The winner is....

Edit: This post is now basically obsolete. You can pretty much skip it.

If you read my last post, you know that I decided to try using Opera instead of Firefox for one week, or until I definitively made up my mind. I didn't quite need the full week. After using Opera for five days, you could say that I have definitively made up my mind. So what is my definitive decision on which browser I will use, you are probably wonder? If you know me well, you probably have noted that my use of the word "definitive" comes off as rather sarcastic. That's because my final, definitive decision is that I will continue using both browsers. Both of them have features that make browsing this crazy series of tubes much easier for me, and both of them lack some of said features that the other does have. Much of the time, I think I should be able to reasonably guess which browser will suit me better for a particular inter-series-of-tubes-web-nets browsing session. For the most part, my browsing sessions fall more of less into one of two categories. Either the type where a) I know pretty much exactly what page(s) I want to go to, or b) those where I don't. Before I explain which browser I will use for which type of browsing, and why, I'll explain a few more of my series of tube browsing habits for you.

The important thing to keep in mind is that I did not undertake this experiment in order to write reviews of opera and firefox for the everyman. I have particular preferences that are a bit quirky, so my goal was just to see which browser is better for me, not better in a more general sense of which one would win over more users if everyone had to give them both a fair one-week shot. The main thing is that when I use a browser, I hate having a bajillion toolbars showing. It's gotten to the point where really all I need to be able to do is see the menu bar (you know, file, edit, bookmarks, etc), the tab bar (I like tab browsing and I'm not amazing enough to go without it), and be able to search easily. To type in a location (notice I did not mention having the location field showing) I just hit ctrl+L (works in both FF and opera) to open the location dialog and enter my destination. It's a nifty trick. You should try it. That way, I have as much viewing space as I can get.

So I decided that when I don't really know where I'm going, I will use Opera. My first big problem when I switched what that you can't move the search box into the menu bar in opera, as you can in firefox, which results in having to have a whole extra toolbar if you want to be able to use the search box. That would have been a dealbreaker for me. But I quickly came across something that is sooooooooo much better. I almost pissed my pants at how awesome it is. In opera, you can use any search field you find on any website right from your location bar. It comes with google, yahoo, ask.com, and several other enabled, but you can easily add others, and may I stress easily. It works by assigning a short key sequence to each search. If you want to search google, instead of typing a website, you just type in "g [your search terms]. You can change the letters assigned to each search to any of your choosing in the options dialog. To add a new search, you simply right click on the search field on the page you find it on and click "add search", then assign whatever letter or letters you want to it. It is absolutely amazing. In firefox, I had to hit ctrl+k to highlight the search box, then ctrl+up or down arrows to highlight the search engine I wanted. That makes it very impractical to regularly use anything but the two at the very top or bottom of the list. Opera also has a few nice features worth mentioning. You can customize most keyboard shortcuts, though not all of them, a few of which I found annoying. If you try not to use the mouse much when browsing like me, that's pretty useful. Also, it's much easier to copy your location in opera as compared to firefox if you are picky like me and don't like to have your location field shown because it's a waste of space. I don't need to copy my location enough for this to be terribly important though.

As for firefox, its main advantage is that it is indeed faster. In cases where I knew exactly where I was going, I found that opera slowed me down a bit because it took longer for pages to load. It's not terrible, but sometimes it did annoy me. I also find firefox's options for tabs to be more flexible. When I have multiple pages open in various tabs, I find it much easier to use firefox. My computer isn't particularly old, and can handle the extra memory that firefox requires, so that is not really an issue with me.

Those of you who care about browsers as much as I do for some odd reason are probably aware of the great debate of whether firefox's plugin capability or opera's natively high flexibility, but inability to add plugins is better. I think it just varies from person to person depending on exactly what you need. Opera's base installation offers great functionality, and because they are controlling things from top-down, you know things will just work, and work well. With firefox, there are literally endless ways to customize your browser. It's just a matter of whether somebody has made a plugin for what you need (or if you can write them yourself). The drawback is that plugins are more bottom-up, and there is the possibility that one might interfere with another, or that if you add too many, they'll eat up tons of memory. In the end I might have to side with firefox on that one, because like I said, the possibilities are endless. It's just too bad I can't write plugins myself to do everything exactly how I want (like immitate opera's awesome search functionality. Hopefully someone will come up with that soon).