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 several sites (including one of my credit card websites and a site I had to use for one of my classes) didn’t work.

When I heard about the new version of Opera in beta, I thought I’d give it a try.  It’s pretty nice, but after just two days of using it, I’m switching back to Firefox.  The lack of extensions is a big problem.  Not being able to use Zotero is a big issue since it’s the best citation manager I’ve come across.  I miss Twitbin and Adblock, too.  Then there are lots of annoying little things like this:

Menu in Firefox

Menu in Opera

This is one of the problems that crops up a lot – text displayed vertically instead of horizontally. Even the little messages in gmail “Loading…,” “Sending…,” etc. are displayed like this. Sometimes it’s not really a problem, but sometimes it makes the text difficult or impossible to read and hides parts of the page, like on Hulu:

Hulu in Firefox

Hulu in Opera

I’m not exactly sure why this happens, but it’s irritating.

Opera also doesn’t work very well with certain logins and uploads that use flash (?).  For example, normally in WordPress when you upload an image, a window pops up to let you browse for the image and edit its size, alignment, caption, etc. and the rest of the WordPress screen grays out.  In Opera, that works alright, but you can’t move the image window around on the screen at all, making it impossible to change certain settings or even click to insert the image into the post if you’ve got a small screen.  In WordPress, this is easy enough to get around if you know a bit of html, but on other sites, that isn’t an option.

Both of those problems showed up in earlier versions of Opera I’ve used.  They were annoying then and they’re more annoying now – why haven’t they been fixed yet?  I like that Opera feels faster, but I need to be able to use Zotero for work and the other issues are just frustrating and a waste of time to deal with.  Despite all the glowing reviews of Opera 10b I’ve read, I’ll be sticking with Firefox.