OK Smart A.--DO A TEST ON THIS VERY WEB PAGE AND THEN EAT HUMBLE PIE!
1. Use latest browsers, Firefox 3.5b99 and Opera 10. (Although with the longstanding bugs in Firefox that Mozilla won't fix, it doesn't matter if you use earlier versions of Firefox, the result will be the same)
2. Save this very page with both Firefox and Opera as follows:
- Firefox: File\Save Page As\Web Page, complete\
- Opera: File\Save As\HTML file with images\
3. To stop the saved files 'talking home' and updating online when loaded into the browser, in Network Connections, temporarily disable your network connection. (This is important so as not to contaminate the Web page snapshots with newly cached files.)
4. Before proceeding, clear the cached pages in both browsers, make sure caches are completely empty of files from these pages.
5. Now, one page at a time [EACH A SEPARATE PROCESS THAT COMPLETES BEFORE THE NEXT BEGINS], load the two saved pages into the browsers (i.e.: four separate operations).
6. Between each operation, ensure that you have [again] properly cleaned the browsers' caches (to avoid any cache contamination).
7. NOW, see how Firefox is incapable of saving the page with any degree of fidelity. (THIS PROBLEM HAS BEEN IN FIREFOX FOR AGES AND MOZILLA CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO FIX IT).
8. ALSO, see what an excellent job Opera does of saving the page. It is AOK.
9. Do the test again but this time include Internet Explorer.
Just because Opera doesn't have market share it does not mean that it is no good. That's about as stupid as saying a Rolex watch is not as good as an el-cheapo Asian one because it has less market penetration than the latter.
If people knew how good Opera is (especially in some specific areas, as I've just demonstrated), then many more people would use it.
As I said on these ZDNet posts sometime back in about 2000-2001, only the cognoscenti will bother using Opera (implying back then that the hoi polloi would use the lowest common denominator, Internet Explorer [in these pre-Firefox days], but that would be the least of we Opera users' concerns). ('Tis interesting to see how little the argument has changed in a decade, even with the entry of another big player.)
This is not to say Opera is perfect by any means; nevertheless, it is a very well engineered product with a long and respected lineage. In fact, I've been using Opera since 1999, but I do so along with Firefox and Internet Explorer (all[1] of which coexist on my machine and which are regularly loaded and used simultaneously. [If it's not obvious why I have do this, I'm sorry but I've not the time to explain here--suffice to say, you've probably simpler requirements than me].
Frankly, I'm sick and tired--just fed up--with people bellyaching over browsers without ever having tested them properly: this noise tells us nothing more than that a specific user has some idiosyncratic preference for one browser over another. Furthermore, it tells us nothing about the engineering specifics or otherwise about the browser.
Oh, BTW:
TRY THIS IN FIREFOX! Few seem concerned that the saved Web Page '_files' directory is usually cluttered with small files that easily go astray (and which often fall prey to duplicate eliminators etc.). Even fewer seem to realize that you can bypass this problem completely by saving Web pages as a single file in MHTML (MIME HTML) format. Both Internet Explorer and Opera have this facility FIREFOX DOES NOT[2].
By now, you'd really think Firefox's feature set would at least be a superset of Internet Explorer but clearly it's not--certainly not in some key areas such as MHTML--it's a serious and longstanding omission.
Whilst the bellyaching is loud and raucous from Firefox fans about issues concerning both Opera and Internet Explorer[3] there is hardly a whisper from them about Firebox's limitations. Either it's a cover-up, or more as I suspect, that most users have a pretty limited understanding about the extent of their browser's features, and concomitantly they don't appreciate the significance or advantages of these features--otherwise there would be many more complaints than there are.
Moreover, given the great importance of browsers to the Internet, I find it truly amazing that nowhere on the Web is there any site where one can find proper comparative tests and/or any decent testing (engineering analysis etc.) of current browsers.
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[1] Along with the occasional interloper, Seamonkey, Chrome, Safari, K-Meleon etc.
[2] For the record, very recently there's a good MHTML plug-in that's become available for Firefox [UnMHT]. However, if you look at its total penetration to date, 96K downloads, it is trivially insignificant. In the grand schema of things, saving Web pages in Firefox as a single archive file is essentially non-existent. Before UnMHT, there was another MHTML/MAFF plug-in (Ottley), 250k downloads, but it languished undeveloped and half-broken for ages and it remains to be seen if the newer pre-version release amounts to anything.
[3] Anyone's who has read my posts over the years would know that I'm no Microsoft sycophant nor that of IE. Stating that IE can save in MHTML format is matter of objectivity, moreover IE was by far the first browser with the feature (although IE's implementation is poorly implemented and IE often 'crashes' on a complex page with the useless message that it 'cannot save the page', moreover, it gives no reason.
