Another reason Opera wins over FireFox

Another reason Opera wins over FireFox

First off let me see, I do like Firefox. Probably like many, you bounce back and forth trying both Opera and Firefox. I've been registered user of Opera for a long time and love it. My biggest problem with Firefox is the way it 'feels.' I know that sounds silly but I equate it to those that use IDEs for programming. I'm not a big fan of Eclipse (like Intellij's IDEA better) for the same reason - it simply feels more awkward to use. I know that sounds subjective (and yes it is) but I think the problem stems from the plugin architecture. I love the concept and think it's great to have plugins, but when you need to download a billion plugins just to try to get standard behaviors, it's quite frustrating and often ends up creating an application that doesn't feel 'integrated' or 'smooth.'

I'm not going to get into all different things Opera has built in that you need to download for Firefox, since there are way too many (ie What's up with having to download an extension just so I can have "add bookmark here" - crazy). I am curious though for those that use Firefox - I want to mimick the simple ctrl-tab functionality that Opera has in Firefox? No one on their forums has given me an answer on how to accomplish this. Looking at all their short cuts I don't see it. Previous and next tab functionality in firefox simply cycles through them in order which isn't what I want. I want the behavior that Opera has and I'm actually surprised it doesn't have it since I would think this would be pretty basic (after all on Windows and even with the Linux desktops you can get that with regular windows behavior ie Alt-tab). Maybe it has it and I'm just not seeing it.

Bottom line again is that I start going "What is the point with me even trying to keep up with Firefox and all of its extensions?" Just use Opera and be a happy camper.

(Although will Opera now work with Ebay - there was a problem with that in regard to posting pictures - so my wife has been using Firefox. If Opera can now handle this please let me know. Thanks.)

Oh, there is one extension that Firefox has that I hope Opera can incorporate into its builds (if it hasn't already) - I love the concept of being able to synch bookmarks to a file on a server via FTP. This is a huge benefit for those that want to keep their bookmarks in snyc between work and home. I know this belongs on the suggestions forum and might already be in the works. Just adding it here because Firefox does have this already and it is very nice.

throw a rock at firefox today and make this topic go away...

I started using firefox more often when the new yahoo page didn't work with Opera... and I didn't need an extension to make it work in FF.

It's Yahoo's fault it doesn't work, not Opera's.

Re: Another reason Opera wins over FireFox

Originally posted by rickcr
I am curious though for those that use Firefox - I want to mimick the simple ctrl-tab functionality that Opera has in Firefox? No one on their forums has given me an answer on how to accomplish this. Looking at all their short cuts I don't see it. Previous and next tab functionality in firefox simply cycles through them in order which isn't what I want. I want the behavior that Opera has and I'm actually surprised it doesn't have it since I would think this would be pretty basic (after all on Windows and even with the Linux desktops you can get that with regular windows behavior ie Alt-tab).

I use Firefox as my primary browser, and I am pretty sure this particular functionality is not available in Firefox. Nonetheless, I would have never known it exists in Opera had you not mentioned it here. I couldn't really see much use of it (or the Alt-tab function in Windows). As long as I can see my tabs, I can just click on them to get to them. Same thing with Alt-tab, I can just click on the taskbar.

Merry Christmas.

Well, some of use love to use the keyboard. And then there are those of us whose very expensive mouse's left button died one month after the warranty expired and are forced to use the keyboard. Well, you could say I fit in both of those groups.

I gave Opera a try when Firebird was having problems with stability but
they eventually fixed it. The one big thing for me was something that's
relatively easy to do in Firefox and Internet Explorer (though you have
to edit the registry with IE) is that you can write your own browser
functions into the browser. I have a little program that transfers your
portfolio from Fidelity Investments or Etrade into Medved QuoteTracker
(streaming real-time quotes and charts). Before I had a program to do
this, I'd have to copy the ticker, buy price and quantity from the
portfolio display into QuoteTracker. Quite a bit of work when do a fair
amount of trading or maintain a large portfolio.

At any rate, noone every responded to my request as to how to do this with
Opera. So I went back to Firefox. My bug was never fixed (to my knowledge)
but I got Firefox fast enough to the point that the bug stopped appearing
(appeared to be some kind of Windows timing problem).

And then there's this:

[img]http://mysite.verizon.net/vze6w3dz/24fun.jpg

Goldzilla
And then there's this:

[url]http://mysite.verizon.net/vze6w3dz/24fun.jpg

Try both on your computer and then show us a screenshot. I always get faster results in Opera on all my computers then in FF, and the only way to make FF faster is to block pop-up windows (then it does get close to 4 seconds on configurations similar to the Top 10 results).

Apart from this, you could've looked at average results instead of Top 10.

domel

Well, some of use love to use the keyboard

Some of us love to use both the keyboard and the mouse. You still get the same functionality with the mouse in Opera - press the RMB and rotate the wheel.

rickcr, In FF you can obtain that behavior of Ctrl+Tab using an extension, like TBE. I do get your basic point though. IMO the following features should be default in FF (w/o using extensions):

1. Open links that normally open in windows in tabs
2. ctrl+z to open last closed tab
3. Restore last visited tabs upon browser restart
4. ctrl+tab to cycle between current and the last used/active tab
5. Basic mouse gestures

Originally posted by neowin
IMO the following features should be default in FF (w/o using extensions):

1. Open links that normally open in windows in tabs

This IS possible in Fx without any extensions. Go to about:config, and set browser.tab.showSingleWindowModePrefs to true. Now when you go to Tools - Options - Advanced - Tabbed browsing, you will see an option to force links to open in new tabs.

2. ctrl+z to open last closed tab
3. Restore last visited tabs upon browser restart
4. ctrl+tab to cycle between current and the last used/active tab
5. Basic mouse gestures

I disagree with all of the above (respectfully), but especially with #5. I absolutely hate mouse gestures - I have it disabled for even when I use Opera. I may not be in the majority here (lots of Firefox users seem to like mouse gestures), but I definitely don't want mouse gestures bundled with the default version of Firefox.

I have both Opera 8.0 Beta 1 and Firefox 1.0 installed on my computer and the best way I can describe Firefox compared to Opera is clunky. For instance, to get my bookmarks in the right click menu, I have to install an extension. The bookmarks show up all right, but they hesitate before doing so. With Opera, it is a matter of editing a file and they are there instantly when I right click. Another thing I have noticed is the way each browser scrolls down a page. With a page such as is on these forums, I like to sroll down at a fairly quick rate, scanning for words of interest in the topics. With Opera, I have no problem doing that and still being able to scan effectively. With Firefox, I have to slow down to a crawl before I am able to actually see what I am scanning because everything blurs up when I scroll very fast at all.

Originally posted by van_grieg
Try both on your computer and then show us a screenshot. I always get faster results in Opera on all my computers then in FF, and the only way to make FF faster is to block pop-up windows (then it does get close to 4 seconds on configurations similar to the Top 10 results).

Apart from this, you could've looked at average results instead of Top 10.

I'll give that a try later on. But I did manage to knock out someone running Opera with a
3.6 Ghz system. The Firefox Trunk (pre 1.1) runs about 20%+ faster than the Release 1.0 line
(I was pretty amazed at the speed increase from 1.0 to pre 1.1) and I've made a lot of
assembler code performance improvements in my own build environment.

BTW, if you block popup windows, test #2 doesn't run. At least it doesn't for me. I normally
run with two popoup blockers (Firefox' and Proxomitron) and have to turn them off when I
run BenchJS.

Other folks don't have access to my build environment so I wouldn't expect a lot of other people to be able to get the results that I get.

Originally posted by neowin
rickcr, In FF you can obtain that behavior of Ctrl+Tab using an extension, like TBE. I do get your basic point though. IMO the following features should be default in FF (w/o using extensions):

1. Open links that normally open in windows in tabs
2. ctrl+z to open last closed tab
3. Restore last visited tabs upon browser restart
4. ctrl+tab to cycle between current and the last used/active tab
5. Basic mouse gestures

(1) is available in the Firefox Trunk right now and it's nice to see it there. I was skeptical about it but managed to get it to work with a little help from someone else. I still prefer all the functionality of TBE though.

Originally posted by yfan
This IS possible in Fx without any extensions. Go to about:config, and set browser.tab.showSingleWindowModePrefs to true. Now when you go to Tools - Options - Advanced - Tabbed browsing, you will see an option to force links to open in new tabs.


I disagree with all of the above (respectfully), but especially with #5. I absolutely hate mouse gestures - I have it disabled for even when I use Opera. I may not be in the majority here (lots of Firefox users seem to like mouse gestures), but I definitely don't want mouse gestures bundled with the default version of Firefox.

I didn't see your post before posting my other post.

I agree about the Mouse Gestures. I tried them a long time ago and didn't like them.

Firefox used to be about a very slimmed down browser but it really isn't anymore as you've had the usual engineering battles about functionality versus original design goals. I wouldn't have a problem if someone added them in. As long as they were off by default.

BTW, if you block popup windows, test #2 doesn't run.

On one of my PCs FF with pop-ups blocked still passes the test, although the test #2 gets skipped. On the other one FF can't get through the test at all - it hangs in the middle of test #1 with pop-ups enabled or disabled. I have to kill it in the Task Manager.

The Firefox Trunk (pre 1.1) runs about 20%+ faster than the Release 1.0 line

Yeah, right.

Originally posted by van_grieg
On one of my PCs FF with pop-ups blocked still passes the test, although the test #2 gets skipped. On the other one FF can't get through the test at all - it hangs in the middle of test #1 with pop-ups enabled or disabled. I have to kill it in the Task Manager.

Yeah, right.

Well, if you don't believe me, try a nightly.

In May 2004, they went into a kind of code freeze. Now a 6-month code-freeze isn't exactly
my idea of engineering but it happens in a lot of large software projects. A lot of performance
improvements went into the Trunk while only stuff deemed critical went into the Branch. About
two weeks ago, they dumped all the stuff that they had been working on in the Trunk into the
Branch. Created a fair amount of instability but it seems reasonably stable right now.

What's happened with development has all been out in the open for anyone to see. And this is pretty routine engineering stuff on large software projects.

Well, if you don't believe me, try a nightly.

If it's 20% faster that 1.0, that'll make it 30% slower than Opera here, so I won't bother, thanks.

I tried a few runs of Opera and it came in second though the difference was only about 10%. This was the Opera Beta.

I tried to install the current release but spent several minutes running into SSL errors. I tried the Simtel site but got bombarded by ads and it gave me the 17 MB kit which I didn't feel like waiting for. It would be nice if there were a simple FTP site to pull kits from. When I want something from Mozilla, I just go to the official FTP site or one of the unofficial sites (I usually use these as they're a lot faster than the official builds) and download the kit.

[img]http://mysite.verizon.net/vze6w3dz/24fun2.JPG

It looks like I came in a little slower than those with 2.2 and 2.4 Ghz processors which is where I'd expect to come in. It's pretty clear that Opera's table rendering speed is much faster than Firefox' though I know one of the reasons
for this. My approach towards speeding up Firefox is to run a profiler which tells you how much CPU time is spent in
what routine (by sampling) and then target the heaviest CPU users for code changes. The Firefox developers haven't
put any effort in this area so I assume that they don't really care about it.

Now to give Internet Explorer a try.

Originally posted by joaomt
I started using firefox more often when the new yahoo page didn't work with Opera... and I didn't need an extension to make it work in FF.

Have you tried it recently? I reported this to Yahoo as a bug; they responded that they knew about it and within about 3 or 4 days Opera worked fine with the new pages. Been fine since.

I don't know what is wrong, but on my PC, Firefox is very slow. See the attachment.

browser performance.png

Originally posted by SPACE
I don't know what is wrong, but on my PC, Firefox is very slow. See the attachment.

The official builds suffer from:

1) Use of VS2002 which is poor in code-generation capabilities compared to newer compilers.
2) Uses very conservative optimization options.
3) Release build is much slower than the Trunk because they went into code freeze last May so that
new development went into the trunk but not into the branch.

In general, you will see much better performance from the Trunk and better performance still from builds that
use newer compilers with more aggressive compiler and linker optimizations. You won't get these from mozilla.org
though.

Originally posted by Goldzilla
The official builds suffer from:

1) Use of VS2002 which is poor in code-generation capabilities compared to newer compilers.
2) Uses very conservative optimization options.
3) Release build is much slower than the Trunk because they went into code freeze last May so that
new development went into the trunk but not into the branch.

In general, you will see much better performance from the Trunk and better performance still from builds that
use newer compilers with more aggressive compiler and linker optimizations. You won't get these from mozilla.org
though.

That's poor deployment on their part. They're trying to get people to use a product, and won't even make it very optimized? Hey.. great if one of these nightlies is optimized to death and runs fast.. but nightlies are crap. I installed one yesterday and saw many many issues with it.

I'll stick with Opera

Originally posted by Goldzilla
The official builds suffer from:

1) Use of VS2002 which is poor in code-generation capabilities compared to newer compilers.
2) Uses very conservative optimization options.
3) Release build is much slower than the Trunk because they went into code freeze last May so that
new development went into the trunk but not into the branch.

In general, you will see much better performance from the Trunk and better performance still from builds that
use newer compilers with more aggressive compiler and linker optimizations. You won't get these from mozilla.org
though.

No, they use VC++ 6.0, not 7.0. That aside, the average on that page for Firefox is 13 seconds. I got 78.98 seconds. With Opera, I got 12 seconds.

According to the test Firefox is very slow on my computer as well, although to be fair whenever I've used Firefox it's never seemed 3 times slower than Opera, but that's what the test says
Both tests were run with no other tabs open and just QCD running in the background.

results.jpg

Originally posted by vcv
That's poor deployment on their part. They're trying to get people to use a product, and won't even make it very optimized? Hey.. great if one of these nightlies is optimized to death and runs fast.. but nightlies are crap. I installed one yesterday and saw many many issues with it.

I'll stick with Opera

I'd agree but I think that a lot of the developers run on Linux and don't know about a lot of the optimization stuff that you can do on Windows. The VS 2003 toolkit is free now so the cost argument isn't really valid anymore.

I make optimized release builds and have just started making Trunk builds. I've spent several days porting my performance changes over to the trunk and am using an optimized trunk build now. It should be faster than the builds that I was playing around with over the weekend. One thing that I love with Open Source is that you can pull it and make improvements and changes and then redistribute kits or the changes to others.

There are many other unofficial builders that do the same thing and we tend to build off the gains made by someone else so that there's a healthy competition to continually improve.

I'll note, though, that the best performance numbers that you usually see for Opera are with the Betas. Nightlies are a little rougher than Beta releases (Mozilla calls them Release Candidates). At any rate, I pulled the source code from 12/23 and am using my latest build as my default build.

One other thing: IE came in at 5.8 seconds. Nowhere in the ballpark.

Originally posted by SPACE
No, they use VC++ 6.0, not 7.0. That aside, the average on that page for Firefox is 13 seconds. I got 78.98 seconds. With Opera, I got 12 seconds.

VS2002 is VC 6.

I have VS2002, 2003, 2005 (Beta) and a few other compilers on my system.

whenever I've used Firefox it's never seemed 3 times slower than Opera, but that's what the test says

That test hardly represents any realistic situation, it's purely theoretical.

All this talk about how nightlies are faster than the official releases is great, but it makes it appear that to get the best performance out of Firefox you need to be techy and most users aren't. I've used nightlies in the past and found them to be buggy, that was pre version 1, so maybe they're better now. But the fact is that majority of people downloading FF will be using version 1.0, and Opera 7.54u1 is faster (although like I said earlier, I'm not convinced the speed difference is quite as big as that test makes is seem).

Originally posted by tupence
All this talk about how nightlies are faster than the official releases is great, but it makes it appear that to get the best performance out of Firefox you need to be techy and most users aren't. I've used nightlies in the past and found them to be buggy, that was pre version 1, so maybe they're better now. But the fact is that majority of people downloading FF will be using version 1.0, and Opera 7.54u1 is faster (although like I said earlier, I'm not convinced the speed difference is quite as big as that test makes is seem).

To get the best performance, you need to be technical or know someone that puts out optimized builds. There's
one guy with his own website that serves up a few GB of kits per day. He uses most of my performance changes, does a lot of localization, and has done a tremendous amount of experimentation with preference packs to maximize performance and stability. He is the most popular unofficial builder.

I know a 17-year-old that publishes very fast builds in 8 languages with a lot of the latest performance stuff off the trunk and he is popular with folks with very slow machines.

So you can get better builds without being a seasoned engineer but you have to dig around to find the builds.

Many of us do this as a hobby using our various skills, whether they be in engineering, release management, languages, marketing or distribution. That official Firefox has been as successful as it is is remarkable in an open source project. There is an undercurrent with the unofficial builders too. In fact there are a lot of people that won't use the Unofficial Builds as they are so slow and they only use unofficial builders that have built up good reputations over time.

You can see the same thing in the Linux world. I know people that are non-technical but they build their own Linux OS on their systems that they run it on. I would probably just grab a build that someone else did myself but there are many that want the best performance and so grab the source and do a build for their environment, sometimes grabbing patches for their specific hardware where support isn't in the mainline distro.

You don't have to wait for the mainline of the code or a particular vendor to get around to fixing something or adding some feature or performance tweak that you want.

It's like modding a PC or a car or do-it-yourself stuff on your house. You get a tremendous feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction doing something on your own that, sometimes, noone else in the world can do.

Originally posted by van_grieg
That test hardly represents any realistic situation, it's purely theoretical.

Yup. I can make a code change that speeds up the benchmark but feels slower in overall browsing. Ideally, code changes improve browsing and improve the benchmark. The benchmark is useful in that it points out glaring problems and that it is fairly reproduceable to see if you've made an improvement in one of many areas.

It's like modding a PC or a car or do-it-yourself stuff on your house. You get a tremendous feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction doing something on your own that, sometimes, noone else in the world can do.

That's all cool, but I need a program to do stuff on the internet, and no matter how enthusiastic you get about spending your time on building Firefox, it doesn't make it a better program for my needs - it won't add a good mail client there or eliminate the need to search for extensions to do every tiny little thingie. Also, in order for things like mouse gestures to work properly, there should be some serious work done, not just optimizations. And I'm afraid I have more useful things to do than browsing through amateur attempts to make some program 10% faster (nothing personal here), with God knows which side-effects. If it were my hobby, that would be different probably. The same thing applies to Linux which turned out to be my biggest waste of time so far.

Originally posted by van_grieg
That's all cool, but I need a program to do stuff on the internet, and no matter how enthusiastic you get about spending your time on building Firefox, it doesn't make it a better program for my needs - it won't add a good mail client there or eliminate the need to search for extensions to do every tiny little thingie. Also, in order for things like mouse gestures to work properly, there should be some serious work done, not just optimizations. And I'm afraid I have more useful things to do than browsing through amateur attempts to make some program 10% faster (nothing personal here), with God knows which side-effects. If it were my hobby, that would be different probably. The same thing applies to Linux which turned out to be my biggest waste of time so far.

There are a lot of people that are very happy with Firefox, official and unofficial. Same with Thundebird (I have optimized versions of that too). Not saying it's the best for everyone but it does work well for many as I've received a lot of emails and posts for my work.

I'm not a big fan of mouse gestures so that's not an issue for me.

I'm a professional engineer and this sort of thing is a lot of fun. Also pretty useful if you have kids looking for some real-world experience in engineering to get into college. As far as side effects go, if something goes wrong, I usually see it or hear about it pretty quickly.

Linux is pretty interesting in that it has turned out to be quite a commercial success.
I do my professional work on Linux and Solaris (and other platforms) and it makes for an excellent server platform. You have to keep your tools (personal knowledge) fresh and
doing something like Mozilla or Linux on the side is one way to keep in touch with the outside world.

Originally posted by Goldzilla
I make optimized release builds and have just started making Trunk builds. I've spent several days porting my performance changes over to the trunk and am using an optimized trunk build now. It should be faster than the builds that I was playing around with over the weekend. One thing that I love with Open Source is that you can pull it and make improvements and changes and then redistribute kits or the changes to others.

Would you care to provide a link to your optimized build? Or another page? I am a Software Engineer, and even I do not wish to compile and optimize Firefox myself. That is what THEIR job is, not mine. If they can't do this, then why should I use their product?

I HAVE actually compiled it in the past, and it was not worth it. I followed some guides to try and speed Firefox up myself, but the improvements still were not able to make Firefox faster on any of the 4 machines I tried it on.

Listen, your argument is fine and dandy for the select few that enjoy getting their hands dirty and spending their time doing things themselves. But most of us out there can't or don't want to deal with the tedious bullcrap.

Originally posted by Goldzilla
VS2002 is VC 6.

No. VS2002 is the original Visual Studio.NET. 2003 was the first update to it.. and 2005 is coming soon.

> No. VS2002 is the original Visual Studio.NET. 2003 was the first update to it.. and 2005 is coming soon.

I just checked on this machine and the VS .NET directory is empty so either I didn't install it on this machine or I deleted it. It's on one of my other machines but I don't have access to it at the moment. You may be right as I generally assumed that VS2002 came with VC6.0. I use VS2003 for my public builds and Whidby for other builds. But I require a disclaimer on my Whidbey builds because of the Whidbey EULA.

You can find my public builds at [url]http://www.pryan.org/mozilla/firefox/mmoy/
The Whidbey builds are in another directory and are password protected.
The moox builds are more popular than mine as he has a bunch of pref optimizations which people seem to like. I try to keep my kits functionally the same as the official kits. You can find them at www.moox.org

I have not made my trunk builds public as I'm required to release my source code changes with my kits due to the Tri-license and I don't have those ready for public use yet.

VS 6.0 has VC++ 6.0
VS.net 2002 (the original) and 2003 has VC++ 7.0

Thanks for those links though, I'll try them out.

Originally posted by vcv
VS 6.0 has VC++ 6.0
VS.net 2002 (the original) and 2003 has VC++ 7.0

Thanks for those links though, I'll try them out.

My mistake. I used 4.* and then went straight to VS2003. VS2005 Whidbey is much better than VS2003. I just wish I could get an MSDN version with PGO as I've heard of 15% to 20% improvements with Intel's PGO and assume that Microsoft's would be similar. PGO = Profile Guided Optimization.

Linux is pretty interesting in that it has turned out to be quite a commercial success.

And that's about it. There are few things in life I can care less for than the commercial success of Linux or Firefox's market share (well, not quite, the propaganda campaign for the latter is annoying as hell, and I completely stopped downloading anything from mozilla.org, it just feels like buying things from advertisements in spam e-mails). In any case, commercial success doesn't mean that the product is good.

Originally posted by van_grieg
And that's about it. There are few things in life I can care less for than the commercial success of Linux or Firefox's market share (well, not quite, the propaganda campaign for the latter is annoying as hell, and I completely stopped downloading anything from mozilla.org, it just feels like buying things from advertisements in spam e-mails). In any case, commercial success doesn't mean that the product is good.

Well, in general, I don't download anything from Mozilla.org except for their source code.

As far as commercial success goes, a lot of large companies have converted from other systems (Solaris, and other large iron) to mixed Linux/Windows environments with Linux as the server and Windows for the GUIs and I've seen some pretty amazing success stories. Big winners are Dell and IBM. Maybe the little guys like Red Hat too but I don't really follow them. I suppose that you can say that the success of Linux doesn't state that it is good but if you work in the business and the business is there for the taking, you'd be harming your own bottom line to not take it.

I think that Sun Microsystems tried to stand in the way of Linux and saw it's stock price drop 90%. Now they're embracing Open Source with Solaris. Maybe too little, too late but time will tell.

I have my share of complaints about Windows too but I use it anyways as it's the best tool for the job. I use MSVC++ as it's the best tool for what I'm doing with it. Same with Firefox vs Crazy Browser, Opera and K-Meleon.

As far as propaganda goes, why is there a college recruitment campaign for unpaid volunteers from a commercially successful company like Opera? I would think that they could certainly pay for people to do college sales. I think some of the Firefox marketing campain stuff is hokey too but they're non-profit so I excuse a lot of that.

But from a commercial company?

mixed Linux/Windows environments with Linux as the server and Windows for the GUIs

Is a very reasonable choice. When I was talking about myself, I meant desktops.

As far as propaganda goes, why is there a college recruitment campaign for unpaid volunteers from a commercially successful company like Opera?

I don't see anything wrong with volunteers. It's the content and the context that make it different, but I've talked enough about it already.

I use MSVC++ as it's the best tool for what I'm doing with it. Same with Firefox vs Crazy Browser, Opera and K-Meleon.

Obviously, we disagree here, and not about MSVC++.

Originally posted by van_grieg

Originally posted by Goldzilla
Well, if you don't believe me, try a nightly.

If it's 20% faster that 1.0, that'll make it 30% slower than Opera here, so I won't bother, thanks.

for me FF runs just a little bit slower than Opera (maybe 5%) but runs faster when browsing pages I blocked graphical and flash elements I don't need to see, especially with checked all boosting up options from Confguration Mania extension (Proxy pipeling etc.)

of course Back/Forward is faster in Opera (cacheing in RAM), I wonder when they will write an extension realising it in ff

Originally posted by Mayor
of course Back/Forward is faster in Opera (cacheing in RAM), I wonder when they will write an extension realising it in ff

You can't write an extension to do that as the internal data structures are gone when you close the page.

you can keep cahe in RAMdisk but it dissapears every PC restart, I think it is possible to force FF to use something like that
FF source code is open so imho it's just a matter of time

Originally posted by Mayor
you can keep cahe in RAMdisk but it dissapears every PC restart, I think it is possible to force FF to use something like that
FF source code is open so imho it's just a matter of time

The objects are cached but you have to render the page from the objects and that information is in runtime structures which get released when you close the page. So the code solution would be to save the structures on a page context change and then point to them from the tab when they need to be brought back into the current context.

As I said before, I haven't seen a lot of demand for this feature (other than from folks coming from Opera) so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it unless you want to implement it yourself.

in this case you're right - if someone didn't try Opera he doesn't know about RAM cacheing and its profits
the same reason is with IE users, they don't know what they lose 'till they try different browser (when I used IE I didn't know WTF are these "mouse gestures" and many other things so I didn't miss them, I tried Opera and boom, realised I had my eyes shut all that time)

if FF users would know it they would miss it too

Originally posted by Mayor
in this case you're right - if someone didn't try Opera he doesn't know about RAM cacheing and its profits
the same reason is with IE users, they don't know what they lose 'till they try different browser (when I used IE I didn't know WTF are these "mouse gestures" and many other things so I didn't miss them, I tried Opera and boom, realised I had my eyes shut all that time)

if FF users would know it they would miss it too

I'd think that a feature like this would be important if rendering was slow as the objects are already local.
I don't find rendering slow out of the cache so it's not really an issue for me.

I'd think that a feature like this would be important if rendering was slow as the objects are already local.

Beside rendering from disk cache vs RAM cache, there's also an issue of validating the pages. When you hit "Back" in on this forum, for example, there will be (absolutely unnecessary) network activity if you use FF. Opera will use local data when you navigate through its history.

It's just one of the many things that make Opera faster, and one of the many things that make Firefox feel sluggish going back to it from Opera, and no Javascript performance improvement will alleviate this per se.

Originally posted by van_grieg
Beside rendering from disk cache vs RAM cache, there's also an issue of validating the pages. When you hit "Back" in on this forum, for example, there will be (absolutely unnecessary) network activity if you use FF. Opera will use local data when you navigate through its history.

It's just one of the many things that make Opera faster, and one of the many things that make Firefox feel sluggish going back to it from Opera, and no Javascript performance improvement will alleviate this per se.

I went back and forth several times between this thread and the post page and there was no network activity after the first page load according to my firewall. The back and forth was under a second in every case.

A browser is fairly useless to me without the ability to write my own plugins as I use these for trading. IE, Firefox and Mozilla support this at this time so those are my current options. You may get your page in 1/3rd of a second vs 2/3rds on my system but saving me 15 minutes a day updaing my portfolios is worth more to me when I need a quick update in a fast moving market.

I went back and forth several times between this thread and the post page and there was no network activity after the first page load according to my firewall.

There is here, and there is on every PC I have access to, so I won't believe you, sorry.

You may get your page in 1/3rd of a second vs 2/3rds on my system but saving me 15 minutes a day updaing my portfolios is worth more to me when I need a quick update in a fast moving market.

Well, that is the reason I use Opera. It saves me way more than 1/3 of a second because it's a tightly integrated package with a lot of useful features that make using it fast and convenient, minimizing unproductive movements, lags and so on. When I do research on the internet, I use the Notes, I always see the mail coming in while browsing, and so on.

When I was watching stocks, I had a ticker on my desktop right above the taskbar with all the info I needed being reflected instantaneously, so it wasn't a problem. And, as a matter of fact, a standalone application makes sense here because I could see the info regardless of my current activities, not just while browsing.

That being said, I don't want to sound like I find extensions a bad idea in general. I probably wouldn't mind more functionality available for modification in Opera (and I'm not sure you are aware of the fact that you can do a lot by modifying Opera's configuration files). However, there's a point when relying on extensions gets annoying and unproductive. When I need to install an extension to get the "Add bookmark here" menu item or "View in IE (Photoshop or whatever)", or "Copy to Notepad", another extension to make tabs controllable, another one to work offline, another one to control the download manager; when I need to find the proper extensions spending hours on the internet instead of just using the application; when I need to update all these extensions when a new version of the browser comes out, and watch for updates of all these individual extensions, I don't find it a lot of fun. There are people for whom modding and tweaking their PCs is a major activity, but I'm not one of them - I want to get the job done as quickly and as comfotably as possible.

I don't think that either Opera or Firefox offer a perfect balance between customizability and a good set of pre-installed features. But Opera is definitely much closer from my point of view. At least it has features.