Ever since the beginning, when Internet Explorer completely sucks for all eternity, compliment browsers have been made. The recent revival of Mozilla’s Firefox is crushing I.E. to 70%, a point that it’s never been at, even when Netscape was still known to mankind. So these alternatives are supposedly good at everything.

Here is a description of the current big browsers out there. Since most users use Windows, I’ll only list the Win browsers. And this excludes all I.E. rendering engine based browsers (including Maxthon, CrazyBrowser etc). Current browser stats.

Firefox / Mozilla

I have nothing against open source, mozilla, or its name. But I don’t like it. It’s still a very young application and needs way more development than it currently gets. Firefox’s main developer just left for Google. Now the browser is left with a bunch of contributors who can’t really do much.

I love the tabs, however, not its stability. It crashes very often (for me at least). It’s interface is, quite, ugly. If there are more than 5 tabs open within a window, the browser crashes. It sounds like that mac video, but it’s true. I am complaining about its incompetency.

Opera

This is the one I’m currently using, for all purposes. First of all, I have to say Opera’s usability is absolutely awesome. The basic customization of the working environment is so delicate. You can have your browser work in anyway you want. Second, its speed of loading any page is faster than all other browsers. Some heavy-graphics pages load significantly faster. The current version of Opera is at 7.5 - you can see how this program has evolved. There are so many options that I can play with. Right now, I can close this window (with 4 tabs) and this textarea (with this text inside), and after I re-open Opera, all of the data will still be here. All sessions are saved automatically, even as it crashes. Opera works fine even if there are 30 tabs open.

The only thing that’s not quite right about it is that it has text-ads, for free-version that is. Mine are gone. Without the ads, Opera is like a browser God. This revenue is probably the only thing that’s keeping Opera alive. Opera 8 (beta) is already out. It does, however, have a few mis-interpretations for some standard html/css tags. This also applies for the current Opera browser (7.5). Some, not all, web pages are displayed with a Seinfeld funny tone - awkwardness. Only because there few smart people realizing that Opera is good and use it, the little percentage of users make designers/coders ignore Opera users. I guess I can blame natural-born retards for that.

In general, Opera pwns Firefox, IE, and all other browsers in all ways - up, down and sideways.