I’ve used Opera up until recently, when I switched to Firefox. Both are excellent browsers and both have their strengths and weaknesses. Opera is a rock solid browser that has some great capabilities, including an excellent e-mail client that I still use. Firefox’s strength is it’s plug-in capability making it very powerful and customizable.
At my work, all employee’s have been instructed NOT on upgrade to IE7. It is not compatible with many of our inter/intranet based tools (especially Citrix and CBT courses).
The desktop guys have told me that uninstalling it is not as easy as some have said.
But even if it was compatible, I wouldn’t. I agree with the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach.
Opera starts much faster, and has a smaller system resource footprint. Firefox likes to do lots of caching, so can burn more bandwidth. Note the mention of memory leaks above. If you notice your machine slowing to a crawl after a while, that would be the problem.
OTOH, about 1 in 100 or so web sites won’t render correctly using Opera. FF seems better in this respect. I have to keep IE for windows updates anyway, and if a site won’t work in IE, something is really wrong.
I’ve been using IE7 at home now since it’s release - no problems - no issues. Layout took a little getting used to and I did add the Google toolbar.
As for the PC’s at the office, no upgrade there - there are issues with some of the other applications we use.
I’m a Firefox person, but at work we have to use IE. Everyone in my office hates IE7. It’s clearly an attempt to be like Firefox, and it clearly does not work as well.
Example: In Firefox, hit ctrl-t to open a new tab; the tab is open immediately, before you could even get your fingers to another key. In IE7, a new tab takes at least 5 seconds to get open and functioning.
Example: That stupid phishing filter; I click a “close this window” link in IE7, and it pops up a warning saying, “This site is trying to close this window; proceed?” Never mind that I’ve told it repeatedly to trust that site; it keeps asking.
There are lots of niggling little details like that; no one thing is a dealbreaker, but they all add up to a clunky, infuriating, counterintuitive browser. Browsing with IE7 is like playing the piano with mittens on.
Firefox and Thunderbird don’t delete a file called .parentlock properly under Linux when they shut down sometimes. The file is used to tell the programs that there’s already an instance running when they start up. Therefore, when the file’s not been deleted, it’s impossible to start Thunderbird or Firefox (you get a message telling you they’re already running).
You have to delete the file manually (which is pretty well hidden in .thunderbird and .firefox) in order to start them. There’s a number of other lock files that are sometimes not deleted, too. The problem’s pretty widespread as far as I know (at least when I was searching for a fix there were lots of others with the same problem).
Firefox developers aren’t gods.
It’s become apparent that the only reason Firefox is more secure than IE is because it’s more obscure. Only a small percentage of people use Firefox, so until recently the hackers couldn’t be bothered to attack it. As more and more people use it, however, it has started to show up on the radar screens of malware writers, and its flaws are being exposed.
You can get add-ons for IE7, just like with Firefox. I used to have the Google Toolbar installed, but it slowed down IE and I only ever used the spelling checker function. Fortunately, I just discovered that Microsoft maintains a list of IE7 add-ons here. Now I’ve got IE Spell, a simple spelling checker that has allowed me to dump the Google Toolbar. (IE runs much faster now.) I love that you can start IE Spell from the right-click menu, plus you can look up the definition of a selected word. I’ve also got the Weather Channel Toolbar, which tells you stuff like the current temperature and tomorrow’s forecast for your location. I like it.
Since I’ve had past experience with “upgrades” I’ve taken a philosophy of leaving them alone unless I actually NEED them. There’s nothing wrong with my current browser so I leave newer versions to the next computer I get. The last free upgrade I got was from Norton when I renewed my subscription and it proceeded to delete the suite of Norton products that had nothing to do with the subcription. It took awhile to fix it. Something I’ll remember next time I buy security software.