Opera 11 finally better than Firefox

I use Firefox almost since the beginning, but it became very bloated and seems to have major issues regarding memory management. Sometimes I can close all tabs and memory usage is still over 500mb and response times from clicks etc. become very huge. Only a restart helps in such a case (but that takes a while since Firefox needs like a minute to close…).

I’ve also used Opera 10 from time to time, but I felt some features/extensions are missing (mainly dev tools and adblocker) AND the diff-view on Google Code was messed up, but it’s obviously fixed since 10.63. Now I tried version 11 Beta and it’s just awesome! It’s possible now to install/uninstall “real” extensions without restart. Overal performance is very good and (on the long run) much better than Firefox. Only cons for me are the lack of some good extension, but I guess they will come with time. Also the beta still has some small bugs, but they will probably dissapear in the final version.

What you think of Opera? You can try the beta here.

What dev extensions do you use?

You thought about create simple list with good extensions for development?

I use in firefox: httpfox, firebug, webdeveloper, adblock, and few others.

Some of my friends tried Chrome some months ago. When i saw the very clean and lean UI i gave it a try, too, and was pretty impressed of all the onboard developer tools. A week later if found myself not starting up FF at all anymore (something i did every day for about ten years or so). :)

There are tons of addons and the Addon API is pretty cool (think of an addon as a “hidden” webpage with some js attached). There are some drawbacks though: There’s nothing like the famous LiveHttpHeaders FF extension for Chrome. And the headers displayed in the developer tools are not the raw headers, but some filtered version of them (whoever made that decision ). The source code view also always seems to reload the page, which is nasty, if the current page resulted e.g. from a POST operation. But you can at least inspect the current page elements, so this is not such a big deal.

All in all i like Chrome for its "reduce to the max" approach.

Never tried Opera though.

@ diggy

Mainly it’s about Firebug. Though Opera comes with a pretty good dev-console called Dragonfly, it’s not as good as Firebug imo. But at least it’s inbuild and faster. For now there are only 8 simple dev-tool extensions for Opera 11.

@ Mike

I have Chrome installed for developing/testing, but I don’t really like it. Maybe too simple for me. :mellow:

Using Opera for a long long time. Even remember times when it wasn’t free. Opera 11 looks like a big step forward.

FWIW I hated Chrome at first and I was a Firefox freak. However for probably the last four months I have been a convert to Chrome as my main browser.

I still open Firefox and often during development I will have Chrome and FF open and of course the devils tool(IE) ;) to monitor incompatibilities.

doodle

Thanks for the heads up - I’ll give Opera a go. :)

I don’t like Chrome at all.

Tried to like it, but it just feels wrong.

And Firefox is getting bloated, that’s for sure…

I have used Safari, and I like it, but I find it too polished. :P

I use IE (often), Firefox (always) and Chrome (sometimes), and Safari.

I’ll give Opera a shout and report back.;)

Thanks for the share Y!!,

I have to say that I am a FF-Freak, but I do agree with you that, even in a Macosx, it have huge memory problems… you are right, it doesnt goes down of 500 MB and sometimes it even hangs but… I have yet not found a better tool that firebug or some of the extensions to debug, measure time loads, etc…

Yes, Chrome is ok, but not powerful enough… we Neeeeed to check HTTP headers, debug server and client values -no need for breakpoints (hated IE), manipulate CSS styles ‘live’ to see what the hell is happening with floats, variants or whatever our beloved browsers do with our cool designs…

I will give it a go… I did before when I was just programming in javascript due that its engine pre-compiled the scripts and they were flying as no-one has yet done.

Wow, I never used Opera, I will wait the final version and maybe I will give it a try :).

I was using firefox before and now I’m converted to Chrome because FF was too slow.

Thank’s for the info !

Downloaded it, tried it - and I am planning to stay. :D

And it feels faster.

Sort of like in the middle between Chrome and Firefox. I like that.

I noticed that it’s got a much better inspection tool than Firebug pre-installed.

Which is a huge plus for webdevs like us.

Thumbs up, Y!! And thanks! :)

It seems we have to specify (CSS3)border-radius in addition to mozilla and webkit border radius.


-moz-border-radius: 5px;

-webkit-border-radius: 5px;

border-radius: 5px;

Anyone know if there is a CSS way to get rounded corners in IE ?

Just answered my own question

Even Microsoft have promised, and demonstrated in their recent preview release, support for border-radius from Internet Explorer 9 onward (without prefix).

Maybe in a few years we can drop the -moz and -webkit prefix.

doodle

There is no CSS-way. Only hacks: http://css3pie.com/

I use Google Chrome because it starts faster and it looks nicer, but Firefox is better because Firefox extensions can hook deeper into the browser (NoScript, better AdBlock etc.). I’m going to switch back to Firefox when 4.0 final is released. Opera 11 extensions seem to be “lightweight” extensions like the Chrome ones. However, I use Opera on my mobile devices because the “Turbo” mode saves bandwidth and traffic.

I use Opera for every-day browsing, research and IRC, Firefox for development and testing.

Currently i’m quite disappointed though, since Opera is frequently crashing on OS X, on two different systems. But the UI is still unmatched by other browsers in my opinion, so even this annoyance won’t make me switch.

I think I am going back to Firefox.

Don’t like it when Opera inserts extra line breaks when I post to this forum.

I have to go back and edit them out.

Do you have a trick? Or is this an IP board bug?

Currently using Opera for browsing and using Firefox for main browser in developing and testing project. Opera is cool, only the main drawback from it is its javascript things. Sometime the Opera is so different with the other browser, that I can’t even use it on particular Web.

For example, I just can’t sending email with attachment in Gmail with Opera, and also in Google site and Google doc, there are some missing feature. But I haven’t tested Opera 11 yet, maybe it has done some improvement in its javascript??

I am a bit dissapointed as some jquery plugins do not work on Opera 11, even though the plugins info state that they were tested on previous versions :(

jacmoe

Posting this from Opera. No extra line breaks.

This is posted from Opera.

And it does indeed insert an extra break each time I press return.

That’s not very cool.

I wonder what’s so special about my Opera?

It’s out-of-box Opera…

And now, when editing, it inserts an extra line break too…

Weirdness.

Safari, Firefox, IE - doesn’t do that to me.

That’s really weird because

my Opera-not-so-special-edition

doesn’t do that.

Try to clean up your cache / cookies. It may help.