i was checking the old release pages from mozilla firefox, to check out when i began using firefox, but it looks like the guys at mozilla aren’t too much worried about history and having the old builds in the ftp. anyways, it’s not that important. i remember that i have used firefox before i even switched to linux, and it was around version 0.9, somewhere in 2004. i remember at that time it was a fast browser, far from bloated, and i already had that feeling that microsoft didn’t suit me that well. i used it as my primary option until 2-point-something, but then version 3 disappointed me somehow, or opera just attracted me better. i’m writing this post from opera 10 rc2, but i have been using firefox again since 3.5. and will be.
i don’t think the unix philosophy is a great friend of the web. the internet is now much more than a collection of hypertext pages, it is the future operating system, and there are many needs that have to be fulfilled together for that specific purpose. bloated browsers seem to be the best prepared for that task.
good thing i remembered to write about this, because the opera’s spell checker seems to work great. also it seems to have a nice ball that appears on tabs when they are refreshed, and turbo should be a nice feature for slow networks and people with limited traffic, but that’s it… google reader isn’t rendered well, google docs is actually what seems to be the css layout for the iphone, it isn’t all that better performance wise. opera mail is a joke. i have used it in the opera days, but now i lack gpg integration and other functionality. opera chat is also a joke, i don’t even have to say why, so opera contacts don’t even make sense.
when it comes to missing features, firefox is much more easily extended. widgets in opera is one of the worst thing they’ve come up with. they replace desktop widgets, and that’s not browsers’ business! and talking about business, the biggest waste of code of all: opera unite. web server on a browser? sorry, but i don’t think so…
i surely hope i’m wrong, and i believe i may be, but i think opera is just about to lose a great deal of share in the desktop browser market. the mini could be losing as well, with the proliferation of the iphone and android platforms, which ship with pretty decent browsers. their only hope could be the popularity of the nokia devices and mobile internet users, due to providers’ ridicule download limits…