Migrating away from Firefox

Hi all,

I'm a long term Firefox user who is new to Opera (having grown tired of upgrading every five minutes only to be greeted with missing features and disabled extensions) so I'm looking to see whether Opera would be a suitable replacement.

Importing bookmarks was a breeze, but it looks like I can't import my saved passwords from Firefox. Since I have over 10 years worth it will be a pain to have to retype them all in, but all I can find about transferring the passwords is "it can't be done." As Firefox is open source, I would've expected it would be a fairly straightforward feature to implement, especially with all the defecting Firefox users at the moment. So is there a particular reason why Opera cannot import saved passwords from Firefox?

Another feature I haven't yet located is how to change the favicons for bookmarks. I have a number of bookmarklets which I use to look up things in various wikis (like Wikipedia) but unfortunately they all have the same icon. How can I set the icon for these bookmarklets? I notice that none of the imported bookmarks have icons either, even after I visit those pages. Will they eventually have icons?

Otherwise Opera is turning out to be quite a nice replacement. There were a number of annoying things I discovered could be configured differently (like the in-page search appearing at the top of the window and making the whole page shift up and down, but it can be moved to the bottom of the page like in Firefox) and unlike Chrome it's actually possible to scroll pages in real time (no need to go get coffee while you wait for the page to finish scrolling) so it's shaping up to be quite a nice experience so far!

Ha, ingenious idea! Unfortunately while investigating this I discovered Opera is not open source (for some reason I thought the source was available) so unfortunately I will have to stop using it :-( Shame, it seems like a really nice browser...

And why is this a problem for you? Did you ever modify the source of Firefox? Nay, did you ever even saw the source of Firefox? What advantage it is for you, when you only download a compiled package?

The craziness of statements like these completely perplex me.

Actually yes, I have looked at the code for Firefox. I haven't had the need to modify it yet, but when you're a programmer and you want to know how a program performs a particular task, it's much easier to look directly at the source code rather than stumbling around in the dark trying to make guesses.

In this case I could've looked at the Opera source to see how it stores passwords and written a program to extract Firefox passwords and add them to the Opera password list. But of course if Opera were open source, chances are this program would already exist.

However for me it's more than simply having the code. Every other application on my computer is open source, and I trust them because they are happy to make the 'blueprints' available, so to speak. When an application comes along and there is no source code, I unfortunately have grown to mistrust it. If they are confident with their code, why hide it? Why prevent other people from helping improve the application, for free? It is this that I find crazy. I also know that if there is a bug that annoys me enough, there is literally nothing but time stopping me from fixing it when the source is available. With closed source software you are at the mercy of someone else's whim, and that is something I do not like.

So because of this I now choose to use only software that is open source. Yes, most of the time I don't need to look at the code, but sometimes I do, and I know that either way the software is better quality because of it. Perhaps it doesn't make sense to some, but nonetheless it is very important to me!