The integration of various search engines ALONE is cool ass shit.

Opera has a fair amount of integration -- I can search from a box in the address bar, or I can type "g 'colin farrell'" instead of a URL to google him (or "i 'colin farrell'" to do an image search -- and I can add other search engines too). I can also highlight text on a page, right click, and send the highlighted text to a number of search engines. How does Firefox work.

The find feature absolutely rocked my wurld!

Please to elaborate?

do you like tabbed browsers?

Opera is a tabbed browser.

ita, I think Firefox works similarly. There is a little search bar to the right of the address bar and you can do dictionary.com, google, amazon, yahoo, ebay, etc.

The find feature is described above when I yahoo'd about it, but you can find words while typing in the first few letters. It does the google thing and highlights all instances of the word. Which works fantastically after threadsucking.

I never did get into Opera. My main problem with it is that many of the sites I visited didn't load right in Opera.

It does the google thing and highlights all instances of the word.

That is nifty. Opera doesn't have anything like that.

As for compatibility -- Opera won't load gmail, and bankofamerica.com insists that it's too insecure (bullSHIT, but they upped their compatibility testing, so just pretending to be IE isn't enough anymore) -- otherwise everything loads -- well, usably. I wouldn't know if it's prettier in IE or Firefox, now that I think about it.

it doesn't do that annoying blinking thing while the pages load.

Firefox doesn't blink for me.

serial:

The main thing, though, that I adore about Opera is the mouse gestures. Being able to close a window, move onto the next page, move back in history, open a blank page, or move up one level in the directory structure by just wiggling the mouse (no clicking required) is so addictive, and I find myself trying to do it in IE whenever I use it.

Opera is a tabbed browser.

ah. never used it. you'd probably like SB then.

Firefox doesn't blink for me.

it only did it for me on certain sites. lj, beta. places that had a lot of content to load on one page.

Doesn't blink on LJ for me, either. (Not trying to be contrary, just have never seen the behavior.)

FWIW, my LJ issue with Firefox is that in my particular style, it doesn't always render posts that start with a short first line correctly. For whatever reason it decides to make the rest of the post the width of the first line, no matter how short. When it happens, refreshing usually makes it go away.

Not to interrupt Browser Wars, but does anyone have a suggestion how to get a working laptop/notebook with at least Pentium 4 or comparable Athlon chip, for around 600 bucks?

Having used and loved both, what finally tipped me over to the Firefox side was not having to deal with banner ads. Not that the Opera ones were especially distracting, but I like having the extra real estate.

What I didn't like at first is that, in Opera, ALL of the flexibility is built in from the get-go, and in Firefox, you have to individually install the extensions you want (including mouse gestures). Now that I've gotten used to it, my impression is that Firefox is slightly faster.

Wolfram, I don't remember where you live, but I always go to Craigslist for used computers. There are some really good deals if you're careful not to get scammed.

I need to extend the copy of Firefox I'm using on this machine (the Powerbook G4). It's very rare that I run into a site that doesn't work under Firefox, which is a plus.