Browser shootout: Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer
18 CommentsPublished March 7th, 2008 2:50 PM EST By Daniel Goldman
Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer (IE) will go at it during the ‘Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again?’ panel at SXSW this coming Monday.
Representing Opera will be Charles McCathieNevile, Opera’s Chief Standards Officer, who will go against Brendan Eich, the CTO of Mozilla Firefox, and Chris Wilson, the IE Platform Architect for Microsoft.
It was an exciting (and a bit controversial) panel last year. Hopefully we’ll get this panel discussion on video for those of you not attending SXSW.
Fight on!
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The podcast recording of last year’s panel can be found here: http://2007.sxsw.com/coverage/podcasts/
Direct link: http://audio.sxsw.com/podcast/interactive/panel/2007/SXSW07.INT.20070313.BrowserWars.mp3
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Yes, Daniel, please post this panel discussion on video, if possible! Audio podcast is great also (thx for the link from 2007, Lawmune).
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IE vs Firefox? IE wins, dang.
It seems fitting, that the future of our Internet standards are decided by a bunch of overheated debaters in an arena too small to hold even one tenth of one thousandth of the Internet user population. Our democracies at work, I guess.
Apparently the term “co-operation” isn’t in anyone’s dictionaries here, lol.
I’ll be looking out for that video
~ Wogan
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That will be a good video. Make sure to post it for us as soon as it’s available.
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This should be fun. Hopefully Ie would be slaughtered.
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I can’t wait to see the video
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No promises on the video (we’ll see what SXSW and the other panelists say), but we’ll do our best. At the very least, you can expect a text description on the opera-sxsw-2008 blog. http://my.opera.com/opera-sxsw-2008
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Having used both Firefox and Opera, I’d say that Opera has a better out of the box operation. You don’t have to download extensions and customize the layout as much to get up to speed (mouse gestures, excellent page resiszing, speed dial bookmarking are all standard features).
In addition, Opera memory usage is pretty lean by comparison. Some of my Firefox-using friends regularly have to reboot their browser several times throughout the day, whereas I’ve been browsing on multiple screens with 30+ tabs open with very few issues for days on end typically. Though I hear the new Firefox 3 beta is making great strides in the memory management department.
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@ BarkTwiggs
That seems to be the breaking point at which the two audiences of those browsers begins and ends. Opera has a lot of great things out of the box, while Firefox lets you customize your own experience to the way you like it.
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I love Opera and have been using the desktop version since ver. 6. I think that, when looked at objectively and quantifiably, Opera offers a more polished experience than IE, Firefox, and Safari(atleast the buggy windows version I’ve used). I’ve started using Firefox for general browsing though, essentially because there are some extentions that I just can’t work without.
For example, I watch alot of youtube videos and often save some for archiving/offline viewing, using the unplug extension. The next best thing I had to do using Opera was to go to some youtube video extracting websites, copy/paste the video’s link and then download the vid. The extracting websites would become unavailable at peak rush hours everyday, and the whole thing was essentially unusable. Then there’s this del.icio.us extention that lets me synchronize my bookmarks between my windows tablet and my linux pc, which is very useful for me. In Opera, I could drag links to the del.icio.us website into toolbars, but it wasn’t as fast or responsive as having del.icio.us integrated as a part of the browser.
I have an Nokia N-Series phone(Symbian OS 9.1, S60v3 UI), and Opera’s got a pretty solid offering on that platform. When I’ve got WiFi, the Opera Mobile browser, though over a year old, works alot better than the built-in S60 browser. Mobile uses the limited ram more efficiently, and it lets the user open multiple tabs. The S60 browser supports tabs, but only if a webpage opens something in a new window/tab. Without WiFi, Opera Mini uses the operator’s expensive bandwidth very efficiently, and is very… ‘functional and elegant’, as Jonathan Coulton would put it. Then there’s a Russian mod of opera mini, which’s based on Mini 2.0, but offers a ton of functions if you can use it’s feature-rich though difficult-to-navigate interface. Supports multiple tabs and ftb and other such stuff.
All in all, Opera’s a pretty interesting company with pretty interesting products, on multiple platforms. This year’s going to be pretty interesting.
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Sorry, typo. I meant to say the russian mod supports FTP, as in File Transfer Protocol.
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I think that now is time for the Opera Team, to focus its efforts on optimizing Javascript execution performance.
IE8, is about 10x faster than IE 7, while FX 3, is about 8x faster than 2. Opera is stille the lead, but quite near to FX.
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hey, they forgot to mention Safari!
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I want to see who’ll come up with full Acid3 support first on Windows.
Apparently the FF3 nightlies are getting pretty close.
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fme: pretty close? The latest Firefox nightly is at 69/100, and the final version definitely won’t pass the Acid3 (it’s just too late in the development cycle). They’re only fixing “easy” bugs before the release. The big bugs will have to wait for Firefox 4 (or possibly later?).
Webkit is at 90/10, that’s what I’d call “pretty close”.
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This thing already happened on the tenth: http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/programming/panels_schedule/?action=show&id=IAP060348, Anyone got any links to this thing’s podcast/video?
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There is lots of impressions/reviews of this ‘browser wars sxsw’ stunt around the net. You can google it, and find one that you find descriptive enough. It was generaly described as ‘good’, so give it a try and look for it yourself. Bonus, you’ll get a chance to see it from other than operawatch’ perspective.
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