Firefox getting bloated
I've been a fan of Firefox since the Phoenix days, but I don't like the direction the browser has taken since 2.x. For one thing, it now has a horrible iconset and very dull UI colours. My preferred Firefox version is 1.5 as it has a functional, elegant interface. The browser also seems to have gotten more sluggish since 2.x, and yet has added practically no new functionality - talk about version number inflation!
Even little things like the MacOS style Options (tabs on top as opposed to side) - why did they do that? The MacOS market share is tiny anyway - about 5%, and no-one uses Firefox on it; they use Safari instead. They should focus on making the UI experience for the Windows userbase as seamless and elegant as possible.
Roadmaps plans for 3.x seem to be more of the same - no substantial new features, more bloat. I can see Firefox market share dropping lower and lower from its 20-25 high. It's just not responding to users' needs and reverting to its bad old ways. The development community seem to be - like virtually all open-source software - inept at dealing with what users want. There's a good likelihood it will go the way of Netscape Navigator.
Opera is a nifty browser and I'm a big fan of 9.20. The quick options menu and more config options are very useful. It's probably more of a "power user" browser though, not one your average user will want to use. And hey, there's nothing wrong with that; because neither Firefox or IE give you enough flexibility out of box regarding images/plug-ins/Javascript/mouse gestures. Its fast-forward and "user mode" functions is also very useful. Oh and I find Firefox plugins to be quite useless; they don't make up for Opera's native features. They seem to be poorly coded, with bad front ends and it just adds another layer of programming language - i.e. it slows things down.
Opera does seem to be less stable than the rest, however. It has the highest crash frequency of them all. Maybe this is my setup, I don't know; maybe it doesn't have enough RAM/cache space. But thankfully it's session recovery tool is top notch.
So it's Opera 9.20 and Firefox 1.5 for me. Please, Mozilla change that disgusting icon set and stop the version name inflation!