Today I’ll be looking at usability in both Firefox and Opera. The main concerns I have for a browser’s usability include Cookie and Password Management, Customization, Rendering, and Bugs/Quirks. For today, I will only be talking about cookies and passwords.
Why does this matter?
Seeing as how I’m someone who enjoys the ”set it and leave it” way of doing things, I am very much concerned with how a browser handles my settings. I have a list of sites that I visit often which require cookies to function properly (like Gmail, for example). I have so many accounts (four different ones just for Gmail) and on so many different sites with so many different variations of “johnnysasaki” and “larker” and whatever else I can’t recall at the moment that I do not like sitting there and thinking for a minute or two before typing in my username and password. I also don’t like trying various options before getting it right. This is why I really think cookies and passwords are so important.
How does Firefox handle things?
In Firefox, as I’ve touched on before, there is one choice to make:
- Accept cookies
- Never accept any cookies
These are coupled with a dropdown menu to determine when to keep them until, until “They expire”, “Ask me every time”, and “Until Firefox closes”.
Assuming you are someone who likes their Internets with prefences and signing in and accessing stuff and whatnot, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that no one is going to start off with never accepting cookies. Now that we’re accepting cookies, what to do with them?
The first and last options (for how long to keep cookies) generally don’t make too much sense unless you like to clean out your private data every single time on exit (i.e. delete all the cookies you’ve gathered in your session) or don’t care about loading your computer up with foreign cookies. The last option may be perfect for public computers or computers with only one user account running (meaning the machine and its applications are shared between a group of people) but is somewhat impractical for personal use (such as what I’m interested in) and even more so if, like me, you have got a lot of sites to log into, a lot of accounts, and a lot of preference settings you’d rather not keep track of by memory.
The middle option, therefore, is the way to go with Firefox. Every single site you visit will ask you whether you want to accept a slew of cookies and you select whether to take them (or reject them) as you please. Of course, it gets annoying later on when you’ve assembled your list of accepted and trusted cookies and a much larger list of blocked cookies. I deleted the blocked ones regularly but it got far too annoying. This is when I realized I could keep my trusted list and just select to never accept any more cookies. I don’t get asked anymore, I don’t get a list of blocked cookies, and I don’t have to worry about my existing cookies. A good solution, IMO, for how to deal with these things.
Passwords in Firefox are handled similarly. Everytime a username and password combination is entered, Firefox will ask you whether to:
- Remember the password
- Don’t remember the password
- Never remember passwords (i.e. never ask again) for the site
Next time you enter the same site and begin typing your username, it will suggest to you possible ones that is has memorized and then pressing enter will automatically fill in the password box too. Very unsafe if you’re on a public/shared computer but perfectly handy on a single-user computer.
What about Opera?
Opera handles things a little differently. Right after talking about passwords and usernames in Firefox, I might as well continue with Opera. Opera has a tool called the Wand which works similarly to a tool in Adobe Acrobat. Essentially, the tool will ask you every time you enter personal information (or you can set it in the preferences window) to save that information away, either as a site specific tidbit or a general one. Anyway, the next time you visit that site there will be golden boxes around the fields and you can click there and press Ctrl + Enter to have the Wand fill in all the stuff in the appropriate boxes.
This, I must admit, could potentially be really nifty and time saving since I won’t need to type out my personal details that, as far as I know, don’t change very often a dozen times for different sites (the Wand also works for signing up for stuff, I think). However, one thing with this is that when you have multiple accounts on the same service (like my four gmail accounts) it may get a bit confusing which one you’re Wanding into.
I tested this out myself today when I first config’d the Wand for “Account A” with “Password A” for Gmail, and then logged out and tried to log into “Account B” with “Password B”. For some reason Gmail would not load. I don’t know whether it was the cookies (which I’ll get to momentarily) or the Wanding. Either way, Gmail would refresh and take me back to the ”Sign in with your Google Account” page. Also, typing in the beginning of ”Account B” had the wand suggest me things that started the same but were not saved as something I’d need for the site at hand. It suggested usernames from elsewhere and even different types of fields (e.g. I would type ”lark…” as the start of my Gmail username and it suggested ”larker.wordpress.com” which is my personal website name). This is weird and pretty annoying when you know you’ve got the passwords right but the pages won’t load up. I have got to test this out more but that’s what I’ve found so far.
Cookies in Opera are handled quite differently in Firefox. Opera doesn’t seem to put a great emphasis on blocking cookies, but rather providing a browsing experience that is unobstructed for the most part. Here’s what I mean: in Opera, you can select one of three options for cookie handling:
- Accept all cookies
- Accept cookies only from visited sites
- Never accept any cookies
There is a separate section where you can select whether or not to have Opera ask the user every time for verification. There is also a “Delete all new cookies on exit” option that proves to be the best thing about this set up.
With the three options, you’ve got the ability to set basically how cookies will be treated automatically. Nothing too special here. From what I’ve seen already, selecting between the first two options doesn’t make much of a difference if you clean your cookies yourself/delete them all on exit. The third option really limits what you can do so I don’t even use it.
Like I said before, I like to have everything set once and properly so that I never have to bother with it again. With Opera, I can actually do that in terms of cookies without sacrificing functionality. Here’s how I went around setting it up and why: I got it set to “Accept cookies from sites that I visit” and to not ask me for permission every time. Then I went to every single one of my frequented sites and logged in, wrote a comment, whatever I needed to do to get all the cookies I needed. I then browsed through all the useless ones from ad sites and then deleted them. Here’s the important part: I selected “Delete all new cookies on exit” but left the ”Accept cookies” on so that I have a list of cookies that I use and need to keep over sessions, and I will continue to take additional cookies in as I browse/need them temporarily, but when I close Opera, these extra cookies will get deleted while I keep all my useful ones. This solves the problem encountered in Firefox when I refuse all cookies after getting my white list and visit pages that won’t load properly without cookies. Great solution.
What’s the final call?
I think Opera’s handling of cookies is quite intuitive and smart since it allows for stuff to work without making a mess. However, I think Opera is lacking in its password/personal info handling just because, for me at least, it was a little buggy and stupid. Firefox has good cookie handling but only if you don’t do too much exploring of weird sites that need cookies to load. Its password management is great IMO since it remembers and autfills usernames (awesome) along with passwords (also awesome if you’re one a loner machine). Opera has an insane cookie handling system while Firefox’s password management just works swimmingly, so I’ve got to call this one a split decision: it’s a tie. If we could get Firefox to adopt Opera’s milk and cookies and/or have Opera take some time to accio us all a better Wand, I think both worlds will be bettered considerably. Hybrid child?! Doubt it, but that’d be cool.