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Opera 9.5 vs Firefox 3 – browser wars

Which browser do you chose? Opera 9.5 or Firefox 3? I for example won’t use neither one for now, because both of them have bugs, even thought Opera 9.5’s official release day was a few days ago and Firefox 3 download day is tomorrow, 17 June 2008. I must admit I like Firefox more and the main reason I won’t use v3 is because most of the add-ons are not updated for this version and on the other hand I like this war between browsers.

Most of you don’t know but in the late 90’s there was an intense war between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, a fight for dominance which ended with Netscape’s victory because Bill Gates was a lame copycat. Too bad for him because even now his product, IE, is a piece of …, a result of Microsoft’s incompetency to create an original browser. Also this war was constructive because Netscape struggled to bring something new with every new update and that is why the war between Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3 is interesting. If Opera brings something new, Firefox should too and vice versa. For example Opera isn’t using as much resources as Firefox and it opens websites 50% faster.

Here are a few things which you should know about:

Opera 9.5

• A nice change is the new skin. Opera’s usability has increased because the new buttons/tabs are easy to see/understand and the color scheme is great (I like grey things in design, metallic stuff).
• You can add widgets which make your life easier and fun. For example here is a widget that shows you webcams around the world, it is nice to see how the weather or traffic is in a specific city. You can see a list of widgets at widgets.opera.com.
• If you want to upgrade from a previous version, you should know that it is 100% possible that you’ll lose all your saved mail, RSS feeds and bookmarks.
• The Zoom option – I think Opera was the first browser to add this option, that allows you to zoom in a specific zone and enlarge the text and images in the same time, but now comes Firefox 3 with the same feature. Nice
• It is two times faster than Opera 9.2 and from what I’ve tested on different websites it’s much faster than Firefox 3.
• “Superior support for Web standards” quite true but it is frustrating with text fields, forms etc because Opera doesn’t render them as it should.
• More info here about Opera 9.5

Mozilla Firefox 3

• Well the new skin is simple to use, everything is where it should be and if I compare it with the older ones I must say that the new one is better improved.
• Memory resource are the same, like up to 1GB for nothing – I think this is the only problem with Firefox
• Associating tags with your bookmarks to sort them by topic is something new and nice. You should try this out.
• Add-ons are still a problem for Firefox 3 because they are not updated. It is quite hard to work with two different versions of FF just to use some addons.
• Full page zoom exactly like Opera 9.5’s option. As I said, the war is on, so everyone is copying everyone…
• More info here about Mozilla Firefox 3

The future looks bright for both browsers, because they complete each other. Also I think you should wait a few months until both browsers release a few updates for the new versions, at least that is how I do. Until then I’ll use Firefox 2 and Flock. Happy browsing!

PS