Firefox vs. Opera: Round Three
Today I’m gonna discuss customization in both browsers and definitely come up with a winner (after last time’s almost pitiful tie).
Why customize?
I once sat in (read: watched on my computer) a lecture about pasta sauce and what the human race has to learn from it. Basically, the argument went that some purists believed the traditional, Itialian style pasta sauce was the one and only kind of sauce for pasta. This was before we had all the present types of sauces, and yet Ragu brand traditional sauce wasn’t selling so great. The makers decided to take up testing, creating a whole variety of sauces (what we now know as chunky, light, basil, etc…) and surveying people to find out which one sauce was the favourite. What they discovered was that there was no clear winner. That was when they realized that the only way to satisfy and content the most amount of people (and get the most sales) was to create a variety of sauces. Basically, this was a round-about way of saying “Embracing our diversity is the way to maximize enjoyment for everyone.”
This ideology might not hold true for some situations (especially where truth and comfort disagree) but it does apply, I think, to something such as one’s Internet browsing experience. And so, here we are, talking about customization of web browsers (aka: “tweaking”). I’m going to look at how easy/learnable it is to tweak and how much there is to tweak in both Firefox and Opera. First up is Opera.
Opera’s Tweaks
Opera has a way of being very user friendly in nearly everything it does. If you don’t obsess like I do about cookie settings and whatnot, then really, setting up Opera to fit your wants and to look a certain way is a breeze. I’d say 99% of what you see on its interface is customizable by right-clicking and selecting “Customize” from the context menu. From there, dragging and dropping buttons as well as fields is cake. Then again, such functionality is not exculsive to Opera so maybe it’s not that big a deal. Nevertheless, very simple rearrangement of your bars and buttons makes for quick customization any can do.
Themes are downloadable and installable from Opera’s own theme manager window and that makes things pretty very easily. There’s not much to say, really, about themes in Opera. You can browse through them in Opera’s own theme browser/downloader and then choose to keep or discard the themes you want to check out. Quick and painless.
Opera also has the option of using things called Widgets which function much like Windows Vista’s “Gadgets” or Mac OS X’s… “Widgets.” These are just a simple tool that remains on its own somewhere on your screen that help you do things (such as check your mail, display weather conditions, show the time, get RSS feeds, etc…). Widgets in Opera are neat and exclusive to Opera (as far as I know, Firefox does not have these) but there is a major drawback, and that is a limited devpool of these nifty tools. There is a very small number of these widgets available for download and installation (they install pretty much just like themes by the way). I think this would be because of the limited number of people who use Opera. Few users means little reason to code for it. There’s a lot of potential for Opera’s Widgets, but few instances where it’s actually realized (most of the ones I found on Opera’s site are pretty useless (mostly crappy little games) for the average person.**
Then there are user scripts, but I want to save these for until after I’m done talking about Firefox’s features.
Firefox’s Tweaks
Before I go further, tweaking your Firefox out is quite possibly the most fun you can have with Firefox. As far as toolbars and themes go, Firefox is pretty much the same as Opera. Drag and drop, rearrange as you please, it’s all there. There is one thing that Firefox lacks, and that is a suite of functionality that should come standard with the browser install. There are extensions you can download to do the same things that Opera can in its native state. I don’t understand why Firefox doesn’t just lump in the best and most commonly used/pretty much necessary extensions (such as Greasemonkey and Ad Blocker) with their install executable file. It wouldn’t be hard, but I guess it tacks on stuff that some people (like 1%) wouldn’t need. Stupid.
Nevertheless, once you’ve downloaded a good set of useful extensions, customization can really start. There are extensions for just about anything because there’s a huge pool of Firefox extension coders out there that always happen to have already thought of things (and have made the necessary extensions) before you. This is one thing Opera really hasn’t got. Widgets are no where near as useful (or plentiful) as Firefox extensions and so this is one area of customization where Firefox really rocks at.
Moreover, there’s Greasemonkey, pretty much one of the most useful extensions out there. The basic premise of this extension is “I’m going to change how webpages work.” with customized javascripts. This effectively lets you control how different things work in different pages (you can be URL specific with your scripts or not). I could, for example, make all links to MP3 files display as a flash player (like the one I’ve got running for audio streaming here). All these can be managed from within Greasemonkey’s scripts manager. There’s a lot you can do that I won’t need to get into now. Greasemonkey owns. That is all.
Switching gears here for a moment, Opera also has the function for user defined javascripts to run on webpages. However, I don’t really think there are a lot of useful/functioning codes out there for Opera. It does have a function to be able to pseudo-run user javascript files make for Greasemonkey, but I’ve tried a lot of these and they just aren’t supported by Opera. I mean, some work (like the folders4Gmail Greased script) but nearly all the other ones I’ve tried don’t work, leaving me wondering, “How Greasemonkey compatible is this really if it doesn’t work nine out of ten times?” To be fair, those codes weren’t designed for Opera’s use and Opera’s trying to do its best (I hope) but it just doesn’t cut it.
On top of this, managing your user scripts for Opera is a real hassle. For something customizing which sites ought to be excluded from a certain script, you’ve got to open up the script file and go to the top and type in a line of something like “@exclude URL”, once for every site to be excluded. Greasemonkey in Firefox lets you do this much more quickly by opening up the Greasemonkey manager window and clicking “Add” and it’ll automatically suggest the domain of the site you’re currently browsing.
Verdict:
Both Firefox and Opera have pretty much the same set of tools to help you get your overall look and feel set up rather quickly. The controls are all pretty intuitive and can be easily manipulated to make a hot look look hotter that much faster. Nothing too special though, in either browser. Opera does have neat Widgets (that don’t do much, sadly) and Firefox has got extensions (that may also not do much if you don’t know what to look for). Extensions definitely beat Widgets since they are usually quite discrete and customizable (to make for lots of hidden functionality to keep things pretty) and there is just a much greater variety of extensions that tweak many more things than Opera’s native settings could touch. The main downside to extensions, however, is that they don’t come standard within Firefox installs. Both Firefox and Opera have user defined javascript running capabilities (Greasemonkey or natively, respectively), but since Opera doesn’t seem to have many people working on scripts for itself and its “Greasemonkey compatibility” runs more like a crippled monkey (i.e. not very well at all), this functionality is going to be next to none within Opera. Greasemonkey codes work best (and beautifully) on Greasemonkey after all. And that’s why I’ve got to say, “Long live Greasemonkey (and Firefox)!” Firefox takes this one.
![Ingrafted [Front]](http://www.the-ppole.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/dsc03295.jpg)
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