Well, when you put it that way---Yes!!

I would have to say that Opera has been about as reliable as Firefox2. Both will eventually crash with a lot of windows or tabs open.Its interesting that Ff3 does not have this tendecy on XP pro. I have had maybe one hundred and fifty tabs open with that and no crashes. When Opera Crashes you get the Windows style dialog box that "Opera has had a problem and needs to close" even on Linux. So as far as multiple tabs being open (crashes) I would say that the two are even. Opera is full featured and I have read where Ff implements Opera inovations.

As far as data harvesting/mining in prinple I would rather not allow it. I believe that a lot of work has to be done to limit it all though. Amazon and whomever always know its your computer and so on. I think the news sites mine info by giving choices to read more of the same article. Don't all the search engines do this as well? I'm thinking that the privacy issue to most users stays in the princle catagory and does not make it to the implementation stage.

I think the real strenght of Open Source is with Gnome ,KDE ,Gtk and so on. I would prefer that these factions where only better documented and not disturbed in any other way.
Firefox holds the GPL Linux "banner" but I don't think that it is more instumental then that in the long run. I have four browsers on my distro right now and they all have their advantages. Dillo is good when you are sick of all the java mind games and just want to read some God Damn text.

I could post " I just installed Dillo today and it does next to nothing but it never crashes and I don't have to play those Java mind games". "Thread closed."

I've found that Opera anywhere is a bit of a RAM robber. I already switched to Seamonkey from Firefox and any problems disappeared (I don't know, is it basically the same underneath the hood?).

Actually, I find that Chromium's interface is quite simple and terse, but contains a lot of little things that make your life easier. It takes a lot of getting used to, but in the end it's quite simple and innovative.

For example, it has no menu bar.

The tabs are on top, making it more obvious that the URL bar and stuff is separate for each tab.

When you have so much tabs that they have to be made smaller to fit and you close one, the tabs do not increase in size if you close one until you move the mouse out of the tab bar. Instead, they shift to the left so that the mouse cursor is right on the close button of the tab to the right of the closed one. Very convenient.

Also, it knows what tabs were opened by others. You could open a few tabs from a page and they will all be opened near the current tab, and they stay associated with that tab.

The "New Tab" page has big screenshots of your 8 most often visited websites, and clicking it takes you there. It also has the bookmarks bar and menu in the new tab page, because that's usually when you really need them.

And having the same bar for URLs and searches is convenient.

1 members found this post helpful.

I rarely have as few as 50 tabs open on Opera and its usually more like 80. At this level, FF (last time I tried, haven't tried this on the latest release) has long become unusable; you just can't work with so many so tiny tabs. It is just about bearable in Opera...but it would be better on a bigger screen....natch.

I don't see opera crashing (although it does use quite a bit of RAM, which isn't exactly desirable) and, as I just couldn't work with FF like this, I don't know how you do it.

I also prefer Opera's handling of bookmarks, again something that you won't notice until you have quite a few to play with.

OTOH, the collections of extensions, in particular developer extensions, that you can get for Firefox are pretty impressive. And, given its short history, Chrome isn't that bad on that front, either.

So, while Opera is my favourite browser and Konqueror is my favourite file manager, and that can also do backup duty as a browser, I find that you definitely need FF and/or chrome, as well, for the set of add-on tools. And checking stuff in multiple browsers is sometimes handy.

A lot of things that we now take for granted first came out on Opera, but these are no longer the Wild West years of the internet (in this sense, anyway), and most browsers these days have the essentials covered.

I tried Dillo, quite a few months back, and page rendering was not of the finest. If they could cure that, while retaining the lightweight/speedy orientation, then it might have a chance.

Sorry, I seem to be wandering a bit...the point of this thread was what, exactly?