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.