With the release of Opera 9.21 a couple weeks ago, people started to tell me that it was hands down better than Firefox. I’ve been using Firefox on and off since version 0.7 and exclusively since version 1.0. I used Opera 7 in there somewhere and had tried it since I switched 100% to FF with v1.0. It never was as good as Firefox IMO.

Fast forward to 5/2007. This new Opera release is gaining users from Firefox so I decide to tell people it sucks and then try it. Makes sense, eh? Download was small and the install was just like any other program out there. I open it after the install and notice nothing has changed since I last used Opera. That isn’t a bad thing, Firefox hasn’t change it’s appearance in a long time either. I hit CTRL-T to open a Tab and I get a Speed Dial page. Pretty slick. I load it up with URLs to my favorite/most used sites and get this:

It’s pretty much one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in a browser. Put your 9 favorite or most used websites there, hit CTRL-T and click the one you want to open. You can also hit CTRL - #, where # is the Speed Dial number of the site you want to open. I did a search on Mozilla’s extension site and there was one Speed Dial extension and it was crap compared to Opera’s. You drag and drop in Opera’s version and it has clear buttons as well as context menus for every Speed Dial you have setup. From the context menu, you can clear the URL out of it, update the thumbnail and set the update interval.

Unfortunately, that’s the only positive thing I’ve taken from Opera 9.21 so far. It’s enough for me to keep testing it out, but I don’t think it will be enough for me to use it past this week. The find option in Opera is still an annoying popup like in Internet Explorer:

With Firefox, when you hit CTRL-F, you get a search bar at the bottom that isn’t in the way at all. Another thing that bothered me about Opera is when you middle click on a bookmark in the bookmarks menu, it won’t open in a new tab. In fact, the only button that will do anything is the left mouse button. No context menu when right clicking on bookmarks in the bookmarks menu. Middle clicking will open in a new tab if the bookmark is in your “Personal Bar,” which is Opera’s name for a bookmarks bar. The other thing that really bothered me is when you only have one site open, the tab bar doesn’t go away. I couldn’t find a place in the preferences to change this behavior, as that happens by default in Firefox, but at least there is an option to change that.

That’s about all I’ve gathered in the two hours of use I’ve put in. Like I said, I don’t see myself using this in place of Firefox, but I DO hope that someone comes out with a comperable Speed Dial for Firefox. It’s one of the coolest features I’ve seen in a browser.

Also, I am aware that there is a built in torrent feature, but I decided to not bother testing it out since nothing is going to beat uTorrent and I’m not going to leave a browser open to seed.

Edit… Opera apparently doesn’t like Wordpress:

Fixed by copy/pasting into the edit page for this post in Firefox.