Opera lover concedes defeat

I’ve been an “Opera”:http://www.opera.com/ lover for years. I bought my first license when version 6 came out and have been steadily upgrading ever since. Now, much against my wishes, I think I have to concede: “Firefox”:http://www.firefox.com/ is the better browser.

Why? Here’s the reasons that forced me to this conclusion.

# Opera 8’s support for XMLHttpRequest is incomplete. Duh.
# I’ve got addicted to using “FCKEditor”:http://www.fckeditor.net/ in CMS, which only works in Firefox and IE.
# (This one surprised me) Firefox’s user interface, menu design and dialogue boxes are far less confusing than Opera’s. I know, I was stunned. But I found the default layout in Opera 8 really confusing, and didn’t feel as clean.
# Opera’s lack of extensibility. Not a fault in its own, but I love Firefox’s “ScrapBook”:http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/, which allows you to save web pages. Great for when I find a design I like and want to save it ‘for future reference’ [Note: I know Opera has notes, never worked out why they're useful as they're text-only - surely that defeats the point of the 'net?]
# MathML rendering. Not really a biggie for me yet, but as a physics student it’s nice to have.
# Web standards support. Opera used to sell themselves on this; now… where’s the push gone?

It isn’t all negative though. On the plus side

# Opera has a built-in news reader (I’m not one for “buying extra software”:http://www.feeddemon.com/) and for some reason Thunderbird and myself don’t get along.
# Opera saves open tabs. I know there’s Firefox extensions to do this, but I haven’t found one which (a) doesn’t slow down/crash the browser and (b) doesn’t forget the saved tabs sometimes. Opera’s works perfectly.
# Memory usage with many open tabs appears to be less in Opera.
# Some web pages just won’t load in Firefox. I’ve tried clean reinstalls of the browser, and nothing works. No headers appear in “LiveHTTPHeaders”:http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/;, and the dots just go round and round until I kill the page loading.

Will I keep using Opera? The answer is yes, but alongside Firefox. For pages I find and want to read in the future, Opera’s ability to save open tabs is a godsend, and a feature I can’t live without. But it isn’t the best browser any more (I’d give my parents Firefox any day rather than try to get them to navigate round Opera).