in the last paragraph, first sentence -- "...which allows users to search test"...should "test" be "text"?

Title says it all. There are lots of alternatives already and if you truly hate Microsoft you can always use the excellent Firefox.

I switched from FF to Opera, because FF is a memory hog, easily eating up several hundred megabytes by the end of the day. Long live Opera!

There aren't really that mucha lternatives, Opera is still one of the best browsers, in market share, it comes fourth after Internet Explore, Firefox and Safari, and it has a reputation of being very good, fast, and feature packed while being very lightweight. The only reason I prefer firefox is because of it's high expandability and customizability.

Remember, Opera doesn't only run on the PC. AFAIK they are the dominant browser on the mobile platform and the R&D they put into the browser on the PC can only be good for their products on other platforms.

I have 512MB ram and I like to open many many tabs, in fact more than this amount of ram can hold. So I've tried IE and FF but in my case Opera performed best. ...and I think it has more features than IE, you can customize the buttons and toolbars, what a pitty Opera isn't preinstalled like IE :)

I love FF for the same reasons Lennart stated above. IE 7's user interface is horrible, and IE 7 is not nearly as customizable as FF.

With that said, evan is right about the FF memory leaks, but I have a reasonable solution.

Download and install the "Session Manager" add-on to FF.

Then you can save your current browsing session and exit FF.

Then restart FF, and open your last saved session.

This will free up all wasted memory.
Happy Browsing

Re: evan
Your FF memory leak estimate is grossly exaggerated "several hundred megabytes".

The most memory I have EVER seen FF use is less than 145 MB. I agree it is excessive, but not nearly as much as evan stated.

Roboform is the killer browser app! Until Opera will allow plugins it is going no where

A simple test:
- Open around 4 sites in both Opera (9.x) and Firefox (1.5 or higher). Make sure that at least one site has a lot of content other than text (images, flash, etc).

- Now observe the memory usage in task manager. -

- Now close up all the tabs in both Opera and Firefox. Look at the memory usage again in task manager.

- Minimize both browsers and look at the task manager.


From my experience, opera has consumed a hell of a lot less memory than FF ever consumed. FF somewhat has a nasty habit of holding on to memory that were used by the tabs that you already closed.

I like Opera more than FF for the features that are already included so I don't actually have to look for 3rd party extensions anymore.

@EndPCNoise - Not that your solution is bad, but minimizing the browser for me is a whole lot easier and conserves bandwidth and processing power.

I use roboform too and if Opera had it, I would use it alot more often. The only last hurdle they have is loading multimedia and certain scripts. But it is the best browser at viewing simple pages.

with some tweaking, firefox is very fast (much faster than opera.

for many web pages, about 40-70% of the file size of the web page are ads

with firefox and adblock, you can block all of the ads, this saves your bandwidth for the real content and not the annoying ads

I have done many tests using everest ultimate edition to monitor file transfers

and with adblock, the the amount download was far less than with out adblock, this makes webpages load very fast, many websites I go to load just as fast as google.com

try adblock for your self then see which browser is faster http://mysite.verizon.net/vze2241e/tips/id1.html

(adblock is extremely good especially on ad filled websites, such as torrent sites where the page it's self is only 40-80KB in size but with the ads, the total download comes out to over 3MB

so imagine having dialup and loading a 3MB webpage, then imagine having dialup then loading the same page with adblock (ps when testing the amount downloaded clear the cache before each test)

PS theres no need to imagine if you have a program called netlimiter, with it you can cap your download speed at any speed you want, like 5KB/s (dialup speeds)

firefox and adblock is much better than any speed increase in opera

LOL Razor512, you must not be using Firefox to get that spelling mistake in your post.

But it does not check text written in the "Title" section of this comment form... only the "Comment" area. If you have seen some of my posts on here... many of them have misspelled "Titles". Oh well.

Your point is irrelevant - Opera broadly supports FF extensions and has its own inbuilt ad blocker as well, so you can do exactly the same thing with Opera if you so wish.
In an apples to apples comparison, Opera up to version 9.23 is faster than firefox (there are plenty of tests online which illustrate this, version 9.5 can only make it more pronounced).
I tried the new alpha today, and while not doing any scientific tests on it, I did notice it did seem slightly faster than my current opera install.
I love FF too by the way, but I just find Opera slightly better. The fact that i find it the best browser on my phone too can only re-inforce my thoughts

I don't understand why Opera is not king of the browsers, it has everything going for it.

It's the most customisable, despite not having extensions.
It's the most secure. (becuase it does not support extensions!)
It's the fastest
It's the most relaible.
It's got the broadest hardware support.

Seems many people are stuck in their ways.. I assume people went from IE to Firefox, saw an improvement, and figured it can't get any better. IT CAN!! www.opera.com

Right click on a page, Block Content.

you can edit the URL's to include wildcards, there are frequently updated block lists on the net.

Some commenter here obviously doesn't know much about Opera. It's not fair, to use FF Adblock against default Opera install. If you want to compare, use Content block from context menu in Opera, and block the same thing.

Opera has built in feature, called Wand, to supply the capabilities (at least, most of it, I don't really know that program) of Roboform. Inculding per-site password saving and easy login. These passes can also be secured with a master password. And there is space for private data (name, address, e-mail address...) to fill in. Correcet me, if Roboform is more capable, but I don't think it is.

On the other hand, Opera IS the fastest, but I admit, Safari and Firefox also pretty fast. Memory comsumption is an important factor, but I can live with that, for I've got enough RAM, mostly unused.

TO THE ARCTICLE: one of the coolest features is completely missed. Opera 9.5 (aka Kestrel) also supports online bookmark synchronization through Opera's community site, My Opera (through My Opera account to be exact). You can log in, and synchronize your bookmarks, speed dial and the content of the Personal bar. Pretty cool, and it works! :) And it will work on a wider basis, feature wise (more sync option), and equipment base (consider Opera Mini and Wii Internet Channel for example). Look for File menu, Synchronize with My Opera...

By the way, Firefox inline spell checker is a nice try, but Opera supports Aspell integration for a long time, and FF's checker is a joke (at least in Hungarian), but luckily not completelly useless.

It would be nice to have a side by side test of this early version with Firefox 3's latest alpha.
My own testing showed that Firefox 3 is around 10 times faster at rendering a page (with some Javascript included) than versions 1.5/2.0. Oper