Legal Research

Is it too late for Opera?

By Simon Chester

If I had to guess, I think that most Slaw readers use Mozilla Firefox as their primary personal browser, even if their workplaces may well mandate Internet Explorer as the browser on their work desktop. Three years back Simon (the other) reminded us of the benefits of an old favourite Opera – which I recall was my own browser of choice a long time back, when Netscape finally gave up the ghost.

Here is a video on what to expect. It doesn’t seem to be speeding ahead of Google Chrome, but PC World says that Opera claims Turbo, its compression engine, can increase browsing speeds up to eight times faster than on other browsers suffering from the same network holdup–but no independent test results on this.

The press says today that we can wait till next year for the new Mozilla, and the Firefox roadmap released today says that the features to anticipate are:

Firefox 4 / Fennec 2 mozilla-1.9.4 branch Q3/Q4 2010
Process separation for chrome and content, new extensibility mechanism through APIs, revised UI on all platforms

* platform enhancements
o content and chrome in separate process
o binary component versioning
o new extensibility platform (JetPack)
* end user feature enhancements
o browser sync (Weave)
o new UI on all platforms
* speed and responsiveness improvements
o tracemonkey engine improvements

While you’re waiting, here’s a piece from this week’s PC World on how to spice up your current Firefox browser

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 07, 2009 (boomark / email).