Opera, Firefox squabble over best-browser claim

Cnet ^ | June 10, 2005 | Ingrid Marson

[Panerai]

A Mozilla Foundation employee has lashed out at Opera Software for claiming it won a best-browser award, saying the award was actually won by open-source browser Firefox.

Opera sent out a press release last week claiming it had been named the best Web browser by technology magazine PC World. "A winning streak: Opera once again wins PC World's World Class Award for best Web browser," according to the release.

A few days later, Asa Dotzler, an employee at the Mozilla Foundation, claimed that PC World had named Firefox as the best browser.

"Firefox not only won the coveted Product of the Year award, sweeping all 99 other products in the list, but it beat out two other browsers, Maxthon at number 12 and Opera way down at number 88," Dotzler said in his blog on Tuesday.

An Opera employee, Haavard Moen, said on Wednesday that the company was no longer sure whether it had won this award and had updated its Web site to make this clear.

"At closer inspection, it appears that Opera might not have won the best browser of 2005 award from PC World after all. Opera is listed as the only browser in the 'Web' category, which I guess got us confused," Moen said in his blog. "We've removed the 'best browser' stuff from Opera.com until PC World gets back to us to clarify things. We're posting a statement in the near future as well."

[martin_fierro]

An Opera employee, Haavard Moen, said on Wednesday that the company was no longer sure whether it had won this award and had updated its Web site to make this clear.

OPERA was Best Browser before it wasn't.

[Grut]

Opera is a theoretically nice browser with a lot of customizable features but I've never been able to make it work very well. Their answer to features that don't work seems to be to add more features that also don't work.

[NH Red]

FireFox #1

[rwfromkansas]

Opera sucks butt.

I have tried that piece of crap.

Couldn't pay videos or do much of anything.

[RayChuang88]

I like Firefox over Opera for the following reasons:

1. It's free.

2. You can easily customize the program.

3. It has very good standards compliance outside of ActiveX support.

4. It has pretty fast page-rendering speeds.

[Jet Jaguar]

ping

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

I like Opera (though I haven't used it for a while) and I like Firefox. However, both are still a little rough around the edges. I still prefer Safari (but not by much).

[zeugma]

Firemonger has a downloadable ISO image for creating an easy installation CD for Firefox and Thunderbird. It includes a bunch of popular extensions and themes. For those of you who periodically end up doing ad-hoc tech support for family and friends, this is a useful addition to your toolkit. Also, it can be cut on a mini CD. I made a bunch for my wife to hand out to folks where she works.

[1L]

I'm getting ready to trash FF. I have constant crashes when clicking on PDF file links out of Google.