Silly introduction: Opera is bloated because it have so many features, and is therefore bad, while Firefox is a great browser because through the use of extensions you an add features to make it even more bloated than Opera.
OK, with that over with, it’s the features I’d like to write a bit about here. It’s true that Opera does include many features, and maybe you don’t need many of them.But on the positive note, they don’t take up much space of the already small download, and won’t show up in the menu and make a clutter out of it if you want to avoid them completely.
Firefox on the other hand chose a different path; it is a featureless browser (well, not quite) that you can add the features you want to through extensions. This way, you can add features that you don’t (currently) find in Opera – and of course refrain from adding features you don’t want, so that you don’t clutter up the interface 😉
But what has any of this to do with time, which the title of this post implies plays a major part of the topic? Obviously, you need some time to actually learn to use the features you like. That’s the same no matter which browser you use, but there’s more!
In Opera you may spend some time to customise the interface to your tastes, if it’s not already so, but in all honesty that doesn’t take too much time. Second, you’re guaranteed that no matter which features you use and enable in Opera, they all works smooth together.
In Firefox the situation is a bit different, as you need to find the extensions that does what you want them to do. True, you do have some centralised pages which have collecti0ns of plugins or links to them. Alas, the job of finding which extension suits you, and which extensions are incompatible with each other, is mostly up to you. It may not be a straight forward task; there are several extensions that does the same thing, in slightly different ways. Which suits you best? Some extensions doesn’t work with other extensions, so there may be a trade off there. How smooth does the extensions work? Do some of them – or a combination of them – make the browser unstable? What about security? And what if one extension is updated – will it still work as expected, or will some incompatibilities have popped up? These are real problems Firefox users have experienced.
So you see, you may potentially spend a lot of time to get it right – that’s the negative side of the situation. The positive side is that there actually are some really great extensions out there.
Opera can’t be extended in the same way, but is it really that far behind? Ad blockers exist, useful side panels, a developer toolbar – or rather developer menu – exists. Truth to be told, you can edit the menus and add entries and features by editing ini-files. You can save the different setups and load specific ones depending on what you want to do. Opera users share the setups they’ve made, many through my.opera.com and some centralised web sites. Just like Firefox users, Opera users have to find the setup they like best – unless they edit the ini-files needed themselves. It may be easier than writing an extension. Unlike Firefox though, you don’t add external code that can make the browser unstable, the different setups aren’t really incompatible with each other, but can’t be used at the same time. You can however edit and combine the different ini-files to achieve that effect, though.
Now, it may seem like no matter which browser you choose, you have to spend time to get the browser like you want it. But of course: That depends. If you want features that neither browser offer by default you have to spend some time to achieve the desired result. How much time depends on which features it is and which browser it is.
However, the situations I hear most of, is when Firefox users is searching for extensions that achieve just the same as Opera offer by default, plus the Adblock. And the problem I hear most of, is that these extensions doesn’t offer quite the same quality and options as Opera, and that some popular extensions weren’t compatible with each other – the combination made Firefox unstable and even crash. It could be solved by using particular versions of the extensions, or alternative extensions, but it took more time than expected.
So the question I’m left with now is the one in the title: If you want the features that Opera offer, without the ad and without paying for it – how much is your time worth?