
Reasons to Choose Opera over Chrome - twapi
http://browserfame.com/1928/chrome-vs-opera
======
ewzimm
Can we please stop repeating the provably wrong statement that Firefox is too
slow to use? Tom's Hardware has recently shown Firefox beating the performance
of both Chrome and Opera. No benchmark is absolute, but you can just use it
and see for yourself. Also, it still has better extensions.

Source:
[http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera-
next,3534-12.html)

~~~
crazygringo
Can we please stop repeating the misleading statement that Firefox is fast
enough, because of benchmarks?

When people talk about Firefox being slow, they're _not_ talking about page
rendering speeds or JavaScript execution times. They're talking about the
longer delays in switching between tabs, in closing tabs, opening a bunch of
tabs at once and still having the interface be responsive, and so on. User
interface stuff.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any user-interface-responsiveness-speed
benchmarks, so it's basically impossible to "prove". But that doesn't mean
that people who complain about Firefox being slow are imagining it. The only
reason I use Chrome instead of FF on my machine is precisely because the UI is
an order of magnitude faster in mundane things -- instantaneous rather than
pausing a bit on every little thing.

~~~
effn
My experience is the opposite. I find Chrome horribly, horribly slow to use.
Safari is ultrafast and FF somewhere in between.

I still use it because I've become so accustomed to its UI but I switch to
Safari on some sites to avoid spinning up the fan.

~~~
Watabou
My experience has also been the same.

Chrome on the mac is absolutely dog slow to use, especially after you open up
a few tabs. Seriously, why do people say it's fast? I really don't get it. It
was fast at one point but now it feels slow, bloated and the tabs crash far
more often than either Firefox or Safari. If I only had a penny for every time
I see the sad face on tab crashes.

Firefox has no lag whatsoever when switching tabs, and general usage. Maybe
people think it's slow because of its dated UI? Maybe they haven't used it at
all? Maybe they're still using Firefox 10 or older? Firefox 22 is awesome.
People just need to give it an unbiased try.

Safari is the fastest of them all, both in rendering speed and general usage,
though it tends to use a LOT of memory.

~~~
saraid216
I honestly wish I could use Firefox as my development environment. I prefer
Firebug to the Chrome dev tools. But I've been slowly forced to admit that it
can't keep up. With Chrome, I can casually open up a dozen tabs without
considering the consequences; in Firefox, I get worried when I have two open.
This pans out in the Activity Monitor.

There exist huge inconsistencies in all of these claims, and it's extremely
strange how difficult it is to work out what third variables are involved that
are causing such vastly different reports.

~~~
Yoric
I have heard reports of considerable performance improvement from users
clicking on "Firefox Reset" button. Have you tried it? You can find it in
about:support (or somewhere in the Help menu, I can't remember where).

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tazjin
I've been using Opera Next (the preview version of Opera with Blink) for a few
weeks now and I would say this is the first time in the history of browsers
that I actually like a browser.

Chrome has always had a lot of annoying bugs for me (not all of which affect
everybody, but in general I seem to attract all bugs in a software if it has
any), like sometimes triggering a page load would not do anything for about a
minute and then actually load and render in a second.

Considering that it's a beta the bug-freeness is pretty amazing, in fact I
have only encountered one bug since I started using it - and that one is OS X
(Keychain) specific.

Edit: Oh, I missed that the final release is out which fixes the bug!

~~~
manojlds
Opera 15 is out

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mtgx
It's also not based in US, which could be seen as an advantage now.

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Nux
This must be the first time in the recent history (that I remember) when Opera
chooses not to release for Linux (and BSDs).

Jimmy doesn't like this!

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cromwellian
Just once I wish people would fire up a camera, point it at their browsers,
and record their claims of sluggishness. This thread is full of competing
claims that their favorite browser is fast, while competitor browser is
atrociously slow.

Posting system specs would be useful too, there's a chance that slow
performance is GPU or driver related, memory related, dependent on other apps
you have installed, etc.

Some objectivity would be nice for once instead of warring anecdotes.

~~~
decryptthis_NSA
I use Firefox and love it. I suppose it depends on what plugins people use. Or
they may have had a bad experience once and let it at that

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gaelow
1 good reason not to: It's not open source.

~~~
atoponce
Neither is Chrome.

~~~
gaelow
My point being: choose Firefox, or Chromium, or whatever OS alternative.

~~~
atoponce
Chromium != Chrome

~~~
vlastik
That's what he said

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kwestro
I'm not convinced. I tried it, and it still sucks to this day.

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theREALffuck
Oh, so I should use Opera just because it's produced by a cool company?
Firefox is Open Source and they champion (or so they say) the cause of a more
standardised Internet. Oh, they also raise money to donate to charity. Does
that mean I should use Firefox? And speaking of standards: Your typical end-
user doesn't give a monkey's about whether all the browsers use the same
standards, or whether they all use different engines and different versions of
HTML and force web designers to run browser detection algorithms. As long as
the page looks good, and loads fast, they'll be happy.

Browsing data sync is also available on Google Chrome. And you're mentioning
it even though it still hasn't been implemented on Opera 15? Well that's quite
something. Saying that "Browser X is better because in the future it will have
Y and Z" debases your credibility as a browser user. I don't use Chrome
because "in the future it might use quantum computing and fly." I use chrome
because it has bookmarks and it has them NOW. I don't have to wait.

Last but not least, extensions. Opera is perhaps the one that's lacking the
most when it comes to extensions. It is good that they'll start supporting
chrome extensions, but that doesn't automatically makes it better than chrome.
If anything, it reinforces the idea that it's just a cheap clone of Chrome.

So there you have it, at least to me your "5 reasons to choose Opera" post
should be renamed "Opera has server-side compression. Yay!". Don't get me
wrong, I'm not an Opera hater. In fact, I used to love it. I installed Opera
everywhere I could. I showed Opera to a lot of people, and explained to them
why I considered it to be the best option. That was one year ago. Today I
would recommend Chrome. That's just my point of view, of course. Opera can
still improve. That's what I hope, that they will turn Opera 15 into a beast,
as fast as Chrome and boasting all the features from the previous versions.
But in the interim, I'll stick with Chrome. Is not everything I want in a
browser, but it's close enough.

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tallowen
I would have loved to see some of these points compared to the traditional
chrome alternative - Firefox. There are many browsers out there that aren't
produced by google. Is the assumption that I want a browser that's using blink
as its rendering engine?

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SomeRandomUser
My list (using Opera 15):

* Internal pages and tools as pages, specially the downloads manager (I can't stand Firefox's little windows or Chrome's behind-the-scenes crippled manager).

* How it handles extensions by default (little buttons to the right of the address bar).

* The nested Speed Dial and the Stash.

* Off road mode is a _really_ great tool when using slow connections.

* Default synchronization (is not an extension).

On the other side, v 15 isn't as polished as it should had been before being
made publicly available (CTRL+Z doesn't work, no bookmarks, small bugs with
the address bar).

Anyway, as you can see, most of the benefits are just UI decisions. I just
don't like how Firefox or Chrome look and how they display their functionality
(which is absolutely subjective).

~~~
MAGZine
aren't points 1, 2, 5 already in chrome, and have been for some times?

~~~
cbhl
Re 1: You have to know to open the page (in the menu, or at
chrome://downloads) -- by default it just shows you the download bar at the
bottom of the page where you downloaded the file.

Re 2: Parent probably is confused by extensions versus web apps. I find this
confusing too, since it's up to the developer to choose which form factor to
use when writing the extension/app.

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vlastik
You can use Chromium. There is no way using closed source Opera is safer than
open source Chromium.

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wnevets
not a dumb company? Charging money & embedding ads into your browser when the
market leaders didn't sounds pretty dumb to me.

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ksec
I still need tab overflow. Which so far none of the Chromium provides.

~~~
purerandomness
That's basically the reason I'm staying with Firefox. I use Tree Style Tabs
[1], however, which gives you a hierarchial view of your opened tabs.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/tree-style-
tab/](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

~~~
starky
This is the main reason why I can't use any other browser anymore.

Opera actually had a similar tab bar built in for quite some time, but it
unfortunately didn't have the tree view. They seem to have removed this
feature in Opera 15, which means there is no way I am switching browsers any
time soon.

