What’s wrong with Internet Explorer? Although I don’t have a categorical anti-Microsoft bias, it does seems that, given their overwhelming share of the brower market at this point, MS doesn’t have much incentive to develop innovative browser features or even to work on improving IE’s performance. I’ve looked at Opera on and off over the years, and the latest version is pretty slick. While the Google Toolbar gives you integrated search and popup blocking in IE, Opera adds tabbed browing and (seemingly) improved performance, as well as better (and fully customizable!) keyboard shortcuts and a bunch of other features without any real side effects. As nice as Opera is, I thought I should check out Mozilla too. It appears that the main Mozilla development track is being deprecated in favor of Firebird, a streamlined browser-only product that doesn’t bother with integrated email and a bunch of other jive. Firebird essentially claims to offer many of the same benefits as Opera, and is freeware as opposed to adware (my main annoyance with Opera being that it wastes a huge amount of space displaying an ad banner when running in “free” mode — understandable of course). It took me an hour or so of low-level hacking to customize Firebird to duplicate my favorite Opera keyboard nav features (z=back, x=forwards), and I had to install the TabBrowser Extension to make tabs work propertly, but with that done, it seems to work pretty well. It seems quick, but Opera still seems faster — although that may just be a perceptual artifact due to Opera’s busier feedback UI. At this point, I’m going to try Firebird as my default for a while, before I shell out the $29.95 (well, $20 with the student discount!) for the ad-free version of Opera.

Here are a couple of other Opera vs Firebird comparisons:

   http://nontroppo.org/wiki/WhyOpera
   http://www.flux.org/pipermail/linux/2003-July/013175.html
   http://www.tntluoma.com/opera/beyond30/2003/08/opera_vs_mozilla.html