[vox-tech] Four week test of Firefox versus Opera

[Troy Arnold]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 11:46:25AM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> Opera was segfaulting quite a bit, so I decided to try Firefox for a month.

Hmm.  It really shouldn't be doing that.  Since the 7.x series of Opera
solidified, it's been extremely, well, solid ;-)  It crashed on me 4 or
5 days ago, but those are very, very rare.  I'm a little different than
some, though, in that I do manually close my browser from time to time.
(Mostly to erase those pesky session cookies)

I'm running opera_7.54-20040803.5-shared-qt_en_i386.deb (yeah, I should
grab their latest security update) on an up-to-date Debian Sid.

I'm in general agreement with your notes -- the biggest thing in
Opera's favor being its speed and configurability, while the adblock
extension (and Sage!) rule the roost for Firefox.

Recently, a few of us at NBLUG gave a little talk on our favorite
Firefox extensions.  Our notes are in this thread:
http://nblug.org/pipermail/talk/2005-January/016545.html

In particular, if you want extended tab functionality, you might look
into:
http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/tabextensions/index.html.en
or
http://hemiolapei.free.fr/divers/tabmix/tabmix.html.en

> 4. Configuration is easier than Opera.  But this is a double edged sword.
>    The reason why Firefox is easier to configure is that there's less to
>    configure.  Things that are normally extensions on Firefox tend to be
>    built-in on Opera, making the Opera preferences menu more "busy".

See about:config for a few more.

I'm really terrible about taking notes, but I did some things that
noticeably sped up Firefox's rendering, and more importantly to me, the speed
of the UI itself (i.e. switching tabs)
I generally got there by following hints from these two pages:
http://codebetter.com/blogs/darrell.norton/archive/2005/01/28/48720.aspx
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=53650

Forgive all the links in this post -- I hope people find them useful.

-troy