When it comes to development and design, perhaps it makes sense to treat Firefox as the norm - for all those minor quirks and variations, let Firefox get the perfect layout, and other browsers get the small-but-insignificant deviations (although I still favour Opera there too, but that’s just me ;)).
As a development browser, I agree that Firefox has an invaluable range of features - Firebug, the DOM inspector, all kinds of extensions that are incredibly useful for development. I wouldn’t be able to do my job as effectively without a copy of Firefox to hand.
But I’m not always a developer. Sometimes I’m just a user, and that’s when I prefer Opera. Opera has no political agenda, and doesn’t rely on a legion of third-party tools to be effective. It just works, and it’s on my side :tup:
(And … btw and slightly ot … Opera Mobile is the only decent mobile browser. Pocket IE is just IE4 on a small screen, while Minimo [the mobile version of firefox] is laughably bad - worse than Pocket IE!)
Oh, I missed that. I use Firefox on Windows 2000. Opera is fast, but I only like to be asked once how it should handle cookies from a new domain. Opera seems to ask repeatedly for each cookie from the server upon loading the initial page. Subsequent pages and return visits are fine, but the requester that pops up requires me to fiddle with a drop-down menu every time. I’d prefer it to remember my last setting so I can just click a button.
Well, the request was for one main reason why I don’t use Opera. Cookie handling is it. When I think javascript may be a problem, Opera gives me the option I want, which is to turn it off. It doesn’t give me the cookie handling option I want. Both IE and Firefox do.
Firefox is Open Source, Opera isn’t. Thats the only reason I use Firefox over Opera. I have never used the source code but I am an avid supporter of Open Source software.
Just because it’s not open source doesn’t mean it’s not any good. I support open source software too, but if I’m given something for free (as in beer), I won’t turn it down on the basis that it’s not open-source.
More to the point - commercially driven software is usually better than open-source, for obvious reasons - it takes time and effort to iron out a slick professional product, and in the OS community there’s no tangible incentive to walk that extra mile (especially if you can just wave your hand and say “oh, a plugin will fix that” ;)) [/ot]
It’s available for multiple platforms, so I can use it on Linux at home and on Windows at work, and it looks and works the same. I even use it on my mobile (Opera Mini).
It’s got tons of useful features for a web developer, especially since The Developer Console came out.
It’s got tons of useful features for a web user (site preferences, UserJS, spatial navigation, Notes, Widgets, custom Panels, mouse gestures, …)
It’s very standards compliant; if it works in Opera I’ve probably done it right.
It’s fast, it’s secure, it’s stable, it’s got a small memory footprint and it’s still small enough to download upgrades over dial-up.
It’s fully configurable.
I don’t have to download and maintain dozens of extension to get a working browser, and I don’t have to worry that those extensions stop working when I upgrade my browser.
It’s not open source. I don’t have anything against open source … on the contrary, but Opera’s developers really listen to their users. If you report a bug, they’ll fix it. Quickly.
@charmedlover
My thing with Apple is that they can do a really fine job when they want to and considering the amount of resources thrown into the iPhone I think at least from a consumer browsing experience perspective - it looks like it will deliver. If you are a mobile developer you better be aware of its quirks. Safari on the iPhone won’t be going away any time soon.
I actually do know how to code for mobiles (really - I care about this sort of stuff to a fault) and that is one of the reasons I always have Opera on hand, at the same time I think Apple’s approach of rendering the regular styles is a pragmatic one, albeit different from Opera’s take.
What I am getting at is that there is more than one way to skin a cat and in the end what the average consumer wants will drive the market more than what we geeks think is the most elegant/best approach (I am fan of standards, forward leaning features, progressive enhancement/graceful degradation and print, screen and handheld styles).
I think that Apple will make sure that the web browsing experience on the iPhone is close to the best on any available mobile (if not better) - or not bother - like the iPod, we can point out particular features or functionality it lacks, but on the whole it does represent the best in its class (for both hardware and software - and their seamless integration). So there is a precedent set where Apple just might raise the bar - and do it thinking differently. Sometimes less is indeed more (see Occam’s razor).
(BTW I posted this via Opera - for Mac - and am digging on Speed Dial - very, very cool indeed.)
