[davesims]

Everything I like about FireFox (gestures, tabbed browsing, a reasonable bookmark manager), Opera did first. I used Opera for years back when it flat killed Netscape and IE for features and standards compliance. I only left once FireFox implemented all of the same features I had come to rely on in Opera, PLUS developing its growing add-on ecosystem.

Gimmicky? Marginal? Not in the least. Sure, Opera, as a foreign, small, scrappy little software company wasn't able to knock off the behemoths of MSIE, Google/Chrome and Netscape-cum-Mozilla. But so what? The fact that they've been ahead of the feature curve as long as they have and are still in the fight is, to me, pretty dang amazing and quietly one of the most surprising stories in software in the last 15 years.

I've always been a fan of that resilient little Norwegian shop, and I'm sorry to see them (or, more than likely, their lawyers) get dragged into the unseemly world of lawsuits and recrimination. Hopefully this will resolve itself more amicably than it has started.

EDIT: I don't mean to be snarky or mean, but this bit made me SOL (snort out loud):

  "..another slightly incompatible rendering engine?"

Opera's earliest claim to fame, back in the godawful days of the real incompatibility wars, was its near-religious adherence to W3 standards. A lot of web developers in the late nineties/early oughts would use Opera as the benchmark browser, and then resolve various quirks-mode issues from there. If it worked in Opera, you could be reasonable sure the problem wasn't with your code, but with a quirk that you were about to have to fork your code on, for Netscape or IE.

[devcpp]

Opera might have been ahead in the past, but is it still ahead? Having tried their browser, I must have missed something because I think Firefox with addons is way better.

I find brand fidelity particularly nonsensical when a company is going downhill on the quality of its products.

[claudius]

Compared to Chrom(e|ium), I don’t get crashes on every other website, a decent release cycle, a decent repository and, you know, a browser that does what I want rather than forcing me to want what it does. Oh, and a functional speed dial.

Compared to Firefox, it actually makes decent use of RAM, doesn’t require fifty-five trillions of addons to work remotely properly (and hence doesn’t require updating of said fifty-five trillions of addons every other day) and a decent release cycle.

Oh, it also works on my phone and I just had to copy over wand.dat to get all my passwords there as well :-)

[purple_platypus]

I wouldn't say they're all that terribly behind. I use Opera daily and rarely have issues with websites. The last really big issue I remember was the Twitter fiasco when they found out Presto wasn't prepared for a Javascript file that was larger than average and only had a single statement because replacing semicolons with commas became the cool thing to do.

[coldtea]

>Everything I like about FireFox (gestures, tabbed browsing, a reasonable bookmark manager), Opera did first.

So? Do you still use Mosaic because it did first most of the important things Opera does now? How about sticking with IE, because it brought as AJAX first?

[davesims]

If Mosaic had a current version with a rendering engine and enclosing feature set as competitive as the current Opera is vs. Chrome and FF, yeah I might. But, as I said, I don't even use Opera right now, only because FireFox's add-on ecosystem makes it the better choice. But otherwise Opera is still a competitive, high-performing browser, and completely reasonable choice for the discriminating nerd.

I never used IE. Because...IE.

Would you hypothetically not use a fast, super-compliant, feature-rich Mosaic out of an irrational bias?

[coldtea]

>Would you hypothetically not use a fast, super-compliant, feature-rich Mosaic out of an irrational bias?

No bias. I've tried to use Opera from time to time. Always stopped because:

1) Awkward UI. The QT theme engine it used (still has?) made it always look and feel off, in both Windows and OS X.

2) Some extra features (mail? download manager?) felt subpar compared to dedicated apps. Why would I need those in a browser anyway? That's why I stopped using Mozilla for Firefox 5-6 years ago.

3) The main operation of any browser, err, browsing web pages, was frequently hit with bugs, incompatibilities etc. I was always left out when browsing the more advanced HTML5 stuff, what with WebGL etc. And I never particularly liked the font rendering.

Some stuff I did like. But an incompatible engine and a bad look & feel didn't really entice me to keep using a browser. Mouse gestures etc, I could not care less, I find them gimmicky anyway.