Opera vs Firefox

[Feek]

I installed the latest beta at the weekend again to give it a try and I persevered throughout the whole weekend but yesterday I had to go back to Firefox as there were too many minor irritations.

Firstly, having to play around with the skin.ini to set the tab width to something more user friendly is awkward, but perfectly doable although from time to time the tabs seem to resize themselves and the only cure is to close it and reopen.

If I've got a web page with a number of links and I want to open a few of them (pictures ), I have to hold down shift and control as I click the link to get them to open in background tabs and not take focus.

Once I get to those images, if they're too large for the screen, they don't get resized automatically to fit. There may be a setting for this somewhere but I couldn't find it.

Alt-S. I mentioned this in a previous Opera thread. A lot of my browsing is forum whoring and the standard keyboard shortcut to submit a post in all other browsers I've used is alt-s. I'm used to just typing in that text entry box and hitting alt-s to submit. It doesn't work, and despite spending a lot of time trying to find a way to make it work, it just doesn't. I can see from internet searching that I'm not the only person who has thought this a problem.

I found its method of using bookmarks quite clunky, the way they expand out into multiple panels doesn't compare with a scrollable list of bookmarks.

I do like the quick link screen and the ability to use ctrl-1, ctrl-2 etc to open a fresh tab and go straight to that page. It's good, it works and it works well.

It seems speedy, this is good.

I don't like the border around the page. This is minor, but annoying! When the browser is full screen it has a amall border on the left side.

The last thing I can think of is that Vista doesn't seem to recognise it as a browser! When I launch Opera, it always tells me that it's not the default browser and would I like to make it so? I always say yes. Next time, it asks the same question and if I manually go to set the default programs, Opera isn't listed. This is probably an OS thing but it’s annoying me.

All in all, I can see the potential and if weren’t for the few things I've listed, I'd be sticking with it. In fact, not all of those would need to be addressed but all together they make it unusable for me.