Torn between two browsers

Feeling like a fool: I really wish there were something that was as fast as Opera, and as popular as Firefox. At the moment I am using different browsers on different computers, and this also is confusing, since I miss, when using Firefox, Opera’s wonderful one-key shortcuts and the ability to move the “Back” button onto the tab bar, which saves, over a year, several miles of mouse track. [UPDATE: this is because I am too thick to read the help file clearly, as a commentator is too polite to point out.]
Then, when I am using Opera, I keep pushing the mouse up to a tab and waiting for it to take focus without clicking, And waiting.

What threw these things into perspective was a note in the relentlessly boosterish Opera blog that according to Netcraft, Opera usage had risen by 34% this year !!!! until the progam now has one per cent of the installed base. So I don’t suppose that the interoperability thing is going to get better any time soon. Designers won’t test in Opera; the makers of add-ons and intelligent dustbins won’t fix their software to work with it. Soon we’ll be unable even to sneer at Safari users.

What makes this doubly frustrating is that Opera had all the good ideas ages before everyone else. Even its mail program, had it been properly developed, would have stayed two years ahead of Gmail and ten years ahead of the rest of the competition. But it looks as if all the effort that might have gone there has gone into the mobile phone browser instead, which is, I admit enormously slick, but pretty pointless so long as you have to enter text from a mobile keypad.

On the other hand, if I were Japanese, I would be planning to write a novel on the keyboard of my phone.

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3 Responses to Torn between two browsers

  1. Shaun says:

    That 34% jump. Isn’t it due to the Wii?

    This is a painful subject. Opera stopped working for me a couple of weeks ago and a hard upgrade trashed my mailbox. Is it possible to forgive software that does that? Would I turn into a serial forgiver like a much-battered wife?

    I have offered myself to Google, for now. Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs – all in Firefox, all on the iGoogle page. Tell me that it’s going to be different this time. A good browser is hard to find.

  2. rr says:

    I can go “back” in firefox by pressing the keyboard backspace – which means no mousing about at all. Would that help?

  3. acb says:

    duh! Yes. of course it would help. How did I miss that?
    Is there a key to move up a level in the remote file hierarchy, as ctrl-backspace does in Opera? It is so useful.

    Shaun: I don’t think that you can ever forgive a program that screws with your email. That’s just co-dependency. Mind you, mine is backed up every morning, and kept on IMAP, too, so I have three copies at least of anything that matters.

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