Hi Oshyan,
JavaJones wrote:So in the end we basically agree?
On the whole, yup.
If I might be so bold as to summarise: Firefox is good, Opera is great, and for some users (though definitely not all), Firefox+extensions is better still.
JavaJones wrote:I do so wish Opera would include plugin support though. I can't imagine it would significantly slow down the system or anything. Would it? If not, as I assume, then they really ought to do it. I'll trawl the forums and see what kind of discussion there is about that. Surely other people agree that "widgets" are just not enough.
Yeah, but I suspect widgets are probably quite useful for odd platforms like PDAs or phones, where developing a native app will be harder than developing an Opera-based widget, given that the latter will then work on all Opera-supported platforms. On a PC, the case for widgets isn't quite as strong - they're pretty and nice as toys, but they’re not compelling given the range of native apps already available.
As to whether the full plugin system would slow things down; I would imagine that for the bare plugin system the speed and RAM penalties would be fairly minimal, but I'm not speaking from a position of any great knowledge on that. Browsers are complex beasts.
JavaJones wrote:First off there is indeed a plugin system:
http://www.opera.com/docs/pluginapi/ Interesting choice to make it the Netscape 4 plugin architecture. Dunno why that would be, or how old the system is in Opera.
Is there some big index of Opera plugins somewhere? Googling showed-up a plugin index from the Opera site, but it was mostly multimedia support plugins.
http://www.opera.com/docs/plugins/Compare with the Firefox plugin page:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=firefoxLots of weird and wonderful things there.
JavaJones wrote:You can also do some things with the Panel, one of which happens to potentially take care of your weather interest. Here's a quote from the forums:
Opera does not have a plugin system like FF's. For this purpose however you can use a panel. Go to
http://www.accuweather.com/pda/pda_5dy. ... 2C+Florida and drag the tab to you sidebar. Not ideal perhaps, but it works. (for better visibility set the panel to small screen rendering in it's view menu)"
I’m yet to really play with the panel in Opera; I'm not sure I understand its purpose. By default it seems to be just a big vertical toolbar, which to me doesn’t feel like the most obviously usable space (or rather, somewhat of a waste of space). So you can do more with it, you say?
Anyhoo, the weather extension I use is Forecastfox, which is a little ugly by default, but it’s easy to customise to something better-looking. It sits in the statusbar (which I think is less of a waste of space at the bottom of the page than the thick panel at the side), and gives the current weather, the weather for tonight, and the forecast for the next two days (or more, if you so choose). Every half-hour or so it gets an update, and in the bottom-right corner pops up a little message saying "Melbourne, clear and 35C. Tonight: showers and 12C", or words to that effect, and disappears after a few seconds (much like RSS feed notifications in Opera). It works just as I think something like this should.
JavaJones wrote:Anyway, some promising stuff. A shame the plugin support isn't more widely publicized or taken advantage of.
If one were to be somewhat ungenerous, for the sake of exploring the argument, one could say this might be because Opera's plugin system isn't as powerful as that of Firefox. I don't know that, of course, but one could theorise, in purely free-market-economy survival-of-the-fittest terms, that if all else was equal, plugin developers would be targeting Opera over Firefox, given that Opera is the better browser without plugins. The fact is they’re not; there are many Firefox extensions, of great variety, and growing at a furious rate, whilst there are comparatively few Opera plugins, which seem to be mostly for multi-media support (as far as I could find, anyway). This does lead one to think that Opera's plugin system is not a match for Firefox's extension system. That said, most Firefox users don't ever install extensions, so it's largely an academic point.
...unless, of course, Firefox makes it even easier to install extensions, like some sort of pretty package manager, with a nice big and friendly button on the toolbar, and a really-really-really easy to use index of extensions (which should probably all be certified as good and safe by the mozdev community before making it onto the list). Extensions are just too hard to handle for the average mom-and-pop user on the interweb, and I think that's a bit of a pity.
JavaJones wrote:As for "running out of memory" while using a browser, I agree that's unlikely to happen with just the browser. But I regularly have 2 rows of tabs open on a 1600x1200 display - that's upwards of 40 open windows - and the memory use can increase a lot in those cases. This becomes an issue even on machines with lots of memory when you also want to be rendering in say TG2 or building a large terrain in, oh, perhaps L3DT.
In such cases I totally agree that using Opera would be necessary. I'd usually have 5-10 tabs max, which means I can interchangeably use Opera and Firefox without having to think of the RAM usage.
Cheers,
Aaron.
Edit: Whoah, one can go too far though. I just read on digg about a guy who created 'the Superbrowser' by loading 100 extensions for Firefox. Have a look at the toolbar and the right-click menu:
http://splasho.com/blog/2006/02/26/the-superbrowser/
Insanity, but it actually kept working.
