First, a little joke to set the scene (forgive a rough translation from Russian)…<\/p>\n
Lion, the king of all animals, was running some statistics over his animal kingdom.\u00c2\u00a0 He called all animals and made the speech.\u00c2\u00a0 “Dear all,” – he said, – “I am trying to figure out how to direct the educational program in the upcoming year.\u00c2\u00a0 For that I need some stats.\u00c2\u00a0 Those of you who are strong, please stand on my right.\u00c2\u00a0 Those of you who are smart, please stand on my left.\u00c2\u00a0 And let me count you…”<\/p>\n
Strong animals – elephants, bulls, hippos, etc – all moved by the lion’s right paw.\u00c2\u00a0 The smart animals – beavers, rats, foxes, etc – grouped by lion’s left side.\u00c2\u00a0 When the dust settled, there was a one animal still running around blubbering something.\u00c2\u00a0 All attention turned towards the creature, and everyone saw the monkey.\u00c2\u00a0 It was running back and forward from one group to another and back again, thinking out oud: “strong to the right, smart to the left.. .strong to the right, smart to the left… and me? what about me?\u00c2\u00a0 Do I have to cut myself in half or what?” …<\/p>\n
For the last few days, I feel a little bit like that monkey.\u00c2\u00a0 The thing is that I’m using two browsers right now, I can’t continue using two browsers, and I can’t pick one.\u00c2\u00a0 Those of you following me on Twitter might be somewhat aware of the situation.<\/p>\n
I love Firefox<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve been using it for years, and I don’t see it going anywhere.\u00c2\u00a0 It has plenty of functionality (especially through plugins and extensions) that no other browser has.\u00c2\u00a0 It does whatever I want it to do and then a little bit more.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s so slow that I can’t stand it.\u00c2\u00a0 I have removed all extensions that I don’t use.\u00c2\u00a0 I have disabled all extensions that I use from time to time.\u00c2\u00a0 I read all optimizations tips on the web and tried a few thoughts of my own.\u00c2\u00a0 It helped, but not enough.\u00c2\u00a0 Nothing has solved the problem.\u00c2\u00a0 Scrolling is still slow.\u00c2\u00a0 Especially with a few tabs open.\u00c2\u00a0 Switching between tabs is slow. Opening a new tab is slow.\u00c2\u00a0 And these are things I do a few thousand times a day.\u00c2\u00a0 Even milliseconds count for this operations.\u00c2\u00a0 Firefox allows itself to spend almost full seconds.<\/p>\n On the other hand, I have Opera<\/a> – a fantastically fast browser.\u00c2\u00a0 It even has a lot of features that make browsing the web so pleasant. Tabs, search bar, downloads management, history and bookmarks, fast dial, notes, and many more.\u00c2\u00a0 But.\u00c2\u00a0 Those aren’t enough.\u00c2\u00a0 Even with recently introduced widgets it still doesn’t cover the functionality that I need.\u00c2\u00a0 By far.\u00c2\u00a0 Not even 50%.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s so fast that it almost makes me not care.\u00c2\u00a0 Almost.<\/p>\n Opera has practically no integration with social services – something that I work a lot with.\u00c2\u00a0 No comparison can be made with Firefox extensions for Twitter, Flickr, and del.icio.us here.\u00c2\u00a0 It has practically no integration with other, less social, online tools – specifically the Google pack of services (Gmail, Calendar, Reader, etc).\u00c2\u00a0 And it misses the most important area of my work – web development.\u00c2\u00a0 Source code formatting, highlighting, editing, analysis, testing, troubleshooting…<\/p>\n I am confident that the situation will improve and resolve itself pretty soon.\u00c2\u00a0 Firefox is getting a lot of momentum and already plenty of optimizations went into upcoming Firefox 3<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Opera is getting a lot of hype and user base on mobile devices.\u00c2\u00a0 People are starting to develop for it.<\/p>\n But I can’t wait…<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n