# Opera owns!



## Dene (Jan 5, 2008)

I thought I would share this with you, I have only been using it for 5 minutes and already I see it is the superior web-browser. I strongly recommend you all download it!


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## Jason Baum (Jan 5, 2008)

I couldn't agree more. I've been using Opera for a few months now and I love it. I especially love the right click shortcuts and the speed dial. Opera pwns


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## badmephisto (Jan 5, 2008)

Firefox clearly for the win; Any other feature you can dream up of in some other browsers Firefox can do as well right after 1 minute of searching through the extensions. And therein lies its power - Firefox is small portable and very fast, and it is only as advanced as you want it to be. Opera has no extensions which is a huge downside in my opinion, and most importantly, it is not open source.


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## tim (Jan 6, 2008)

badmephisto said:


> Firefox is small portable and very fast



I agree with you, that the extensions make firefox very powerful, but Firefox is neither fast nor small. It eats extremely much RAM and tends to hang while loading websites.


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## Stefan (Jan 6, 2008)

badmephisto said:


> Opera has no extensions which is a huge downside in my opinion, and most importantly, it is not open source.


How often do you look at Firefox's source code?


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## Karthik (Jan 6, 2008)

Jason Baum said:


> I especially love the right click shortcuts and the speed dial.


Not that I am a fan of Firefox but for your information Firefox has addons to do exactly that.And they are almost as good as Opera's.


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## badmephisto (Jan 6, 2008)

StefanPochmann said:


> badmephisto said:
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> > Opera has no extensions which is a huge downside in my opinion, and most importantly, it is not open source.
> ...



never myself. but then we both know that that's not the point.


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## andrewvo1324 (Jan 6, 2008)

badmephisto said:


> StefanPochmann said:
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> > badmephisto said:
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Lmao. I bursted out laughing.


And Firefox is faster for me.


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## tegalogic (Jan 6, 2008)

I use Firefox, simply because Firebug doesn't exist in Opera.
I like Opera's features/quickness/standard compliance/etc. though.


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## Swordsman Kirby (Jan 6, 2008)

Er. Opera > Firefox, imo. But it really comes down to what features you like about Firefox.


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## Johannes91 (Jan 6, 2008)

badmephisto said:


> Opera has no extensions which is a huge downside in my opinion, and most importantly, it is not open source.


That's pretty much why I prefer Firefox, too (except that I think extensions are more important than being OS).


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## Jai (Jan 6, 2008)

tim said:


> tends to hang while loading websites.



That's because pipelining isn't enabled, and there is a pause between entering information, and reading information.
[link removed]
Visit this page on instructions on how enable pipelining, and how to make Firefox run as fast as it can get.

BTW, I'm running Firefox 3 Beta 2 with Personas from the Mozilla Labs website, and it totally pwns Opera.

I have a few browsers, and I constantly use my FF. As of right now, I have IE7 (..waiting for Micro$oft to release an alpha/beta of IE8 in this half of 2008..) , Opera 9.25 , Safari 3 (beta), Firefox 3 (beta 2), and Konqueror on my mini-linux app, and I'd rank the browsers something like:
Firefox > Opera > IE > Safari > Konqueror

EDIT: the page I originally linked to , wasn't the page I used when I was tweaking. Check hait2's post , just below Pedro's, for a link to the website that I actually used.


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## Pedro (Jan 6, 2008)

I went to that page and tried to do the stuff, but couldn't find the "browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs" thing...neither the "singlewindow.openintabs"

found the other part...let's see how it will affect my browsing


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## hait2 (Jan 6, 2008)

i have optimized my firefox as much as humanly possible (yes any tweak you find online that's legit, i have most likely already done)
nothing stops it from being a memory hog though
i wouldn't call it slow, but that's because i have ram to spare
there's also a memory leak present, i am not sure what causes it yet but it sure is annoying when it happens. i have heard this is fixed in firefox 3 soooooo we'll see

but yeah. firefox is neither small nor quick. it's pretty decent though i still hate it.

and flash plugin for ubuntu firefox fails. just, total failure. more gsod's please. (gray)

edit: that 'hack' up there is funny. firstly 100 is a bit overkill, but i guess it doesn't really matter. i have mine set at 30 although most sites limit it to 8 at most, and default to 4. some IP ban you for trying to pull a stunt like 100.

most importantly, it's missing nglayout.initialpaint.delay that should be set at 0. without this, there's really no big improvement (at least in my experience)
here are more tips for those that wanna try:
http://lifehacker.com/software/firefox-2/geek-to-live-top-firefox-2-config-tweaks-209941.php


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## badmephisto (Jan 6, 2008)

hait: the current version of Firefox does take up a fair amount of RAM. It's never been a problem here because I have 1GB RAM and a fairly fast PC, but i know that some people are still 512 and possibly even lower. However I heard this was addressed in Firefox3 and maybe Jai can give us more information, but from what I heard from other people that tried it, they did a pretty good job, and the next Firefox should have much slower RAM requirements, and be much faster.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see.


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## Jai (Jan 6, 2008)

I don't see many differences upgrading from FF2 to FF3, besides the fact that 98% of the themes aren't compatible with it. I guess we should wait for later releases to see differences; Mozilla hasn't implemented all of the new features into Firefox 3 yet; I don't know about the internal stuff, but as for the UI, they still have to replace the old theme with the new ones (they vary depending on your OS; the theme matches your OS), and put in more graphics-intensive tab switching (http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2007/11/firefox-3-gets-beautiful-tab-switching/)

About the RAM issue, it doesn't really bother me either, badmephisto, because I have 2 GB of RAM (667 mhz), an Intel C2D @ 2.00 ghz ( 667 mhz sidebus), and Nvidia Geforce 7700 with 512MB of memory.


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## darkzelkova (Jan 6, 2008)

I love my firefox  I use the plugin fasterfox, so that speeds everything up aswell lol


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## Stefan (Jan 6, 2008)

badmephisto said:


> StefanPochmann said:
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It just sounded to me as if being open source were an advantage by itself. For most users, I think it isn't. Actually, now that I think of it, I'm not even sure what the point of open source is. Not even extensions are a good argument for it, as those could probably (?) be supported by a good extension API. Not sure you need to look/edit the code of the core program for that.


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## Stefan (Jan 6, 2008)

darkzelkova said:


> I love my firefox  I use the plugin fasterfox, so that speeds everything up aswell lol


You admit using it and even "lol" about it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasterfox#Forced_Prefetch_controversy


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## darkzelkova (Jan 6, 2008)

StefanPochmann said:


> darkzelkova said:
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> > I love my firefox  I use the plugin fasterfox, so that speeds everything up aswell lol
> ...



I don't use prefetching, I don't like the idea of downloading EVERY link on a webpage. But I do like the little thing on the bottom of a page that says how long it takes to load


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## hdskull (Jan 6, 2008)

I have a question, so sometimes when I use firefox, it shuts off the window by itself, what do I do to change that ?


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## badmephisto (Jan 6, 2008)

StefanPochmann said:


> badmephisto said:
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i don't even know where to start when listing open source advantages...
- there is no single company that controls the code. If Opera would theoretically all of sudden decide to discontinue development, noone would have the rights to continue in the development, and all people using the software would be in big trouble. This is not a concern with Open Source.
- the code can be read by masses, so there is pretty much a very good guarantee that the code doesn't come with some privacy concerning subroutines that could for example track your web-browsing habits without your consent or so on. (remember the Sony rootkit scandal?)
- open source is more secure especially in huge projects such as Firefox, because many developers can review the code and find bugs in it. Also, the code is usually very good, neat and well commented because you know that there will be people reviewing it after you code it.

those are only some of the major points, but I'm sure there has to be plenty of stuff out on the internet about this, if you just search a little deeper than the wikipedia.


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## tim (Jan 7, 2008)

Jai said:


> tim said:
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I don't talk about how fast the page loads, i mean the application itself hangs (doesn't response) a lot.


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## Jai (Jan 7, 2008)

In that case, your system may be playing a part in that, Tim. What are your computer's specs? (If you don't know, right-click My Computer, and click 'properties')


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## AvGalen (Jan 7, 2008)

Jai said:


> In that case, your system may be playing a part in that, Tim. What are your computer's specs? (If you don't know, right-click My Computer, and click 'properties')


I know you said "playing a part", but please don't start blaming the users computer. Firefox is well known for having memory leaks. Many of those have already been fixed, but many are still there in version 2 and even in version 3.

This is a great source: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(Firefox)

These 2 quotes should be a good indication that there is really something wrong in the way firefox manages memory:

Version 3 will have "more memory leak fixes", so version 2 still has some:


> Memory leaks can cause Firefox not to release memory that it is no longer using, especially with older versions. There has been a lot of effort to reduce the leaks in recent versions, and Mozilla developers have have created tools to detect them. [5] [6] To minimize leaks, you should upgrade to the most recent version. The most common memory leaks appear to be fixed in Firefox 2. [7] Firefox 3 will likely use even less memory than Firefox 2 due to more memory leak fixes and further efforts to reduce memory usage. [8]


 
Good advice, but shouldn't be necessary:


> If you find that Firefox's memory usage continues to grow after long periods of being open, you may want to consider periodically restarting Firefox to bring the memory usage back to reasonable levels. The Session Manager extension allows you to close Firefox while maintaining the pages you have open.


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## tim (Jan 7, 2008)

Jai said:


> In that case, your system may be playing a part in that, Tim. What are your computer's specs? (If you don't know, right-click My Computer, and click 'properties')



I tested it on Mac OS X (Tiger) and on two different Windows machines. It doesn't seem to be a system issue. (Unfortunately i can't find a page at the moment, which makes the firefox hang, but just load a web page with a java applet and you'll see, what i mean.)
Anyway, i use Safari for daily browsing and Firefox just for web development.


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## Kristoffer (Jan 7, 2008)

I use Opera, its niiiiiiiice


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## Jai (Jan 8, 2008)

If you have an extra USB flash drive you don't need, and you're running Vista, you could enable Readyboost , which uses the USB drive as extra RAM.


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