed this.
  • Help → Opera Help opens the Opera Help website in the currently-open tab. This is wrong. Fixed with a configuration change: Tools → Preferences, Advanced tab, Browsing, uncheck Reuse existing page. I would like to note that this wording does not make clear under which circumstances a page would be reused.
  • I can't easily search A9.com, Wikipedia, or other sites from a toolbar, as in Firefox. Only Google and a few others that Opera has selected. I checked the documentation, but it doesn't seem possible to add searches for other sites.
  • When a sidebar is open, I find myself searching for the tiny backward/forward/reload navigation buttons. They are very small and blend in a little too much with the surrounding widgets. There are a lot of widgets.
  • Navigation toolbar, if enabled, takes up too much space and displays text for all possible attributes, even those that aren't assigned. I would rather have a small drop-down widget that only pops up when navigation headers exist and only shows those destinations that are defined.
  • Panels sidebar wastes a ton of space below the five buttons that open various sidebars.
  • Bulky toolbars can be closed and re-opened when I want them again, but this means it takes at least two clicks to get to whatever widget I'm looking for.
  • The default sort for bookmarks is alphabetical, and when I selected Sort by my order, they ended up in more or less random order rather than how I had imported them from Firefox.
  • New tabs open directly to the right of the current tab. I'm not sure whether I like this or not, but I'm certainly not used to it. I think I would rather they open to the right of all tabs. Fixed with a configuration change: Tools → Preferences, Advanced tab, Browsing, uncheck Open new page next to active.
  • Hitting the down arrow on the last line of an input box doesn't move the cursor to the end of the line. I tend to use this as a shorcut when navigating in blog posts, and it irritates me to have to look for the End button or click the mouse.
  • Some features are unintuitive to me:
    • Cookie dialog is confusing; it's unclear what to do if I only want to accept or refuse one cookie without affecting all other cookies for a certain site.
    • Wand (password manager) dialog doesn't behave well if I hit Cancel because I don't want to choose always-or-never right away. The website logs me in, but Opera reloads the login page. So what am I supposed to do?
    • I had to read the help to find out what the Notes feature is supposed to do. I couldn't figure this feature out at all. Usually clicking on whatever you can find reveals the available functionality, but not this time. I may just be dense.

Firefox

• Pros
  • Dialogs for cookies and password-saving have clear only this time language.
  • Functionality is extensible and modifiable through extensions.
  • Free as in beer and as in speech.
  • Since Debian distributes Firefox, it's easy to update.
  • Very standards-compliant.
• Cons
  • Loads a bit slowly, certainly slower than previous versions used to.
  • Has had a few security bugs recently (though I don't think these are as critical as some detractors make them out to be).

I may add to this list later, but I'm going to post it now. So far I think Firefox is winning, mainly because I'm used to it already. It always takes a little while to move into a new application, and that isn't the fault of Opera. On the other hand, there genuinely are some useful features of Firefox that Opera doesn't have. The reverse is true as well, but there are always extensions.