Firefox archive
5 things you'll love about Opera
2008-01-02 22:24
Computerworld recently posted a piece about 5 things you’ll love about Firefox 3 — it’s at this stage I feel compelled to correct their title to “5 things you’ll love about Opera”. Take any and all bias into account, as I’m an Opera employee (even if I only ever speak for myself on this blog), but just to set the record straight, I’ll go through their main points, and some minor ones:
1. Easier downloads.
Opera’s download manager includes everything the Firefox manager has, and in 9.5 also allows you to select which application to open something with. The only thing Firefox adds is when you downloaded something.
2. An enhanced address bar.
Opera 9.5 also searches all of your history, and provides excerpts of pages where the text you are typing occurs. There is also a dedicated historysearch.
3. A workable bookmark organizer.
Opera has had this for ages, and from 9.5 has built-in synchronization.
4. Easier bookmarking.
Ok, I’ll give them this one, it’s a nice improvement if you’re mouse-centric. (Personally, I can still live with my Ctrl-D shortcut)
5. Better memory management.
While Firefox may have improved, I’ll wager that Opera does way better. I started a fresh Opera install. It uses 18.6MB on my Ubuntu system, according to System Monitor (The actual usage is a more complicated matter: X memory, shared memory etc.), but the usage is still lower.
Either way, the acid test of memory consumption is what happens when you have an active history and a few hundred open tabs. My SO usually keeps over 100 tabs open on a machine with 512MB.
Another thing mentioned:
For example, Firefox 3 Beta 2 adds the ability to save your existing tabs when you close the app down
Has “always” been available in Opera (Session saving has been there since 2.12, I believe, but automatic saving came sometime later).
And another:
it has enhanced the browser’s ability to magnify Web pages from just affecting text to taking in the entire page
Full-page zoom has always been a feature in Opera.
Congratulating innovations is fine, but it would be nice if journalists stopped acting like something doesn’t exist until it’s part of Firefox.
(This is a somewhat edited repost of a similar comment I’ve placed on reddit)
dojo.query: A CSS Query Engine For Dojo
2007-02-05 08:19
Link: dojo.query: A CSS Query Engine For Dojo
dojo.query is a CSS Selector Query engine that performs very well in Opera and WebKit nightlies, tolerably in Firefox. MSIE performance is left at the mercy of IE engineers lack of support for XPath on the HTML DOM
Being compatible with the dark matter of the web
2006-11-17 10:29
Link: Being compatible with the dark matter of the web
On being compatible (or incompatible) with various non-standards
Top 150 Popular Firefox Extensions and Opera
2006-11-15 14:45
In the past, I have written about Opera equivalents to Firefox extensions - with a follow up.
Rijk has taken this one step further, and surveyed 150 Firefox extensions. Do these extensions have equivalents in Opera? Mostly, they do, either through built-in functionality or simple customization, UserJS or widgets.
Opera Graph Library
2006-11-06 15:17
Link: Opera Graph Library
A BSD-licensed library for creating all sorts of SVG graphs, see this user-submitted example for a demo.
Obviously requires an SVG-capable browser.
Conspiracy theorists, unite
2006-01-16 14:29 – Six comments
A bit about the Opera splash page discovered by Asa.
Firefox URL Domain Name Buffer Overflow
2005-09-09 14:39 – Leave a comment
How to disable sound in Firefox?
2005-04-16 10:36 – Ten comments
From the answerblog: How to disable embedded audio in Firefox using the Adblock extension.