Posted on 06/20/2008 7:57:47 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Two of the four major browsers have undergone some big changes in the past two weeks. Firefox 3 is, of course, the big news of the week, pulling down eight million or so downloads in its first 24 hours in the wild. However, the Opera browser updated to its much-awaited version 9.5 last week. Since both of them have got game but for different reasons, let's take a look at how they match up.
Empirically, the two most-cited complaints about browsers are speed and memory. Now, I'm a big fan of Firefox because it's so easy to customize, so despite concerns I had about placing both browsers on "equal footing," it would be misleading to test Firefox devoid of extensions, so I left in my cadre of add-ons, and ran both with fifteen tabs open--a more or less standard browsing session for me.
Using the SunSpider JavaScript test, Firefox 3 scored around 5500 microseconds to process the tested scripts, with a margin of error at around three percent. Opera 9.5 scored about 7280 microseconds on the same test, with a margin of error around 1.5 percent, making it nearly one and a third times as slow as Firefox 3. This isn't surprising, given how long Opera's been using the same rendering engine. Assuming they get to Opera 10 before Mozilla puts out Firefox 4, it would be interesting to go back and re-compare them.
Firefox used approximately 127 MB RAM with the 15 tabs open, while Opera used around 117 MB. This was a little bit surprising, since Opera is definitely running on the older code. It might be attributable to the various extensions I use in Firefox, but it's more likely that ......
(Excerpt) Read more at download.com ...
Have you tried the PicLens add-on yet?
I’ve never heard of it—what does it do?
Do get add-ons in FireFox 3, and you’ll find it. It uses Core Animation to display web content in thumbnails in a scrollable, zoomable, grid that bends around in front of you in a big panorama. For example, YouTube shows a bunch of videos, scroll through with the ball, pick, watch, scroll, pick another, etc.
It’s just cool. I wish CoverFlow worked like this for the images and videos on my system.
bookmarking for later
I was a loyal and exclusive Opera user from about v2.0 through 7.23, then about 7.5, they hosed the UI, so I stayed with 7.23, which forced me off Opera for a larger and larger percentage of websites as 7.23 became more and more out of date. I cast about for alternatives, and at about that same time, Firefox was starting to achieve viability, so since then I’ve used both, but have not been able to commit fully to Firefox either because it lacks the built-in email client Opera has.
Opera is pretty customizable too, but I never found a theme to let later versions emulate 7.23 or I would have upgraded. So does anyone know of either a way to make later versions of Opera emulate the look of 7.23 or know of an addon that integrates an email client (local, not webmail) into Firefox, preferably with the split pane view like Opera has?
I just found out that Opera will run greasemonkey scripts since version 8.0. Very cool.
Isn’t Seamonkey ...close to Firefox with the email capability?
See post #5...and MR Tech Toolkit....it is a possibility.
If I remember correctly, the UI is from Netscape, which is to say, not good. Also, IIRC, the integration is a button that opens a separate app in a separate window (not a separate tab, a separate window). Still seems pretty “segregated”.
I saw that earlier and installed it. I must be stoopid because I can't seem to find where to tell MRTT to change the max version on extensions.
Perhaps I'll get lucky with the XinhaHere extension and when I come back from vacation in a few days, it will be updated on the website.
Opera supports ad-blocking. Their Web site lists how to go in and do the list, or manually you can right click on a page, block content, and select what you want blocked.
I find Opera to be faster than Firefox. Of course both are much much faster than IE.
I saw Opera 9.5 has had 4 million downloads which isn’t bad.
SAweet! I never heard of this extension. Just trying it out now. This rocks! Thanks for the tip.
BTW, looks like the update happened, I'm running Firefox 3 and it seems to be working. Got it straight from the homepage:
http://www.hypercubed.com/projects/firefox/“How do you kill the “awesome bar”?”
Uninstall Firefox 3 and reinstall Firefox 2.0.0.14
Or fire up IE, which is what I’ve done, since FF 3 wrecked some of my add-ons even after uninstalling 3 and reinstalling FF 2. Firefox 3 is poison.
I was really missing it!
Thanks!
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