LinLog

Holy inversion of opinion, Batman! Who would have thought that, just a month ago, I was on the verge of dropping Opera for Firefox, when now, I'm just going to complain about how much Firefox sucks? Funny how things work out, isn't it?

Opera 8.0 final has been good to me, while Firefox has not. Opera 8 is definitely a step up from the 7.x series and I'm no longer suffering from the problems I had with the 8.0 betas. However, with Firefox, it seems like every upgrade I install breaks something. I mean, it's really starting to get ridiculous. Of course, I should probably preface this by saying that I'm only talking about Firefox on Windows - I can't use it on Linux, because my system is old and Firefox is so slow on it that I have enough time to go get a cup of coffee between page loads.

Anyway, the first thing to go was the ability to open multiple windows. I'm not sure if this is because of a Firefox upgrade, or a "Tabbrowser Preferences" extension upgrade, but I can no longer open more than one instance of Firefox. It doesn't matter if I use File->New Window, run it from the Start menu, or any other way I can think of. I get a quick busy cursor - and then nothing. The really annoying thing about this is that it also forces me to open all Javascript pop-ups in tabs, including the ones that resize the browser window.

The second thing I noticed was mouse gestures. They seem to be working now, but for a while, they would inexplicably stop functioning. A little experimentation on my part suggested that this might be somehow related to my using MSVDM (the suckiness of that is a story for another day), so maybe it's not all Firefox's fault, but it's still a pain.

I also noticed recently that some images are not being displayed in Firefox. So far, they've all been GIF images, but it doesn't happen with all GIFs. I saw this both on Linux and the more up-to-date version I use on Windows. For example, when I downloaded RealPlayer 10 on Linux, the download page was missing a rather large graphic that displayed fine in Opera. On windows, I noticed that the graphics used for some characters in the pronunciation guides at dictionary.com are missing. What's the deal? The AdBlock extension doesn't show these being blocked and they show up in other browsers, so this doesn't make much sense.

Of course, it's entirely possible that most of my problems are caused by Firefox extensions rather than Firefox itself, but that just raises the question: what good is an extensible browser if it's not safe to use the extensions? Many of the Firefox boosters I've read claim that Firefox's extensibility makes it superior to Opera's built-in features because you can build extensions to emulate anything Opera can do and more. While that's technically true, what they often leave out is the fact that a) not all extensions are high-quality and b) extensibility doesn't buy you anything if no one has, in fact, written the extension you need. Yeah, I know - I could write the extension myself if I really wanted to, but it just isn't worth the hassle.

So, yeah, Opera has its problems, but at this point, I don't really think Firefox is any better. It's kind of like the difference between Linux and Windows - they both suck, just in different ways. And right now, Opera, just like Linux, sucks less for my purposes.