January 07, 2006

Top Five(5) Reason's Why Opera 9.0 Kick's Browser A$$

Reason #5 - Themes update in real time. Change your theme, no restart required.

Reason #4 - Integrated advanced data feed reader (similar to a typical email client) with support for all major data feed formats (unfortunately that list includes RSS "2.0" but with good comes evil... been like that since the beginning, probably won't change anytime soon. Too bad, huh?! ;).

Reason #3 - Feed reader allows quick ability to respond to an entry using the author's provided email address.

Reason #2 - Integrated communications such as email with full support of all major email standards, chat via IRC, and a News reader (similar to the Mozilla browser project (for those unaware, before Firefox, Mozilla was (and still is, but Firefox is now the official Mozilla foundation browser project) its own browser.)

and the #1 Reason Opera 9.0 Kick's Browser A$$

Client-side XSLT :D (surprised? ;)

---

I should point out that coupled with XPath 1.0 and XSLT 1.0 support theres also SVG 1.1, SVG Tiny, WebForms 2.0 (no XForms support... :( yet. :), all of CSS (including most, if not all, of CSS 3.0, need to check to make sure), and MUCH, MUCH, more.

As mentioned in the client-side XML processing post from a week or two back, with the final release of version 9.0 I believe Opera can easily be considered the uncontested King of ALL browsers.

Yep, even better than Firefox. Sorry.

That's not to say I don't LOVE Firefox, and with Firefox comes the Mozilla platform, and with the Mozilla platform comes XPCOM. But XPCOM is its own thing. You don't HAVE to have Fx installed so you can develop with XPCOM. It's easier, but you can install the Mozilla browser, or better yet, Sea Monkey and get XPCOM. If your really adventurous you don't even have to install any of these. You could just compile the various pieces you want/need by themselves. But there's not a whole lot of benefit in going to all that effort if you can gain access to XPCOM with one of the above projects.

The point. Opera and Firefox are browsers. As a browser, Opera kicks ALL browser's a$$. But Opera (at least beyond Javascript access to the DOM and the various standards already mentioned) isn't a platform. At least not yet. Don't know if they plan to take things to the next level or not, but that's beyond the point of this post.

If you're confused by any of this... Nevermind. Just use what browser makes you happy, K?

OK.