Wow... this is INSANE...
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node&from=325
It's been an astonishing and sleepless 72 hours since we released Firefox Preview Release. Thanks to your impressive efforts, nearly 790,000 people have downloaded Firefox in 3 days, bringing us within arm's length of our 1 million goal with a week to go!
http://my.opera.com/community/
Opera is Free!
Tuesday, 20. September 2005, 07:26:35
Thursday, 22. September 2005, 12:37:18
Apparently the word got out about the new version of Opera. Version 8.5 has been downloaded over 1.4 million times so far. But this is only the beginning! We are depending on our community to help others Choose Opera.
Have you already helped people make the switch to the world's best browser? Blog about your experiences so we can all work together to bring a better browsing experience to the masses.
UPDATE (9/23/05): We've just reached 1.6 million downloads since the release of Opera 8.5. Keep up the good work!
A TON more people are downloading Opera compared to Firefox... comparing both to their initial launches. Just amazing.
Anyways, back to features... If you don't mind a 10 Mb additional download package, highlight some words and hit the v key on your keyboard. You have a browser that speaks to you... and speaks much better than Firefox does with its' extension.
ANOTHER ANNOYANCE... Page finding. Hit CTRL-F and you get the lovely IE "let's find things on this page in a painful manner" dialog box!!
SOLUTION... hit ., yes, the period key on your keyboard. A little box appears at the bottom left that says "Finding text". Start typing and you have find as you type. To find the next word in the page, hit F3.
Minor annoyances... Tab browsing has different keys. CTRL-N (not ctrl-t) is a new tab. SHIFT (not ctrl) click a link for it to appear in a tab, but the tab is thrown in your face. You have to CTRL-SHIFT on a link to have it appear in the background. You can optionally override that, but it isn't a big deal because middle clicking still makes a tab appear in the background.
Minor annoyance... Firefox shows in my Windows XP start menu as the browser for the internet, even though Opera is my default browser. In fact, Opera is submissive to Firefox!!
HTML:
Plug-in path D:\Program Files\Opera\Program\Plugins
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Plugins
Yeah... I was wondering how Opera installed all the plugins I ever needed without me knowing about it. Truth is, it is "borrowing" Firefox's plugins!!
It makes it work wonderfully, but it would certainly cause issues later on if I didn't notice that. So, Opera is also less agressive about "taking over the system". Perhaps one day I can kick Firefox off of the darn start menu's internet option... hmmm...
So, anyways, I can make a preliminary conclusion finally. Opera is great... if you are somewhat handy with computers. It certainly needs a bit more kicking of the tires and tweaking under the hood to make it gel with your computing experience. Firefox, for the most part, has a great UI in place and is similar enough to Internet Explorer to work for most computer newbies. So, if you can figure it out, Opera is spectacular to work with. If you can't quite get your head around operating Opera, Firefox allows you to just browse the web with little learning required.
The features in Opera make it worth learning though... and currently, Opera has "won" the battle for my little piece of the desktop... although they can certainly improve (just like Firefox can certainly improve... and IE needs to catch up already!).