At the moment I don't know (or care) about all the XUL shit, I don't know whether it's good or bad, only time will tell. I'll only care if the technology takes off and Opera doesn't support it, only then I'd agree that FireFox has a significant advantage over Opera. At the moment it doesn't, I don't need any extentions for Opera because it's so advanced it doesn't need any, currently the superiour interface and download manager carry far more weight than support for some new technology that isn't even mainstream and might not ever become important.
At least you know now that Firefox is a bit better technically than you previously thought. If I ever say "IMO Firefox is technically superior to Opera", anywhere where there's Opera fanboys about... Not pretty. And then XUL comes into play.
Opera is probably superior functionality-wise. But I can live without them functions Opera has and Firefox lacks, believe it or not ("They're importance is close to nil, at least IMO. I wouldn't go crazy over them. I wouldn't switch from Firefox to Opera for them.". GNU Emacs has all the functionality in the world (you might need extensions for some crazy stuff - like an IRC client and a web-browser), but you don't see everyone using it, do you? Some functionality is just not-important. skyman, what was your reason for disliking Emacs, again (it mightn't have been clear the last time. I remember you made a joke about Emacs (something like "it's supposed to be a text editor or something"?))?.
Also, Firefox is far superior extensibly. Some of the functionality provided by Firefox extensions you simply won't get on Opera.
For now I'll stand by my previous statement, Opera is better than FireFox.
Only IYO. Other people's opinions will differ, and you better not try to force your opinion on them.
Anybody who, in their right mind, says (and means) "Opera is better than Firefox" (like, plain-better), either has alot to educate me about or has alot to be educated about.
In my opinion, XUL is a waste of memory, and serves to slow it down with the unneeded ability to skin the browser.
Can't you skin Opera? Why do you say it's a waste of memory?
Oh yea - that's another thing. XUL applications can be easily skinned (I think that's by nature - or close to it - too (which would mean it shouldn't have been a huge amount of extra code to get-working, and it shouldn't require a much faster/better CPU or more/better memory).). But that's not the only advantage of XUL. So don't kid yourself skyman.