Browser wars

[desh]

Things that Opera has that Firefox doesn't, and that keep me from switching to FF:

• Real paste-and-go at the cursor point in the address bar, not "go to whatever URL I have stored in my clipboard, regardless of the current contents of the address bar"
  
  
• A good session saver
  
  • some modicum of a UI
    
  • distinct session files that I can locate on my hard drive
    
  • the ability to save and load multiple sessions, not just one at at a time
  
  
• Good gesture support
  
  • Overloaded gesture commands (e.g. "down-right means 'close tab', unless there are no tabs open, in which case 'close window'")
    
  • Gestures that don't cancel themselves if I wait too long before releasing the right mouse button
    
  • Better movement recognition
  
  
• Easily configurable toolbars
  
  
• Tab configuration
  
  • Tab focus that goes to the most recently used tab, rather than the next tab to the right, when I close the active tab
    
  • A tab close box immediately below the primary close box, at the top right of my screen
  
  
• The ability to use less than half a gig of memory to handle the dozens of tabs and multiple windows that I usually have open at once
  
  
• Probably a couple other things that I can't think of off the top of my head
  
  
• The ability to do all of these without hunting through thousands of extensions, fighting to install them, keeping them upgraded, and finding out that it's no longer supported or that a rival extension does what I want better

These are all subtle things, but major usability things for me. If any of you FF nuts can solve them for me, then it will go from my second-favorite browser to my favorite. Promise.

Comments

Re: Browser wars

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i've been with opera since a really early version (forgot whether it was 2.X or 3), and i won't switch even if another browser catches up (mostly by picking off everything cool that opera invented). that's despite me usually vastly preferring open source software. opera gets my loyalty because they worked for it. and i willingly pay for software whose makers pay attention to their customer base; i've only had the best experiences with them even when i had problems.

your last point is also a decisive one. i generally like the flexibility that comes with extensions/plugins, i think it rocks when it comes to graphics programs, for example. but for a web browser i don't need it. i don't want my web browser to become my operating system (i already have an editor aspiring to do that :).