Firefox Myth debunking?

[JPnyc]

It's supported by good web developers. We always test in the "big 3", IE FF, and Opera

[Moira]

Yeah, but making new services Opera-compatible is never going to be quite the priority for many people as it would be with FF or IE, since its market share is so comparitively tiny.

It's a great browser by all accounts, but has no phishing protection, no bookmarks toolbar and I've heard criticism that the ad-blocker coud be better, ie it requires you to manually select the elements of a page you want to remove.

One of the better features is mouse gesturing, which I gather needs a separate add-on in Firefox. To sum up, if you want everything under one roof, then Opera would make a great choice, because you can have one tab for email and also use it for newsgroups and IRC.

[JPnyc]

Opera really doesn't require much special coding that FF doesn't. Most of the time they display a page the same.

I still don't get why phishing protection is needed in a browser. Phishing comes in the form of emails, so you don't click on any links in em. Most everyone has heard by now that you should type any sensitive addresses into your address bar yourself, not click a link in an email

Also, I can't believe how dumb some of these phishers are. You mouseover a link and it shows the actual link to be nothing close to what they claim

[Moira]

I don't view it as essential either, but I suppose for some people it's an added bit of protection. I find it hard to believe anyone falls for these phishing scams, but they must do or scammers wouldn't feel it was worthwhile persisting.

[JPnyc]

Well I have to say my 79 yr old dad did ask me about 'em. He's not pc savvy at all, but to his credit, he asked, he didn't click. I don't think my browser has it either, but it does pass the cross-site scripting test on secunia.

[Moira]

Yes mine does too. I get the weekly secunia summaries which I find a useful source of information.

[Terr]

Opera has some optional phishing protection as of the latest version, the ad-block stuff can be customized to insert wildcards of your own. It has a bookmarks sidebar/panel and you can create a very specifically FF-like bookmarks toolbar if you want fairly easily simply by dragging the icon/favicon of the address bar to pretty much anywhere in the UI.

As for web standards, Most of the time when opera doesn't render something right it's either because people went out of their way to make it IE-only or because they botched their browser detection code. The only page in the last several weeks that I've come across that doesn't work in Opera also doesn't work in Firefox.

[Moira]

I heard they were going to include phishing protection in the newest version. Agreed, all these things can be customised, but an awful lot of people don't customise anything - what I meant was, they aren't included as standard.

By all accounts it's an excellent browser though, and has improved a lot over recent years to make it a real alternative to IE and up there with Firefox as a browser of choice.

[JPnyc]

It's much less common on our forums than FF, but then FF has a better marketing campaign. In fact, they have BRILLIANT marketing, since somehow they managed to make that browser "teflon" where any sort of criticism is concerned, even amongs application programmers and developers.

[muert0]

I'm checking out opera now and liking it. I like the search engines thing. All I have to do is type g <word> in the address bar and it will search google.
The tabs are a little different. Like it so far though. It uses about 10mb less ram when started.

I've been using it on my phone and it's better then the mobile IE. I couldn't get firefox to load on my phone:/