I recently, on a complete whim, switched from Firefox to Opera 10.10 for web browsing. And I haven’t looked back. I mean, Firefox is fine – it’s more than fine, it’s darn good, but there’s something about Opera that I totally like. I can’t really put my finger on it. It’s . . . it’s sexy.
A few things I’m enjoying:
-speed dial: I can use the command key plus a number to access any of nine websites, and these really do make up a huge amount of my browsing
-custom searches in the search bar: I type “v nabokov” and it searches Voyager (the library catalog at UH) for Nabokov. ‘Cause “v” is for Voyager, and I told it that.
-Opera Link: keeps my bookmarks, notes, and other settings synced between my laptop and my work computer
-Opera Unite: enabling this on my laptop (and leaving my laptop running) means I can access music, photos, and files on it from anywhere I have internet access
-keyboard shortcuts: I don’t like going back and forth between the keyboard and the trackpad, so the more I can navigate by typing, the better
I know most of these things (maybe not Unite) have some equivalent I could have gotten in Firefox. And I’m not trying to convince everyone to switch to Opera. I’m just happy that it works for me.
I definitely like Fx for its extension support (yeah most of the above can be done, not sure about Unite though), but recently I also changed by primary browser to Google Chrome… I now use both extensively (Chrome has those support too) (although I also have Opera and Safari as standby browsers (and IE as standby to standby’s))… I’m kinda schizophrenic in this aspect :P
It’s great to have competition…
One thing I miss in Opera and Chrome is ad-blocking… You can get it to work in them but Adblock Plus in Fx is so much more awesome…
Good point about Chrome – I haven’t really used it much because I’m on Macs about 90% of the time right now. Yeah, I think variety (aka schizophrenia) is the key :)