Firefox is slower than Opera.

[lodore]

I find Opera faster than Firefox, particularly on my old Celeron 1.2GHz laptop. The downside is that Opera has compatibility issues with a number of websites, including the "new" Yahoo! Mail.

Opera 10 currently in alpha works fine with yahoo mail.
for now i use IE8 for yahoo mail=(
i usse opera everyday and find it faster than firefox.
i use firefox portable at college since opera seems to crash alot when the proxy at college blocks alot of stuff.

[Stringent]

I like FF because of all the plugins you can get, but yeah, when you have a load, it does take up time. never got on with Opera, although my friend said Opera mini on the S60 mobiles is supposed to be ace.

[Raz316]

I've used opera since the days of dial up I still have everything else installed and I have to admit that I quite impressed with Safari for windows.

Out of interest, who here uses Opera on Linux? I find it never works as well as on windows.

[dangel]

Well thank you all - i'm pleasantly surprised not read any fanboyism type responses - hexus appears to populated with well-informed people

Here's an interesting thing about speed - on my wife's PC (Athon64X2, 2gb RAM) FF takes a long time to get going (it's running XP so no caching benefit a la Vista) and I keep catching her using Opera. I say "why?" - she says "because i just wanted to see something quickly". Which says it all really. The point with FF is, out the box it's not that good - it's the addins that improve it and to get the same behaviour funtionality as Opera I had to add a fair few. And that's before I started junking it up with trick extras (which i do like).

Vista and 7 obviously help a lot with startup time but FF does feel clunky in use - it'll be interesting to see if the next version does help in this regard. Ah well you can't have it all I guess

[Golden Dragoon]

I have used opera full time since the opera 5 days, I even payed for it back then and was mighty happy, though in those days the alternatives were all pretty poor, but I still find that Opera has an edge over FF and IE, I do have the latest FF installed, but in order to make it do everything I am accustomed to in opera it becomes loaded down with extentions and uses twice the memory of opera whilst still being fractionaly slower (though it really dosn't matter to me if a web page loads in 1.8s rather than 0.9s) the one thing about FF I hate is the thing I use the most in opera, the mail client. Opera's is the most easy to use client I have come accross, and works fantasticly for me, not having that in FF means that even if it were more standards compliant, and even if it was faster I would not be able to use it.

It's a shame it's not possible to "relax" the compliance in Opera (or even selectively for certain websites), because I would have no hesitation using it as my main browser, but as it stands, I prefer Firefox 3.

You can change Opera into user mode rather than author mode (click on customise after right clicking a toolbar, and select to show the view toolbar) where you can mess about with the way the page renders, this works great in many ways, and can make certain websites readable or more comfortable for people with poor eyesight by changing the colour pallet to high contrast or layout to better fit the screen ect...

Self confessed Opera Addict on Win\Linux & OSX

Edit: the one thing I don't use opera for is hotmail, I simply allow msn to use IE, as the intergration is better. Other than that I don't think I have ever had to use IE for any page, pretty much everything has displayed properly in Opera for me.

[scaryjim]

I have to say that I'd never used Opera until I started my current job - this is the first one I've been paid *primarily* foir writing public facing websites so I wanted to check all of my work with as many browsers as possible. I've since become completely addicted to Opera, although I really couldn't tell you why - but it is the first browser I go for.

I've hardly used Firefox since, until recently something screwy started happening with IE (which I was still using for my internet banking and a few other things that complained about me using Opera!) so I've switched to FF for those sites. And I have to say I don't really find it noticably different to either IE or Opera, to be honest.

I have to say, since running Win 7 at home I've become quite a fan of IE8 - although it still amuses me when it has to break itself to properly render sites designed for IE 7 and earlier

[corylus]

I have used both but cannot (despite many attempts, reinstalls - opera and flash, googles, etc) get opera to display flash videos. It always says I need to install flash, offers to help, does the download and refuses to work.

very frustrating

[shaithis]

There is no doubt that firefox is a resource hog, although I do like using it :S

Currently have 5 tabs open (Hexus, PL Fantasy Football, 2 phpbb forums I admin and news.bbc.co.uk) and it's using 260MB of RAM!

If I leave FF open over night, then I run the risk of Windows becoming unstable when I use it again tomorrow until I have fully closed FF.

But as I said, I do love it, it's very much a love-hate relationship. It's technical short-comings are only matched by it's joy to use.

[dangel]

I have used both but cannot (despite many attempts, reinstalls - opera and flash, googles, etc) get opera to display flash videos. It always says I need to install flash, offers to help, does the download and refuses to work.

very frustrating

Go here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

Choose "Flash Player 10 for Windows" and download

close all browsers

run installer

Check you Opera/program/plugins directory - there should be "NPSWF32.dll" in there (if not it failed to install!)

[dangel]

nglayout.initialpaint.delay - changes page rendering. More info on http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9020880

I found pipelining to make a big difference

And dear God does it! I followed the instructions on that thar page and the difference is dramatic - why on EARTH is it disabled?

[peterb]

I found Opera to be slower than FF (on a Linux platform) and also a memory hog, but I think that is because the Opera interface is better and I tend to have far more tabs open at any one time (40 or 50). If I'm starting up the machine from scratch for a quick browse, I'll use FF - if I'm in fr a longish session, I tend to use Opera.

I haven't really noticed much difference between Opera on Windows and Linux - I originally bought a licence for Opera (before it was free) because it was a cross platform browser. (I had one for Mulberry e mail client too - before that became pretty much unsupported )

[Shaunbarlow]

I used opera temporarily quite a while ago (2 years ish) because of a recommendation. Have used firefox since, didn't get on with Opera. But i really do hate Safari..

[Funkstar]

Missed this thread before. I'm liking all the Opera love here

Been using it for a bit over a year now, and despite the period of instability (all the 9.5x series would randomly crash, but at least it would open your tabs again when you resumed) 9.64 is awesome.

Really looking forward to Opera 10, sounds very promising. Not tried it since the initial public Alpha build, migh need to go have a play about again.

[CX23882-19]

Opera 10 currently in alpha works fine with yahoo mail.

I'm liking Opera 10's compatibility so far, but not too keen on the default skin. I think that the Opera 9.64 skin was more attractive and somehow easier to look at.

As you say, Yahoo Mail is now working without needing to do anything special. There are a few scaling issues (e.g. the top-left panel is too deep), but nothing as serious as the garbled unusable mess that Opera 9.64 made of it. I'll be using Opera 10 on my old laptop without hesistation.

[Terbinator]

Id say from my experience Chrome is faster out fo the box, but as mentioned by others changing the pipelining settings in Firefox does make a difference - a noticeable one at that.

[Blaineoliver]

Link please, need to change my firefox piplining settings.