So I have Firefox loaded on this PC for development purposes. I don't use it for normal browsing, mainly because I'm an avid Opera fan. BUT, because of either boredom or curiosity at work this morning, I decided to give it a fair shakedown, and here are my problems with it:

Themes: The default theme isn't that great looking, so I thought I'd use their skinning feature called "Themes" to go find some new ones. They have several, which I start to fumble through and I quickly realize the horror that is Firefox theming. First off, you have to restart the browser each time you want to apply a new theme to it. To make it worse, the idiots making the themes are not only lacking imagination, but they can't make a decent preview screen to save their life. I want to see what I'm going to use before I go through the pain of actually downloading it and restarting my browser. On top of that, I found at least 1 or more categories of skins that had no theme in them!! WHY EVEN SHOW IT? And there were no "EDITOR'S PICKS". Fabulous. Way to keep up with that, editor.

Opera not only makes it easier to get to the skins, but you see a structured preview of what you're downloading before you click anything. On top of that, it pops the new skin into place so you can see it and then even offers to remove it if you don't like it. Oh, and did I mention you haven't restarted the browser at all yet? Oh, and most of the skins look good and they're more customizable than the FF themes.

Not good so far.

Extensions: So firefox allows users to create small controls and tools that add to the browsing experience. I start to think this is pretty cool and try to add a few. Again, the first thing I notice is that the goddamn browser wants me to restart to apply any of the extensions. WHY? Another thing I quickly begin to notice is that the majority of these "extensions" are BUILT INTO OPERA. They are just things people use or want... like more tab control and validation tools. And the stupid weather extension pops up like some sort of annoying twat everytime I start the browser, no matter what I tell it. And half of the extensions couldn't be used until I upgraded from 1.0 to 1.0.1 or something.

On a positive note, I do like some of the additional tools that can be found, like the color picker, and some of the web developer tools... but again, a lot of them require going to a menu or a toolbar when Opera has a lot of the stuff loaded into a context menu.

And that's about as far as I got. Another negative that I found was that it asked me a lot of stupid questions, like I was some kind of idiot... or needless things about arriving at a 3rd party site... no crap. I want to be there, leave me alone.


I was just generally not happy with the experience, and as I said before, I'd pay for Opera again in a heartbeat.

And I don't want to start some stupid flame war, I'm just stating my opinion.