Quote:
Originally Posted by James
if i could apt-get install opera, i'd probably take it for a spin. it's apparently a lot snappier than FF.
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Opera does offer a .deb file for download, making the dpkg -i fairly easy (though admittely not as nice as apt-get install). In my opinion, it's entirely worth the extra 25-second investement of your time and bandwidth.
I use Opera on all my systems, ranging from my main desktop Windows XP 3 GHz, to OS X on G4 PowerBook, back to Windows XP on a TransMeta 700 MHz Crusoe laptop (very slow), to Debian and Ubuntu testing and development systems from 1-3 GHz. In addition to offering a great feature-set out of the box, Opera's claims of being "The Fastest Browser on Earth" have held up in my experiences (as well as in most of these tests:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html ).
I have to keep Firefox around for testing web pages I code (and actually, has been the "IE" of the three browsers I test in Windows in more than a few situations (surprisingly, worse than actual IE)), but it really just doesn't do it for me. I've found some aspects of its usability to be rather lacking, and as Jason425 pointed out, has some stability problems. I'm frankly rather annoyed at the new trend of people designing web pages "for FireFox," rather than simply using open standards [compliance] and cross-platform applet formats (if absolutely necessary). Screw ActiveX, etc., and use Java :-/ if you really need to do something that can't be done with xhtml/css/dhtml/svg/etc. (SVG, that reminds me ... use an open implementation of svg, rather than requiring Adobe's stupid plugin.)[/rant]