[sgift]

> Why do people get out of their way to use some marginal browser when there better both proprietary and open source options available?

This is simple: None are available (for me). They are (take your pick for your specific browser):

  - Slow
  - Memory-inefficient (i.e. they either use too much memory when I need it for other tasks or they use not enough when I don't need it and they could use it to provide a better experience, e.g. faster tab switching)
  - Instable for my use case (50-100 tabs)
  - Have no good mouse gestures (all the plugins for FF suck)
  - ...

[TheDag]

I've used Opera for a long time, and when I started using it it was simply alone on top of a lot of crap browsers. Now there are several decent alternatives, all of which are very frustrating for me. I work on multiple computers and have multiple computers at home. I'm lazy. Hence, no plugins should be required, so I get the experience I want installing just the browser.

For the most part Chrome or Fox or even IE10 behave similarly enough that I can almost use them instead of Opera. I think there's just 2 exceptions. Whenever I use another browser I find myself getting frustrated with 2 things: (1) Nothing happens when I "roll-left" over the mouse buttons (navigate back). (2) Tabs MORONICALLY cycle left-to-right, rather than in most recently used order. Both are show-stoppers for me, and I don't care if a plug-in can fix it, as long as Opera is otherwise more or less on par with the alternatives.

[coldtea]

So the public for Opera is bizarro outliers? (100 tabs! Love of mouse gestures!)

[stinos]

I acknowledge your point on the tabs, but not on the gestures. It provides a genius way execute actions, probably faster than anything else. I would almost say that is a fact, and that if you don't agree then it's because you haven't used it.

[qu4z-2]

I'm still using firefox because of pentadactyl. It lets you switch to a tab by substring search of title/url.

If you have 100 tabs open (I often do too) how do you switch to a specific tab with mouse gestures?

(Genuinely curious; seems a shame to have to specify, but I don't want to be misunderstood)

[claudius]

At 7 billion people on this planet, there well may be enough ‘bizarro outliers’ who don’t want a Mac OS X-like browsing experience to justify a special browser.

[stinos]

- Have no integrated mail system