I think the biggest problem with including all of that out of the box isn’t intimidation, rather it is the fact that they are all included whether you want them or not. With firefox, you get to essentially “roll your own” set of advanced features. Sure a lot of people don’t use extensions, but I’m certain a lot of people don’t need or want all of those features in Opera either.

But even with the exhaustive feature list Opera somehow stays faster than Fx! Those developers are magicians.

With all this, it could be hard to believe I use Fx. The reason is I love IE7’s menubar-less interface. Buttons are easier to find, take less clicks to get too, look cooler, and save space. But I can’t use IE7 (no download manager, no undoclosetab, no spellcheck, no RSS to Y!, no find as u type) so I skin Fx to have the same great interface. I just don’t like the traditional menu bars. They’re inefficient, and the future looks like it’s w/out ‘em.

Look at the Wii. Nintendo chose Opera!

Indeed, and the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) also chose Opera who made a custom version of their browser just for it.

Yeah, you’re definitely right. The point being that people don’t want to use Opera because it has so many features, whether it be because they are intimidated or they see it as “bloat”.

One of my friends just switched to Opera though because Firefox and IE 7 both had memory leaks that would frequently cause his browser to go above 1GB of memory usage. He thinks it has to do with leaving Google Reader open all of the time, but he said that Opera never surpasses 250MB of memory usage. So you would think that all of Opera’s features (Mail, IRC, etc…) would bog it down but in reality they have the best browser when it comes to memory managment.

I use Firefox on a regular basis, but I also use Opera so I’m not partial one way or another. I recommend both browsers to people because they are both better than IE.

Opera has a lot of features out-of-the-box that don’t require you to download extensions to do. It has mouse-gestures, more configuration options than Firefox, more advanced toolbar and button customizations, and then also the mail/irc. There is no doubt that you can do most, if not all, of this in Firefox with the help of extensions, but having all of this out-of-the-box can be intimidating for new users.

I think the biggest problem with including all of that out of the box isn’t intimidation, rather it is the fact that they are all included whether you want them or not. With firefox, you get to essentially “roll your own” set of advanced features. Sure a lot of people don’t use extensions, but I’m certain a lot of people don’t need or want all of those features in Opera either.

Wow…first they are 100% HTML complaint now the team is shotting for CSS, great job Opera team. Man it’s too bad that such a good product doesn’t get half the attention it deserves. Well at least mobile devices (such as the Palm Feleo, Nokia N800 to name a few) are using Opera web browser as their default browser.

Look at the Wii. Nintendo chose Opera!

What features are you talking about?

Opera has a lot of features out-of-the-box that don’t require you to download extensions to do. It has mouse-gestures, more configuration options than Firefox, more advanced toolbar and button customizations, and then also the mail/irc. There is no doubt that you can do most, if not all, of this in Firefox with the help of extensions, but having all of this out-of-the-box can be intimidating for new users.

When it comes to Opera I think a lot of people assume it is too advanced for them because of all the features it has incorporated into it.

What features are you talking about?

Mail? I have a standalone mail program that is better than Opera’s.
IRC? I have a standalone IRC client that is better than Opera’s.
Bittorrent? I can’t recall ever downloading anything using bt.
Tabs, popup blocking, privacy control, session control, etc? Can do all of those in Firefox.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think Opera is a great browser, but that’s all it is. Firefox is much more flexible and give a lot more opportunities for integration with other applications.