Opera (now 100% Ad free) is the fastest Graphical Web Browser in Windows.
In Windows? Yawn.
I don't like the layout of that page, or the way the writer has it like IE vs. FF in the titles of the myths and
Opera + IE vs. FF in the reality and notes bit. WTF? We already KNOW Opera has some advantages over both FF and IE.
Myth - "Firefox is Faster than Internet Explorer 6" - Example
Reality - Internet Explorer 6.x is clearly faster than Firefox 1.x in 6 out of 7 measures of performance and is significantly faster from a cold start. - Source
Notes - The argument that components of Internet Explorer may load during Windows Startup is nullified by Opera's start times. Which means there is no excuse for this except poor coding on Firefox's part.
Other than that general shittyness of the page, it has potential.
Myth - "Firefox Achieved 150 million downloads (2-2006)" - Example
Reality - "Oops. We recently introduced a bug into the counter and it's being fixed. We're not quite there yet. Sorry for the confusion. We accidentally counted the 20 million people who updated from Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 1.5.0.1 this week." - Source - Source 2
lol, never heard about that before. Doesn't sound like that unplausible of a mistake. Compare that to when Opera put a logo up on their front page claiming they won that PCWorld award, when in actual fact they did not. lol.
sourceopera lies about being named pc world best browser
Opera Software seems to have decided that it's easier to lie than to win. Here's the chain of events as best as I can tell.
PC World announced their 100 Best Products of 2005.
Firefox not only won the coveted Product of the Year award, sweeping all 99 other products in the list, but it beat out two other browsers, Maxthon at number 12 and Opera way down at number 88.
Opera puts out a press release claiming "A Winning Streak: Opera once again wins PC World's World Class Award for best Web browser". Opera.com then places this same thing on their front page (see the third checkbox with the claim that they've won best browser in '05.)
Conclusion: Opera is simply lying. They were one of 100 products to be labeled as "World Class" but they did not win any "best Web browser" anything. They were last in the ranking of three web browsers. They got beat by both Maxthon and Firefox.
update: without apology or any public comment at all, Opera has changed their homepage to remove the claim. You can see the old home page here. They have not corrected their press release.
update 2: While they still haven't fixed the press release that states they won the PC World Best Browser of 2005, or done anything make a correction available for those who reprinted that press release, one of their employees, Haavard, has commented at his blog/journal saying "it appears that Opera might not have won the best browser of 2005 award from PC World after all". It looks like he's also locked the discussion in their community forums here and here.
update 3: OK, the press release is corrected and Opera's saying it was all just an innocent mistake.
And on the security thing, DUH if you don't use the latest FF version you'll be insecure. The page should've noted Mozilla's not-bad record of getting security fixes out to people who are free to take them (and free to not take them). FF 1.5 will automatically download the updates (you can disable that ofcourse) and tell you when they're ready to be installed (because you'd needa restart it). I know of no better solution to getting updates out to the willing millions. Kinda sounds like this page is trying to flee users from FF, the standards-compliant, free web-browser.
And re: Opera being more secure than FF. How does Opera get their patches out? I know they have major releases out every 6 months or whatever, between them do they have minor releases and/or do they have an update system like FF 1.5's?
IE extensions, LMAO. I noticed IE supported extensions when I couldn't get that (can't remember the name of it) toolbar off my brother's computer. Nevertheless, FF with XUL and that, I love the way extensions work. I doubt I would like the way extensions work in IE quite as much.
And as we come towards the end this guy shoots himself in the face:
Myth - "Firefox supports Tabbed Browsing and Internet Explorer does not" - Example
Reality - Internet Explorer 6 supports Tabbed Browsing when used with the MSN Toolbar extension in Windows XP. - Source
Uh, FF supports basically anything you can imagine (including pop-up blocking improvements etc.) if you install/make an extension for it. And it's pretty damn secure if you update it.
Warning - When viewing his websites in Internet Explorer you may receive deceptive warnings saying: "Warning: There is a problem with your web browser" which links to his "IE is Dangerous" propaganda page. This is an attempt to use scare tactics to try and get people to use an alternate web browser. Please do not fall for these. He is also well aware some of his web pages break in Internet Explorer but deliberately refuses to fix them out of clear bias: "Do I dislike Internet Explorer? Yes. Do I wish Internet Explorer would just go away? Yes." - David Hammond. It should be noted these guides here will always attempt to work with all web browsers and never resort to these dishonest tactics.
How ironic.
Notes - Internet Explorer has very good support (81-86%) for the most important web standard, HTML 4.01
Ugh, in a modern web-browser HTML 4.01 on it's own isn't all that great. Most websites use something called CSS to style pages.
Re: Acid2 test, Opera and FF. In my experience FF has excellent support for w3c and standards and ecmascript (aka javascript). I've often messed about with using JS to modify the DOM of e.g. a SVG page. I built them in a way I expected them to work with standard compliant browsers and they worked on FF. I don't have Opera installed (must install it, just to test this shit), but other people using Opera have told me (to my surprise, I thought Opera was good at this stuff) they just get blank pages on my documents (must get those pages up for ye to examine).
Opera doesn't support XSL(T), something I've also often messed about with (
http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/).
