A Week Without Firefox

Last week I fired the Fox and switched to using Opera 9.6. Today, I'm back to Firefox 3.0 because while Opera has a few nice features, it ultimately lags behind FF (for me, anyway) in usability and functionality.

Here's how they stack up:

Opera 9.6's Pros

1. Sidebar notepad feature
2. Speed dial homepage
3. Minimalist UI with sidebar (incl. a handy notepad app and the usual suspects (transfers/downloads, history, bookmarks). For web dev, there's some handy extras like Links (a list of all the links in a page) & Info (page metadata)... but then FF also provides these via a different UI
4. Ability to do "g keyword keyword2" to search Google for those keyword(s) (Firefox just does this without the "g")
5. Mouse gestures
6. Single "Wand" password manager login for entire session (rather than per-window - see Firefox Cons below)

Firefox Pros

1. Awesomebar searches within history allow minimal typing like "hu ec ve l ar" to pull up a long URL like https://build.eclipse.org/hudson/view/Athena%20CBI/job/cbi-ve-1.4.x-Ganymede/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/
2. Ability to create keyword associations for bookmarks, so that "b 272403" will load https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=272403
3. Tons of plugins/extensions, including: mouse gestures, Twitter, Delicious, Tab colouring & detach/merge, ...

Opera Cons

1. Location bar only works with URLs and sometimes page names. Way more typing needed than in FF
2. No ability to undo the closing of a tab
3. Cannot reproduce FF extensions in Opera; Delicious and Twitter integration are not nearly as good; no tab colouration, single view of downloads, no Tasktop support.
4. Cannot store username/password pairs for in-page login forms (only browser-level ones). Repeatedly having to log in to JBoss Hudson every few hours is a royal pain.
5. Crashes unexpectedly but previous session can be recovered.
6. Lame icon with a dropshadow. Retro, sure, but c'mon, they've had that for AGES, and it's just lame.

Firefox Cons

1. Memory bloat
2. Crashes unexpectedly but previous session can be recovered.
3. When reloading a saved/crashed session, every single page requiring access to the password manager pops a login dialog; sometimes I get to enter my password 7 or 8 times, or hit ESC repeatedly to lose those tabs.

I also briefly tried Firefox 3.1beta4, but as none of my extensions work there yet, it's not much better than Opera at this point. It's supposed to be better on memory, and has new bells and whistles being added to the Awesomebar. It's also supposed to be implementing a lot of functionality I get now from the above extensions, such as better tab management.

So, ultimately, I'm back to Firefox 3.0.10.