Has the Fat Lady Sung?
My affair with Opera may be coming to an end. I’m trying out the public beta of Mozilla Firebird, which aims to be fast, light and extensible. It does feel subjectively faster. It runs Shockwave games, which I never could get Opera to do. No adware. The tabbed browsing works at least as well as Opera’s. It comes set to suppress popups by default, which you need a third-party add-on to do in Internet Explorer. I never liked Netscape or Mozilla much, but I’m liking this.
What it doesn’t have: mail and news. If you went for Opera’s M2 mail client, you won’t want to switch. (The Firebird people are working on Project Thunderbird, a redesign of Mozilla’s mail client. It’s not as far along as Firebird.) I never switched to M2 for various reasons - it struck me as worth seriously considering in future versions, but there haven’t been any. (Opera client development has slowed way down, too.)
On the extensible front, two words: Google Toolbar! Plus BlogThis and more. (Things They Left Out looks like a good extension for those who want to get into serious customization or have important security concerns.)
If you’re a Windows user, I recommend downloading the version with the unofficial installer module. It auto-configures many plug-ins and MIME types, and avoids an unfortunate Flash bug that can crop up with manual installs.
This is not a definitive endorsement, more “if nothing awful happens, I’m sticking with it.” I’m trying it as my default browser until such time as I reject it utterly.
