Opera or Firefox ..

I've been a loyal user of Firefox since its first release and I almost never looked for a change. There was a low point at one stage, with Firefox memory consumption getting out of control and users trying different hacks to reduce it. But when I almost decided to change, Mozilla guys have come up with fixes and improvements. And 3.0 release is too tempting to leave and it only gave more reason to stick with firefox. But one ought to get bored using the same thing for years (exception for wives ;-)). Particularly when other competing browsers start to make their presence felt. Sure IE still has most browser market share, but Firefox was and is still the fastest growing browser. In that way, even though it is not leader in it's market, it has a monopoly in a way. If Microsoft had not come up with IE 8, which fared much better than its previous versions, I could see no other way for Microsoft but going further down.

I've read many blogs which appreciated new features in IE8. I didn't try it out much, but the overall look and feel of the application felt much better than IE7 and IE6. One crucial point which is keeping users who are at least slightly technical away from IE is the lack of huge add-on base. I use around 15 different add-ons any time in Firefox, and its gonna be a long time before IE produces that kind of platform and community.

On the other hand, I have read much about Opera too. The strange thing with Opera is, all fans of Opera are die hard fans. Whenever I tried Opera before, I quit again with the same reason I quit IE - lack of strong add-on community. But this time, I decide to stick with it for some more time at least to evaluate it properly. I had to sacrifice some add-ons like the in-built twitter client and Google Notebook, Flag etc. but for some other most important ones, I found alternatives. For instance for synchronizing bookmarks across computers, Opera has a service called Opera Sync. Further, I was quite impressed with the way Opera renders pages. It is visually very pleasing and 100/100 score on acid3 tests speak for themselves about the standard compliance of the browser. Of course I am talking about Opera 10 Alpha and not the Production version. If you haven't tried it yet, it is the right time to try Opera 10. It is surprisingly stable for an Alpha release. I never experienced a single crash yet.

One thing I miss in Opera is the status bar from Firefox. There is no way to know what is happening when I load a page in Opera except a small progress bar to the right of address bar. And that too doesn't give an apt information about what is happening. In firefox, on the other hand, I know from the status bar whether it is looking up the domain name/sending request/waiting for the request and I know when the page is fully loaded. This information is missing from Opera. I hope they will include something in the final production release.