It's the Week For Browsers!

It's been a very interesting time for browsing software. Opera 9.5 was released last week, Firefox 3.0 and Flock 2.0 beta 1 were released today.

Firstly, I think Opera is brilliant. I've been using it since about v. 5 in Windows and was glad it was there in Linux when I made the switch. Opera has always been fast and filled with useful features well ahead of the pack.

I don't like Opera's mail client, but I do like its implementation of news feeds. I also like its appearance and the panels are a useful feature.

Flock is the browser I want to work, but it never quite gets there. I love the way it does newsfeeds and all of the extra widgets for uploading photos and interacting with sites such as facebook make it brilliant. It used to be too slow (particularly in getting and displaying feeds), but the new version which is based on Firefox 3 seems much much faster. Flock has lots of nice additional features, but its one downfall is that the blog editor (something that Opera seriously needs to produce) just will not work with the my.opera site. For some reason the whole system locks up when it comes to publishing blog posts. It worked well in Flock 0.7 but then it stopped working.

Then there is Firefox 3.0. The Mozilla people have made the rendering engine much faster so now it is competitive with Opera. I've installed the NewsFox and ScribeFire add ons and it is quite a good combination. NewsFox works well at getting all those RSS newsfeeds. ScribeFire plays well with my.opera.com so it's all good. The only thing is that the default appearance is quite chunky. There probably are skins that will make it look better.

The question is: is it good enough to tempt me away from Opera?