One of the cool things about this conference is that they had the 4 major browsers represented: Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Opera. Yes, Opera is a major browser, and it's a really nice one too (see earlier posts about my Opera experiment).

I missed part of the Chrome talk, but I did hear about some prefetching of link data to help provide a snappier response when you navigate around the web. The obvious question of ad tracking came up. I also worry about the poor site that happens to be featured on a major page on the web. They not only get the clickthroughs, but they also get the pain of the traffic that never actually arrives, as it were.

The Firefox talk focused a lot on the features of HTML5 and customized JavaScript APIs that are being added. The upgrades are looking really good. Apparently Firefox 5 is going to be launching in a couple weeks. 6 and 7 are later in the year, but they are apparently only 6 weeks apart. I appreciate the faster development cycles and getting upgraded browsers into users' hands quickly. However, I don't like the break from Firefox's sensible numbering scheme. Chrome does the versions like this, but I like that Firefox, IE, and Opera all come with really visible changes to the end user when they do major version bumps. In any case, the version number doesn't really matter. What I want to see is if Firefox will suffer the same problem that Chrome does with the upgrade path for its users. I don't want to have to support 10 versions of every major browser, all at different points in the implementations of the really neat upcoming features.

IE was up next with some nice graphs and demonstrations of IE9 performance, especially against IE8. This is really the second time I have seen this talk. The last time was before IE9 was actually released as a finished product. The leaps are definitely impressive. I have to compliment the two presenters I've seen on their poise. It is difficult to walk into a room of people who are almost always using Firefox and Chrome to talk to them about IE. For the actual content, the most notable part for me was the background compilation of the JavaScript. This uses the other cores that so many computers have these days to compile JavaScript even as you may be running the exact same code. The next time through, though, it will be faster because it will be running native code.

Finally Opera got some time in the sun. The funny thing is that Opera has actually implemented most of these things already. They don't have hardware acceleration in their browser yet, but they have done a lot of forward-thinking things since some relatively early versions. The talk was mostly about how Opera owns the mobile market. I like the idea of selling the typically reluctant developers on this by showing them how many of their users actually use Opera on mobile devices (whether mini or mobile). He also talked about some of the difficulties of sites that do not respect the X-Forwarded-For header. In any case, it was good to see Opera getting some time on stage to talk about their product. He had to rush through the Firefly information and mobile debugging towards the end, but those are both great features if you have never tried them before.

In my previous post, I talked about why I was fed up with Firefox and why I didn't really like IE. Now, let's look at Opera specifically.

First, it comes with integrated email and feed support. You can say that IE also does in that Windows comes with a mail client. Also, Firefox does have it's companion Thunderbird. However, neither of those solutions provides the experience that Opera does.

Email is email, but I don't really like webmail. I find it rather painful, to be honest. It does not give me the view of my mail that I would like (i.e. all my mail accounts with all my feeds in a single messaging application). One of the reasons I stumbled across Opera is that I was getting tired of Thunderbird's unstable feed support (feeds will occasionally stop updating until the application is restarted). The one thing that has bugged me about the email support is that I cannot seem to find a way to import my Thunderbird contacts. If anyone knows how, please let me know.

There are a few things I don't like. First, the filters are cool in that they can learn. However, they are annoying in that there seems to be no other foldering mechanism. I used to have a folder for my girlfriend, one of stuff to keep, and a few others for particular things that I do. Now, it just feels a bit weird. Maybe there's a little nuance that I'm missing.

Next is the feed support. I like the message-like feed support. I like to not have to sift through things I've already read, even if the new stuff is highlighted in a certain way. The feed support in Opera is much like Thunderbird in the way it is displayed. It has the added bonus of letting me see all feed messages in a single list. I like this because it relieves the monotony of sifting through all the random feeds (including several from failblog and the like) that I read one at a time. The best part of the news feed reader is that it is in my browser. I know this may not seem to be a breakthrough, but I can watch flash videos in the news feed entries. The pages that are brought up are fully functional. It's one of those strange and crazy things. Plus, my content blocking also works.

For the browser itself, everything just seems to work. There are a few places where I have to tell Opera to tell the site that I'm using Firefox, but otherwise, it just generally works. It takes a little time to get used to the way the pages are rendered, especially when there is only partial information. Opera tends to be a bit more brutal to pages that do not do the right thing. In general, though, it handles itself quite well. Interestingly, one of the biggest issues I have is with Yodlee's Moneycenter. I use this to manage my finances. When you enter your username, it takes you through a redirect to get to the page to enter your password. That redirect page writes invalid HTML (everything up to part of the body tag itself) and then seem to cut off. The meta tag with the redirect is there, but Opera will not follow it because the page is not complete. If I forcibly stop the page load, it will then read the meta tag and refresh me to the next page. It is really odd.

Finally, I want to say something about what the Internet should be. Over the years I've been on here, I have seen many things come and go. I have seen the rise, fall, and continuing persistence of AIM. I have seen game services and popular sites die. With all the dynamic web applications and cloud-based systems, all the cool sites that do basically useless things, there are consistently a few problems with life on the Internet.

To start this, I will ask when the last time you sent a large file to someone? How did you do it? I'm sure many people do it in different ways. Personally, I upload it to the server you are reading from right now. I send a link to whoever wants it, and they download it from there. The real question is how do you share resources without using an intermediary. AIM allowed file transfers. If you're really savvy, you can set up an FTP or HTTP server on your computer, make it accessible to the internet, and have a friend hit that. Opera Unite makes that easy. There are built-in file transfer, media, picture sharing, and web server functions. You can easily set up a web server to point someone to to look at your latest web development work. You can select a file and send it to someone without having to know how to host it somewhere. I have yet to use some of these features due to the fact that I have almost no friends who use Opera. They look like the dream, though. It's the dream of any easy, social, shareable Internet without sacrificing control over the content you own. There's even a way to share your music library across the web. This is particularly appealing to me. I'd love to share my music with myself when I'm on other computers.

The verdict isn't in yet. I'm not convinced I will stay here with Opera. Even if I don't, the fact remains that I would like a better email client and a better browser. The new versions of Firefox and IE scare me more than encourage me. Could Opera finally be making its own way in the world?

Like many developers out there, I have been a Firefox user for several years. In fact, I've never been an Internet Explorer user. I was using Netscape until its demise. I switched to the Mozilla suite later on and eventually to Firefox and Thunderbird. I have been a faithful user of the latest and greatest stable versions of those applications for several years.

Until now? Firefox has been my standby at work and home for quite some time. Over the past few years, as I've done more and more with heavy JavaScript applications (both writing and using them), I've found Firefox to be far better than Internet Explorer. That's no surprise to anyone. However, I've also found myself swearing and facepalming more and more as time has progressed. To paraphrase a friend: Firefox started out claiming to be the faster, lighter browser, and now they're just as slow and bloated as anyone else. I even got to the point where I tried to go to IE8 and see how that worked. Don't ask me to be too specific about why, but I didn't last long. Somewhere within the first few hours of using it, the red haze came over me, and I switched back. I believe it was a general feeling that the interface was in my way more than was appropriate.

Let's take this methodically, though. Here's why I hate certain browsers:

Internet Explorer:

• interface is clunky
• customization (keyword searches? I know there's a way to do it, but I haven't found it yet.)
• typically less support on developer-oriented sites
• security holes are targeted
• poor memory management on complex JavaScript application pages

Firefox:

• memory hog (try leaving Facebook with the auto-refreshing feed open for a day and then look at your memory)
• bloated
• security holes are targeted
• extensions necessary rather than nice
• supposedly minor revisions can wreak havoc on complex JavaScript applications

I am tired of waiting for my hard drive to swap out my browser, and I am tired of poor experiences. In this day and age, there are really only 2 other options: Chrome and Opera. Now, Opera is the single thing most web developers can rally against when it comes to browser support. You mention Opera to a room full of developers and you'll hear lots of groans above the one or two cheers of appreciation. If you mention Chrome, you'll get quite a few cheers, but you'll hear some very vocal people (myself included) in the background saying they refuse to touch it. Considering this is my browser preference, I'm choosing to avoid Google products. Yes, I'm probably going to be kicked out of the web developer's club soon since I'm using Opera at home.

At this point, the Opera experiment has been going on for 2 days. I am not using it at work for two major reasons: it does not support Kerberos very well and I work at a tech company where most of the tools barely support IE and are pretty iffy on Firefox, even. Therefore, this experiment is at home only.

My first impression is pretty good. Importing settings from Firefox wasn't too bad. I'm definitely making headway into making Opera my own. In several hours, I was much more comfortable with it than I've ever been with IE. There were a few things that were terribly unfamiliar like creating a toolbar with my bookmarks. I figured it out eventually, but that seemed a bit harder than it should have been. I will write more when I have spent more time with it. To be completely open, I have to make a couple complaints and disclaimers:

• The scrolling with my mouse wheel is way too fast, and there doesn't seem to be a good way to slow it down.
• I miss my triple click to highlight an entire line.
• I have yet to try it on any extremely heavy JavaScript applications as I am not using it at work. However, I use a couple financial sites that are pretty dynamic, and it seems to work fine except for some hover menu issues that I'm not ready to blame on the browser quiet yet.

More about my experiment, including what I like about Opera will come in a couple more days.