(Migrated weblog post from LSR)
Ever since Opera announced that they would be making their web browser available for free there has been a lot of discussion all over the place and some folks even talk about the revival of the Browsers battle for second place. And while reading through some of those arguments I just cannot help sitting back and smiling a bit about the whole thing. Don’t you just love it when people start comparing pears with apples ? Because that is exactly what is happening right now.
Some people even ventured to mention that Opera‘s announcement to make the browser available for free is just a move that comes a bit too late since FireFox has already settled in as the “alternative” browser. There we go again, comparing pears with apples. When are people going to understand that FireFox cannot be compared to Opera ? That FF is just that, a web browser, with no other functionality on its own, so take out the extensions and also the GreaseMonkey scripts. We are talking about applications from out of the box. Yes, indeed, FF is just a browser and nothing else. So how can you compare it with the Internet Tool Suite that Opera is. How can you compare both of them when we all know that they are substantially different in the functionality they provide?
FireFox will allow you to browse through web sites, but nothing else. However, Opera provides you with that same functionality, plus e-mail, RSS, IRC, Newsgroups and a whole bunch of other native features, so how can you compare both of them? How can people even compare IE with Opera? If anything, if you would seriously would have a compelling need to compare Opera with something else, you may as well get started with comparing it with the likes of Mozilla or IE + Outlook Express. Then you would have a fair comparison.
But then again you probably know already why that comparison is not taking place out there both in the main news media and the Blogosphere, right ? Yes, indeed, for what each of the suites would provide, we all know who the winner would be: Opera. I wonder why we don’t get to see that battle, well, if you can call that a battle because as far as I can see there isn’t a single web browser that could be up to the same level as Opera. Whether people like it or not. Thus no point in continuing comparing pears with apples. At least, not over here. Not need to waste our time any longer. Let their battle continue till they realise how wrong they have been all along.
