Despite being downloaded in record breaking numbers on Download Day, not everyone is overjoyed with the latest release of Firefox.
Andrew Brown for one has decided to adopt the latest Opera browser as his default, and draws some interesting distinctions between open and closed source software development when comparing the browsers.
The contrast between Opera and Firefox is an interesting example of the contrasting strengths of open and closed source. Opera has always been closed source, and commercial and proprietary even though it is nowadays free to use. The good results of this are obvious. It was innovative, original and responsive to customer pressure - none of these qualities I’d associate with open source. Because its users and its programmers were always distinct groups, the programmers thought much harder about how to please the users - sometimes even before the users knew what they wanted.
While not my default browser, that’s still Firefox, I am using Opera 9.5+ (as well as Safari) and find it is head and shoulders over previous versions.
There are some features of FF 3.0 that I find troublesome. For instance, each time I close the program and attempt to reopen it, I get a warning that Firefox is still running and that I must close the program before I can restart. This forces me to log off my Windows Vista machine and then log back on before I can start FF.
I also use Opera to test the websites that I develop, but I have never found the interface to be quite as intuitive as I would like and have never even considered switching to it as my default browser.
That’s weird Firefox behaviour. I’m using XP and have no problem like that. I wonder what causes it… hopefully it’s not a Vista issue… maybe there’s a FF add-on that’s not completely compatible with v3 that’s causing the problem. Have you sent in a bug report?
Opera 9.5 is, as I say, a vast improvement over earlier versions, but it still doesn’t render some webpages properly. Likewise I use it for testing and a little browsing, but it’ll sometime before it becomes my default browser (if at all).