Goodbye, Firefox

Posted by on . 6 comments.

Monday, I switched to Opera.  I’ve been frustrated with Firefox for awhile.  The biggest problem was how slow browsing had become with it.  I also had lots of problems with flash player.

I’m not as used to Opera yet, but so far so good – browsing is MUCH faster and while I still have flash player problems, they aren’t nearly as severe: it works on more websites and the videos load much better.  Opera is also very easy to customize.  I like that I can really easily remove buttons and boxes and bars and move them around.

I don’t think I’ll be switching back anytime soon!

Comments

  1. Mike says:
    November 26, 2008 at 8:04 am

    Though Firefox has gotten decidedly worse over the years, I still use it because of the extensions. I use about 35 of them, and without them I’d be lost — I create my own menus, toolbar buttons, etc — things that are just absolutely impossible in Opera. I’ve basically created my own browser on their base. I should call it Mikeyfox or something.

    I also have many tweaks and optimizations that I’ve done to Firefox that makes it far faster than it is in the default config — on many pages, about 2-3 times faster.

    I’ve also got Flash working correctly, even on Linux.

    If you ever decide to go back to Firefox, all of this stuff is pretty easy, just takes a little time.

    Reply
  2. sarcozona says:
    November 26, 2008 at 10:39 am

    The time is a big part of it – yes, I could have fixed the flash problem, no, I didn’t want to spend half a day doing it. Yes, I could spend a bit of time tweaking it to make it faster, but I’d rather be cooking or doing hw. At this point, I wanted the most functional with the least work!

    Reply
  3. Mike says:
    November 26, 2008 at 12:19 pm

    I understand about the time factor.

    I noticed that you mentioned, “Opera is also very easy to customize. I like that I can really easily remove buttons and boxes and bars and move them around.”

    Almost everything in the Firefox interface is movable and customizable, too — you probably know this, but if not, right-click anywhere on the address bar and “customize” will appear as the bottom entry in the context menu. Using this menu, you can add and remove any button visible in either the window that opens or on the toolbar, and in addition you can move or remove any of the toolbars present by dragging and dropping. I don’t know of anything that can’t be moved or removed in the Firefox interface, which is why I was surprised to hear that you cited Opera as being “customizable” as many of things I alter and move in Firefox, I can’t change at all in Opera.

    For instance, here’s my Firefox. I’ve moved all the toolbars, removed the search toolbar, removed most of the buttons and added my own, partially using this extension.

    Since I value screen real estate and customization most of all, not being able to move absolutely everything makes a browser unusable to me. Firefox is getting worse in this respect — it now requires more dirty hacks to get it to work as it should for me — but Opera is even less friendly to customization, though its customization options are probably more intuitive.

    Didn’t intend to turn this into some screed advocating Firefox. I like Opera and use it from time to time, and Firefox has lost sight of its potential and purpose and is getting worse, but I did want to let you know that Firefox is, in my opinion, more customizable than Opera. If you monkey with the Firefox “userChrome.css” file — which I do — you can customize it far more. Essentially, you can change anything at all with this file, if you wanted to — but even the regular customization options (which I think most people don’t know are there), you can make it completely different.

    Reply
  4. sarcozona says:
    November 26, 2008 at 2:57 pm

    For what I want my browser to look like, Opera takes under a minute, and Firefox can take quite a bit longer. You definitely can do more with Firefox though 🙂

    Reply
  5. Mike says:
    November 27, 2008 at 3:03 am

    Using Opera on Linux right now.

    It does render faster than Firefox. I like the interface better than the Windows version, too.

    It’s nice to have lots of options. Epiphany is also a good Linux browser.

    Reply
  1. Gravity’s Rainbow » Blog Archive » Switch to Opera? says:
    June 9, 2009 at 8:39 am

    […] to Opera? Tuesday, June 09th, 2009 | Author: sarcozona I switched from Firefox to Opera last November, but I switched back after about a month because 1) I missed my extensions and 2) the buttons on […]

    Reply

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