Opera, Chrome, Firefox, OR?

[Fedechiar]

I use Iceweasel (Debian) and it bugged me to no end - as they changed the package name every month or so, my update manager got an error every time and I had to check the new source location and edit the sources.list (I obviously used backports, or I would still be stuck on 3.6)...Luckily, they fixed it (yay for Linux!)

[Thirty-one]

Rapidly changing numbers don't really bug me. I'd be a little annoyed if they removed it from the "about" box though.

[cjmcjmcjmcjm]

I realized I voted back when I still used Safari. I now use Opera and FF, depending on the OS.

Something I hate is when programs put the "Check for updates" under the Help menu. I know that can solve some problems, but still…

[flying sheep]

or even worse: the pligin management (as seen in eclipse)

wtf has this to do with “help”?

[Velict]

Has anybody else been annoyed by the firefox rapid release stuff? What exactly is the point of changing the major version number every 8 weeks?

Mozilla realized that Google was shaming them in terms of major browser improvements (memory management, UI aesthetics, consolidating the search and address bars, and browser sync), so they're releasing new browsers faster in hopes of maintaining their flagging market share and getting back up to speed.

Needless to say, I'm a Chrome guy myself

[EvanED]

Mozilla realized that Google was shaming them in terms of major browser improvements (memory management, UI aesthetics, consolidating the search and address bars, and browser sync), so they're releasing new browsers faster in hopes of maintaining their flagging market share and getting back up to speed.

Chrome's UI is a huge reason I don't use it on Windows, but to each his own I guess.

[Anonymously Famous]

I don't use Chrome because there have been web pages that haven't displayed properly for me on Chrome, but they have on other browsers. And one time that I was using Chrome to test a web app that I was developing, I got the Javascript to work properly on Chrome, but it didn't on IE or Firefox. So I use mostly Firefox for surfing, but when it comes to developing, I of course follow the general rule of testing it on every major browser.

[v1nsai]

Chrome is my favorite by far. You only have to search on a website once, then chrome remembers it for you I.e. Go to YouTube.com search for something in the search bar, then all you have to do is type YouTube.com + search query into the address bar and it will search YouTube.com. Does that automatically with every search box i've come across. Plus it's fast as hell, comes with firebug built in and syncs with google so my windows and Linux partitions have the same bookmarks and extensions automatically.

[jawdisorder]

Chrome is my favorite by far. You only have to search on a website once, then chrome remembers it for you I.e. Go to YouTube.com search for something in the search bar, then all you have to do is type YouTube.com + search query into the address bar and it will search YouTube.com. Does that automatically with every search box i've come across. Plus it's fast as hell, comes with firebug built in and syncs with google so my windows and Linux partitions have the same bookmarks and extensions automatically.

In firefox I know that you can save searches and assign them a keyword. For instance to search youtube I just type, y [query], wikipedia, w [query].

[jeorgun]

Konqueror, for a number of reasons:
-Speed. I have yet to encounter a faster web browser on linux (chrome/ium comes close).
-KParts. Opening another app to read word documents feels so obsolete.
-KDE Integration. Uses my qt theme without any issues, allows me to access its bookmarks from krunner, etc.
-Web shortcuts. yt:<term> to search on youtube, dd: for duckduckgo, wp: for wikipedia, etc. (also usable from krunner).
-Completely customizeable toolbars, keybindings, etc. without any addons or extensions.
-Vi directional keybindings (with khtml. When it doesn't work (the only site with which I've had real issues is google docs), I can switch to webkit).

[Steax]

I just switched to chrome from firefox. Can anyone help me on a few questions?
- Is there some way to activate tab notifications? I.e. If a tab's title changes, it should appear in the tab. It's prevented me from pinning tabs so far.
- I miss being able to search by page title, like in Firefox. Sometimes I only remember a particular thing that appeared in the title, but it's impossible to find it again. If there's no solution for this, I might go back to firefox.

[hotaru]

- I miss being able to search by page title, like in Firefox. Sometimes I only remember a particular thing that appeared in the title, but it's impossible to find it again. If there's no solution for this, I might go back to firefox.

typing in the address bar searches both addresses and page titles. or you can open up chrome://history/ and ctrl+f.

[Steax]

- I miss being able to search by page title, like in Firefox. Sometimes I only remember a particular thing that appeared in the title, but it's impossible to find it again. If there's no solution for this, I might go back to firefox.

typing in the address bar searches both addresses and page titles. or you can open up chrome://history/ and ctrl+f.

Ah, apparently it does, after a short delay.

[JuEeHa]

O like many Mozilla based browsers (Firefox, Iceweasel, Seamonkey, TenFourFox(Posted using it), Classilla, K-Meleon(Back when I used windows)...) and Konqueror, but my favorite is Links2. Yes I am not kidding. I have ported it to every platform I have used(be it either text based or graphical), thought under Mac OS X 10.4 graphical mode looks weird. Well... back to coding.

[GonzoMcFonzo]

It's always funny jumping into these threads and seeing people talk about how they simply couldn't live without feature X in browser Y, where X is a feature Opera had years before Y did.

Some of the reasons I use opera are:

• built in mail/newsgroup/newsfeed client
• built in bittorrent client (integrated into the download manager)
• True multi document interface (not simple tabs) + tab stacking
• Built in content (ad) blocker
• completely customizable UI and shortcuts
• Opera Link automatically syncs my desktop, netbook, the copy I keep on a usb drive, and opera mobile on my phone
• Ability to reopen closed tabs/windows with complete history intact
• Built in translation tool
• built in spell-checker
• The option to start the browser where I left off when it was closed (i.e. all tabs with their full back/forward history)
• Speed dial
• Completely customizable searches from the address bar (with lots built in)

afaik, except for a couple, Opera was the only major browser to have each of these features when it introduced them, and in many cases is still the only browser to have them (out of the box, no extensions needed). Even stuff that is standard in modern browsers now, Opera often does better.

[deepblueq]

I'm using Midori for the moment - it's still in alpha, but it actually runs surprisingly well. It does crash occasionally, but at least it fails gracefully. It's the fastest thing I've found (at least on Linux - it's molasses slow on windows) that renders things properly and has a customizable enough UI for me. As far as things on the list go, I'd have to say Opera is my favorite. Very fast since v10.5, renders things well, and while the UI isn't the most customizable it looks a lot like I want it to by default. FF used to be good, but it seems to have gotten more bloated of late.

[Steax]

Even stuff that is standard in modern browsers now, Opera often does better.

Well, you hit the nail on the head. It's not about "browser X has feature Y", but "browser X has feature Y in a way that I find more productive". Your last statement is your opinion, and this is where people differ. Having a feature does not mean the feature works as people wish it would.

For example, I still prefer Firefox's address bar. If I, say, watch "Shadow of Israphel" on YouTube, on Firefox I can just type "shadow" and it'll immediately focus on the video (it matches the title). Right now, here on Chrome, it doesn't do that. This applies in many places - more often than not, I end up doing a Google search (something that Google must be very happy with). Now, my browser of choice is still Chrome, and both browsers claim to have intelligent address bars, but I prefer Firefox's implementation.

[Euler]

ChromeNerd here.

[snoods]

I love the chrome extensions. Kick Ass is a great app for passing five minutes.

[flying sheep]

I love the chrome extensions. Kick Ass is a great app for passing five minutes.

has been a bookmarklet forever (without the silly advertisement)

[GonzoMcFonzo]

Even stuff that is standard in modern browsers now, Opera often does better.

Well, you hit the nail on the head. It's not about "browser X has feature Y", but "browser X has feature Y in a way that I find more productive". Your last statement is your opinion, and this is where people differ. Having a feature does not mean the feature works as people wish it would.

Except that a lot of the time, it is about that, because opera has so many features that other browsers don't. Except for the spell-checker and translation tools, every feature on my list was not available in any other browser when opera debuted it. I still don't know of any other browser that has built in mail, newsfeed, newsgroup, irc, and bittorrent clients. Or a real MDI.

Obviously, plenty of people can get by without these features at all. That's fine, I'm not trying to argue that; I'm just pointing out that for so many of the features it's not a matter of "Opera does X better than anybody else" so much as "Opera does X, and no one else does."

For example, I still prefer Firefox's address bar. If I, say, watch "Shadow of Israphel" on YouTube, on Firefox I can just type "shadow" and it'll immediately focus on the video (it matches the title). Right now, here on Chrome, it doesn't do that. This applies in many places - more often than not, I end up doing a Google search (something that Google must be very happy with). Now, my browser of choice is still Chrome, and both browsers claim to have intelligent address bars, but I prefer Firefox's implementation.

I'm not sure I understand your example here. Did firefox match the title of the page from your history/cache? Or search the internet for it? Or just focus on the tab you already had open? In Opera's case, when you type something in the url field (sorry, no awesome new names for it lol) it automatically searches the title and content of pages in your browsing history, bookmarks, and I think cache, plus your browser search history. If you don't select one of those and just hit enter, it searches with the default search engine.

[phlip]

Did firefox match the title of the page from your history/cache? Or search the internet for it? Or just focus on the tab you already had open?

It'll do the first and third of your options. If you enter something and have a tab open for it, that'll be first in the list. The rest are all pages where the entered words match the title and/or URL (eg I can enter "forums coding" and the "Coding: Fleeting Thoughts" thread will be first in the list - matching "forums" in the URL, and "coding" in the title), ordered by frequently-visited pages. Bookmarks will be given a bump up, and appear high in the results, but it's not absolute - a bookmark you never visit will still be outranked by a not-bookmarked page you view all the time. It also seems to associate things you type with particular pages - eg if you type "for" and go to forums.xkcd.com quite often, then it will bump that site up whenever you type "for", even if there are other sites that contain "for" that you visit more often (but you don't regularly get to by typing in that particular thing).

It won't search the Internet automatically - but if you enter a phrase and hit enter without selecting something from the list, it'll do a search, by default. I have that turned off, though - I don't want to be sent to a search automatically, if I want one I'll use a keyword search.

[Steax]

phlip handled that bit perfectly.

Except for the spell-checker and translation tools, every feature on my list was not available in any other browser when opera debuted it.

This bit matters. The quality of a product isn't determined by who did it first. It doesn't matter if Opera did X first, if all the browsers today have it, Opera can no longer claim superiority based on X.

Therefore:

... it's not a matter of "Opera does X better than anybody else" so much as "Opera did X first, and no one else did at the time, though now they do."

And that doesn't matter now. It doesn't matter who had it first. What does matter is how well it works, which reduces most of your claims to your opinion phrase "Opera often does better".

Of course, saying that Opera's still-unique mail/bittorrent client etc features are superior are perfectly valid statements. I wouldn't say they make Opera as a whole any better, though, since there's clearly a reason other browsers haven't done this (most of them have the "we'll browse and let your other programs handle the rest" mentality).

[TheChewanater]

I really like Mosaic. At the time of its debut, it was the only browser that could render images! Obviously, this means that it renders images way better than all these other browsers.

[EvanED]

I used Opera for quite a while on my home Windows box. I recently have been giving FF more of a test again, and I think I might stick with it. Opera (perhaps Opera+Flash) have a tendency to chew through memory even worse than FF does, and when it hits 2 GB (which it seems to do with remarkably little effort), it starts behaving... strangely. FF seems to do better when Flash crashes as well. Though I've been more annoyed by popups since the switch. I've seen a couple sites that open popups when you click something, which gets around the popup blocker. It got around Opera's too, but Opera's "open new windows in a tab instead" setting actually works, while FF's seems to not.

I wish there was a good web browser for Windows though. I have a lot of complaints about all of them.

I really like Mosaic. At the time of its debut, it was the only browser that could render images! Obviously, this means that it renders images way better than all these other browsers.

Now that's a religious wars post!

[Kick]

Well, I use four browsers for four different tasks. Ordered from most common to least, here they are:
Chrome - general web browsing (forums, news, social networks)
Opera - research (the tab management is really helpful, and the pop-up blocker does exactly that)
Firefox - anything involving the use of a proxy
IE - testing (I sometimes do some web design and often IE is the first browser I test on)

[JonnyTHM]

Chrome for regular useage, firefox for when I run into a problem

I like Chrome better for 4 reasons:

1: it's fast, faster than Firefox usually
2: never have to restart it. Okay well you do for some updates, but for installing extensions and themes you're never forced to close the whole thing (I keep TONS of tabs open)
3: Shiny U.I. Firefox isn't nearly as pretty
4: syncing, FF can't sync nearly as well, and the authentication behind it is compicated

I use FF when a website has issues, or doesn't work on Chrome

One big dislike about Chrome is how it consumes memory like no tomorrow, and often lacks stability. Seriously Google get on that.

[Sgt.Artemis]

Chrome has been my preferred browser for quite some time now.

Neat, fast and simple. I like it.

[EvanED]

My favorite benefit of running Firefox and Opera at the same time is that when one crashes, I just switch to the other for a little bit.

[algorerhythms]

I've been using Internet Explorer a lot recently (the adblocker in IE9 is almost good enough). Lately, though, the ads on Facebook have been sneaking past IE9's adblocker, so I switched back to Firefox.

[mmmCatSoup]

I use Fire Fox but after reading the posts here I'm thinking of switching to Opera. Does Opera have an ad blocker as good as Ad Block Plus? Because that's the deal breaker.

[EvanED]

Chrome pissed me off once too many times (my AFS credentials expired, and Chrome decided that would be a good opportunity to corrupt my entire ~/.config/google-chrome directory, losing my bookmarks, history, and many browser settings and killing my extensions), so I will try using Opera as my primary browser on Linux now. We'll see how that goes.

[Tyrannosaur]

I use Fire Fox but after reading the posts here I'm thinking of switching to Opera. Does Opera have an ad blocker as good as Ad Block Plus? Because that's the deal breaker.

https://addons.opera.com/en/addons/extensions/details/opera-adblock/0.52/

I use opera almost exclusively, because I find it faster, uses less memory, and <b>love</b> the tab grouping.

But I do not use any sort of ad-block (except for one that disables youtube ads ) so I don't know about extensions in that area, but we do have a decent-sized extension list.

[TheShadowFog1]

Chrome is a botnet. But I like it.

[theo1358]

I switch between Firefox and Chrome.

[piwakawaka42]

I'm a firefox man. I have security concerns about chrome, run a windows machine so don't use Safari (please don't flame me about it-flame in this thread should be browser choices only , find that IE 9 has stopped sucking but is still missing the add-ons, and (from what I've heard about Opera) find firefox's add-ons manager to be more intuitive. If I want to do something, I have to search the add-ons manager and click install-I find this easier than messing around in the options menu but YMMV. I do acknowledge it can be slower but (for other reasons) have just upgraded from a 7 year old desktop to a modern, i5 laptop, so do not notice anything like that. If firefox continues to be slow, I may be forced to check out chrome in a couple of years time, when my machine is no longer considered modern.

[Not_an_S]

I use Firefox over Chrome for one reason. For some reason Chrome (well, actually Chromium) tends to crash on me with what are normal (Facebook, Youtube) websites.
I'd use Chrome over Firefox if only for it's incognito mode (without having to close out of current tabs like firefox's), although that's not really a point of me choosing it, but someone else doing that, because I like not leaving my history behind when I'm using someone else's computer.
I've used Opera before, Firefox is just more widely used, and I don't really have any problems with it that would make me switch, and Opera doesn't seem to have any features that I love enough to switch.

[troyp]

I'm really torn between FF and Chromium these days. Chromium has a wonderfully polished UI - the attention to detail really shows - but its plugin architecture is more restrictive and the plugin ecosystem still less developed (although rapidly evolving). Chromium should have some setting that allows more powerful plugins. I haven't investigated the details, but I know there are few good plugins for FF whose authors say it's not practical to port to Chrome due to the limited plugin API. Also, it really annoys me that I can't have plugins operate on Chromium settings and new tab pages: I use plugins to customize the UI, especially for keyboard shortcuts, and it's irritating to have them frequently disabled on important pages*

I've been using Bookmarks toolbars a lot lately. I used to ignore them and use the bookmarks menu (I use AiOS on FF and a searchable drop-down bookmark menu widget on Chrome). Now I've rearranged my bookmarks and I often use the toolbar (it helps that I've finally got a bigger monitor, although I still keep the toolbar off most of the time). One nice touch about Chromium is that the toolbar automatically appears on the new tab page, which is where I usually use it from, so I don't need to hide and unhide it all the time. Have to get a FF addon to replicate this.

The most annoying thing about Chromium is that I haven't found a replacement for DownThemAll yet.

* this used to annoy me even on FF, but there it was only on tabs with a pdf-reader plugin loaded. Sometimes I would get fed up with it and set pdfs to load in an external app...until that would annoy me and I'd switch back.

[Laserdan]

Well if Firefox (best browser ever) wouldn't eat RAM like a stoner eats chocolate chips, I'd never even look at another browser. Especially since I found that addon that organizes tabs in a hierarchical manner (it's pure genius for someone who regularly has >50 tabs open).

So I only use Chrome as a sidearm. And by Chrome, I mean Iron. It's supposedly all Chrome without the phoning home stuff (google "SW Iron"). For my normal browsing, it lacks all those great FF addons I love and when you go over a certain amount of tabs it just bogs the computer down even more than FF; and I somehow dislike that every tab is a new process.

[troyp]

Well if Firefox (best browser ever) wouldn't eat RAM like a stoner eats chocolate chips, I'd never even look at another browser. Especially since I found that addon that organizes tabs in a hierarchical manner (it's pure genius for someone who regularly has >50 tabs open).

A tab-tree plugin? You can get them for Chrome as well. Another plugin you might find handy is one that lets you easily "suspend" your tabs - ie. it stores the address (can't remember if it stores local state, but often this wouldn't come up because sites rely on REST interfaces and/or cookies) and kills them, then lets you reactivate them easily. There's one I have running on Chromium now called "Too Many Tabs" that brings up a popup with iconified windows on the left representing active tabs and a column of suspended tabs on the right. You can suspend or reload tabs by dragging them back and forth. There's also a trashcan icon, sorting by name and TLD, a search box, an import/export/merge dialog (I believe it uses sensible plain text files) and an arrow to switch to another right column that has recently-closed tabs rather than suspended ones. Too Many Tabs has a FF version as well, and there are other variations on this idea.