Opera vs Firefox

[VampDude]

Firefox is better, obviously.

Mainly because it has thousands of pugins/add-ons to make it fully user customizable and personal

[quzar]

This debate has been on these forums as least 4 seperate times. What it always boils down to is:

Opera is faster, Opera passes Acid2, Opera has mouse gestures, Firefox is open, Firefox IS BETTER !11!!, Firefox has many more addons availible, Opera has a lot of the most functional things out of the box, Firefox can be themed, by saying that you obviously havn't used Opera which can also be themed in any way you want, and so on and so forth.

That last point for FireFox is where people usually consider it to be way better. Firefox starts off as a relatively blank slate that lets you addon all sorts of whimsical things. Opera on the other hand comes to you with everything ready to go. Recently Opera has pushed for more third party bits and has MANY more than it had 1-2 years ago, but it's main point is still that everything is integrated.

I'm a long time Opera user (at least 6 years) and for me Opera is great because without having to hassle with anything, it has all the functionality I'd ever need from a web browser built in. I use Opera as not only my web browser, but my irc client, my newsgroup client, my email client, as an rss feed tracker, a bit torrent client (ok, so I don't but it can do it), and wether a page works right in Opera is almost always the litmus test to wether it was written correctly.

Some have made the compairison to me in the past that Firefox is like linux, you start off with something that is barely functional, but all the tools and bits are out there for you to make it exactly how you want. Then Opera is Mac OSX, you don't have to worry about how it works because it does everything you ever need it to do and does it with style, if you like it's style you'll love it. With that thrown out there I'll say I mostly agree except that Opera is way more customizable than OSX =P.

[Buddy4point0]

opra does torrents? thats cool, i wish firefox had that.

[kcajblue]

i use opera as my irc client too.
no hassle of having to download one.

[Shadowblind]

Then opera just hates me. Everything about it runs so freaking slow and terrible on my computer.

[quzar]

Then opera just hates me. Everything about it runs so freaking slow and terrible on my computer.

Opera is still (afaik) the fastest web browser out there. That said, if you have a slow machine, don't expect to have 15 tabs open and not start to have slowdown.

edit: oh and by fastest, that is both in rendering pages, and in speed of Operation on a machine. Opera scales it's performance really well based on hardware, that is to say that it will look at your system specs and decide how much ram to use based on how much you have free. If you're on a machine with 128mb of ram, it will barely use any. 2gb and well. I've seen memory consumption go as high as 600mb, but with this 600mb you have the whole history behind any tab accessable instantly.

[Chameleon]

No your mistaking, firefox is much faster, just for some reason firefox is scaled down to only load 8 images per page at a time... when it is fully capable of loading 30 or more.

This is easily fixable by downloading an extention called "tweak network" and setting it into power mode.

Alternatively you can type in about:config in your address bar, and manually configure it yourself.

When doing these "tweaks" i have noticed performance of firefox increase ten fold

if you need more help go here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1299854/posts

[kcajblue]

i dunno.
quzar really knows his stuff.

[scarph]

wow chameleon that helped a lot.

when setting the max requests, can i go above 30.

i have a pretty fast cable connection

[quzar]

No your mistaking, firefox is much faster, just for some reason firefox is scaled down to only load 8 images per page at a time... when it is fully capable of loading 30 or more.

So, if you MODIFY firefox it becomes faster? I am not sure as to the validity of the claims so I tried looking for more information.

First I found this site: http://willlangford.com/2006/06/22/f...15-vs-opera-9/ which, although not on the same issue, gives a REALLY good rundown of all of Opera's features from a Firefox lover's perspective.

The following article outlines speed tests for rendering in ie7/firefox/opera: http://news.softpedia.com/news/IE7-v...20-54537.shtml

It also does memory tests and some security tests.

Here's another: http://exe.gotfrag.com/portal/story/33887/ They do fewer speed tests, but have a nice little (a bit simplified) pros/cons at the end.

While whatever your speed thing does may speed Firefox up, that does not mean that it necessarily makes it faster than Opera, especially since many of the tests shown in the links above work on individual images or scripting type things, which your hack (as you explain it) would not affect at all.