The Linux Extremist

I remember back in 2004 that I had procured a new PC for one of my staff, and he insisted on putting Linux on his machine. He also insisted that he had to put Opera on as well. For him it was the gold standard of browsers, particularly on Linux.

I have long been acquainted with Opera; in my business, it’s good for auditing any websites you build as it’s the most unforgiving browser. Code errors which IE passes over are picked up in Opera. Thus if you have a site that functions perfectly in Opera, it can be truly said to be a sturdy solution.

That said, Opera’s claim to be the fastest and best appears to have been eclipsed by the coming of Firefox. Opera 9, perhaps, is an effort to reclaim the title. Does it succeed?

I spent a day using it to find out. The answer is simply - it’s great, but not an improvement enough on Firefox to provoke a switch.

This is not to denigrate it - the browser is fast, clean and unlike Firefox, it has an e-mail client built in. Again, it is still the most unforgiving browser and this is helpful for those in the development arena. There are a number of skins (I prefer Freestyle) to make it very attractive. The new widgets feature shows promise; though I must say that the FTP Widget is a dud - it merely prepopulates values for a web based FTP tool.

So in the end, it’s a case of 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Both Firefox and Opera are excellent, outstanding browsers. Firefox may just have the edge on speed, particularly with the tweaks I’ve described in an earlier post. In my case this means I use Firefox as my primary browser but Opera is always on my PC as well.

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