Firefox is slower than Opera.

[Agent]

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

No idea I'm afraid. All I know is that the difference is dramatic on my systems. Certainly puts it very close to Opera for me speed wise

Link please, need to change my firefox piplining settings.

I was the first and only person to mention pipelining in this thread, and I provided multiple links in that post

[Stringent]

Isn't FF 3.5 due out soon?

[peterb]

Tnkk you Agent - makes a useful difference!

[5eb]

Long ago, firefox became bloatware, in my opinion! Opera has always been fast and has mostly been on the forefront of supporting standards.

[MarcLister]

Opera (9.64) still won't let me using the CTRL+ENTER/Magic wand feature to automatically logon to play.com. Perhaps Opera giving me a hint there?

Apart from that I love Opera. I did try to ditch it for Firefox 3.5 but after a few hours I had to go back to Opera. Have also been using the 10.00 Alpha builds which work well I must say.

[spanna5]

Another Opera fan here

Who else uses mouse gestures

When I have to use a browser without it I absolutely hate it

When it comes to speed, I don't care about the milliseconds differences in rendering pages, without mouse gestures I find browsing so much slower

[CX23882-19]

As of last week, Yahoo Mail is broken again. It seems that Yahoo are blocking Opera from using the new Y!M.

[nightkhaos]

The browser market seems to be tighting at the moment. More and more browsers are complying with the W3C standards. (Presto and WebKit seem to be the cloest, with Gecko trailing behind in the same camp as Triedent in that "we will fix current cabality and security issues first.")

The curious thing I find with that line of thinking is that any security holes you patch under your current (bad) may close by fixing the engine to fit the standard, or reopen when you comply with the standard.

Firefox has lost the "top spot" for me, because it has done completely the wrong thing, it has attempted to steal more and more Internet Explorer users, and has become a "transistion browser", because of this, the developers tend to develop it so it looks and feels as much like Internet Explorer as possible, this includes some of the rendering "quirks" that Internet Explorer 7 has.

Althrough I understand why that mode of thinking was important (consider Opera, only web developers and people who understand the importantance of W3C standards actually used it in the first place), this mode of thinking will get Firefox in trouble if it does not start thinking for the future.

Take Google Chrome, it's market share is growing, and it is trying it's hardest to comply to W3C (my only concern is the V8 engine, which may be a little too advanced, and hence has trouble with some scripts because it requires more resources to "get started", it does overall tend to use less, which means it is good for complicated and bulky Web 2.0 apps, and the fact is has yet to update to the latest (Acid3 complaint) version of WebKit.)

Then there is Safari, which only two failings in my opionion are it's combersome UI (what is it with OS X era applications, have the concept of UI consistancy and simplity simply gone out the window with Mac OS X developers?) and the fact that it simply refuses to run properly on Windows (which turns out to be a detriment to the Mac OS X market as well, why should we buy a Mac when iTunes and Safari run so slow?). Apple, if you want more market share, so the Windows users you can do it properly!

Opera has always been, in my opionion, a "would be nice to use, but" browser. It never ofters enough to justify the switch from my current browser. However, right now, it is better than Firefox overall, which is worrying for the Firefox market, assuming my opionions are of any merit when it comes to the entire market.

Internet Explorer 8 cannot be forgotten, it is a good step towards Microsoft actually producing a half decent browser. Many of the security holes have been fixed, but that will mean nothing if they do not continue to patch them in a quick and timely manner up until the release (and majority transistion) of users to Internet Explorer 9 (assuming Microsoft still is producing Internet Explorer by this time). There is still a very considerable amount of people using Internet Explorer 6 and 7, one of which Microsoft has dropped support for completely.

If you made me rank them I would rank them thus, and please note the distrinction between Safari for Windows and Safari for Mac OS X. Also note I am going to assume that if you are not using the default browser for your operating system you will have it up to date (this is why I include Safari 3 for Mac OS X, but not Safari 3 for Windows).

1. Google Chrome
2. Safari 4 for Mac OS X
3. Opera 9
4. Firefox 3
5. Internet Explorer 8
6. Safari 4 for Windows
7. Safari 3 for Mac OS X
8. Internet Explorer 7
9. Internet Explorer 6

Please note an important aspect of my ranking is W3C complaince, hence why Safari 3 is so low down the list.

[Barry]

I find Opera faster but I use Opera because it 'feels' nicer than others for me