If you're going to bash Firefox, at least know what you're talking about.
by AC - permalink
For whatever reason, nearly every unofficial Opera blog I see seems to think that bashing other browsers (specifically Firefox, even though IE is still dominating the market) is as good a way as any to promote their personal favorite. I just don't understand this. There's a blog called 30 Days to becoming an Opera8 Lover that I keep bookmarked for its fairly comprehensive rundown of Opera 8's features, and last Friday they took a misguided shot at Firefox 1.5 beta 1 for not yet being compatible with most 1.0.x extensions. Here's a tiny bit of it:
If you want to go all the way back to the Phoenix/Firebird days, then sure, Firefox was in beta for a long while. But Phoenix was never meant to be a widely-used, mainstream browser, not until Firefox 1.0 was released last November. Since then, six finalized versions have been released to fix security flaws (this is a good thing). Because Fx is open-source software - and therefore a collaborative effort - all six were openly beta-tested, generally for about 48 hours. Firefox 1.5 is based on a new branch of the Gecko rendering engine, and has taken significantly longer to test.
But the point is, just because there's a beta of a new version of Fx being tested, it doesn't mean there isn't still a stable, official release available. There is, and there has been for ten months now.
I think the problem the die-hard Opera users are having comes from not fully understaning how open-source software like Firefox is created. Every single new build (and there's a new one literally every day) is made available to anyone who wants it. New versions aren't tested in-house for a while before a beta is made public, shortly followed by a final build.
This isn't Opera, it's OSS. If you're not beta-testing, don't use a beta. I don't know how I can say this more clearly.
And by the way, I'm not bashing Opera itself. I'm writing this post in Opera, and I use it almost daily. I think what the Firefox-bashing Opera users need to realize is that as one browser gets better, they all have to get better. Do you think it's a coincidence that Microsoft, after years of letting Internet Explorer stagnate, is suddenly crashing development of IE7 now that Mozilla has released a better browser and is steadily taking away market share a few ticks of a percent at a time? Opera's market share has not made as big a dent, but Opera, like Firefox, is vastly superior to IE, and that has to be another reason that IE7's target release date has been moved up by over a year.
So why don't we try to stop slamming each other's perferred browsers just to make our own look superior, and focus on the real enemies: terrorists, reality television, and J-Lo's self-branded mini marketing empire.
by AC - permalink
For whatever reason, nearly every unofficial Opera blog I see seems to think that bashing other browsers (specifically Firefox, even though IE is still dominating the market) is as good a way as any to promote their personal favorite. I just don't understand this. There's a blog called 30 Days to becoming an Opera8 Lover that I keep bookmarked for its fairly comprehensive rundown of Opera 8's features, and last Friday they took a misguided shot at Firefox 1.5 beta 1 for not yet being compatible with most 1.0.x extensions. Here's a tiny bit of it:
Well, Firefox was in “beta” for ages and of course “beta” is increasingly meaningless.
When talking about Firefox, “beta” means very little. Not as little as GMail, perhaps, but still, it has spent 90% of its life in beta.
If you want to go all the way back to the Phoenix/Firebird days, then sure, Firefox was in beta for a long while. But Phoenix was never meant to be a widely-used, mainstream browser, not until Firefox 1.0 was released last November. Since then, six finalized versions have been released to fix security flaws (this is a good thing). Because Fx is open-source software - and therefore a collaborative effort - all six were openly beta-tested, generally for about 48 hours. Firefox 1.5 is based on a new branch of the Gecko rendering engine, and has taken significantly longer to test.
But the point is, just because there's a beta of a new version of Fx being tested, it doesn't mean there isn't still a stable, official release available. There is, and there has been for ten months now.
I think the problem the die-hard Opera users are having comes from not fully understaning how open-source software like Firefox is created. Every single new build (and there's a new one literally every day) is made available to anyone who wants it. New versions aren't tested in-house for a while before a beta is made public, shortly followed by a final build.
This isn't Opera, it's OSS. If you're not beta-testing, don't use a beta. I don't know how I can say this more clearly.
And by the way, I'm not bashing Opera itself. I'm writing this post in Opera, and I use it almost daily. I think what the Firefox-bashing Opera users need to realize is that as one browser gets better, they all have to get better. Do you think it's a coincidence that Microsoft, after years of letting Internet Explorer stagnate, is suddenly crashing development of IE7 now that Mozilla has released a better browser and is steadily taking away market share a few ticks of a percent at a time? Opera's market share has not made as big a dent, but Opera, like Firefox, is vastly superior to IE, and that has to be another reason that IE7's target release date has been moved up by over a year.
So why don't we try to stop slamming each other's perferred browsers just to make our own look superior, and focus on the real enemies: terrorists, reality television, and J-Lo's self-branded mini marketing empire.
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