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Apparently my Firefox looks very similar to your Opera, everything from left-handed tab bar with groups and plugins on demand to scrolling through tabs with RMB+mouse wheel. I'm literally using all of the features you mention. I think you can set up Chrome in mostly the same way.

Of course you need to use extensions while Opera does it all out of the box. I prefer being able to pick-and-choose features and I appreciate the rich playground for ideas of the Firefox extension ecosystem. If anything I wish Firefox did less out of the box.

I think I usually use only between 30 and 60 tabs, though it's easy to lose count with tree style tabs and I've certainly never hit a ceiling where things seemed to slow down. But maybe Opera really shines in super-heavy browsing loads. Even if that's true, "stuck in the stone-age" is just flamebait rhetoric.

> Even if that's true, "stuck in the stone-age" is just flamebait rhetoric.

Not so. Firefox and Chrome come out of the box with more or less the same features as Internet Explorer 6, which is stone-age browsing for me. Sure, you can add extensions and add-ons but they (at least for Firefox) slow down your browser, take time to set up (unless you use a portable version you carry everywhere with you), may be a security risk (as history has shown) and are nowhere near as refined as what Opera provides (I really disliked the All-in-one gestures add-on in Firefox, although you can still customize it until it somehow behaves like Opera's implementation, sort of). And really, Opera has so many features that I like it would take a very long time to have an identical setup for Firefox. Maybe someone should develop an 'Opera' extension.

> I prefer being able to pick-and-choose features

What does it matter if you don't use those features and they don't get in the way? For instance you have a torrent downloader embedded in Opera. I don't use it, I never see it, it does not slow down my browser. What is the problem?

> If anything I wish Firefox did less out of the box.

Really? Like what?

"take time to set up"

Chrome and Firefox have the option option to sync your extensions, as well as bookmarks etc. and settings. I just have to login to Chrome or Firefox on a new computer and it's pretty much identical.

Contrast that to Opera Link, which as far as I can find doesn't sync extensions or settings, so I'd have to configure it and change all the default settings I don't like.

I'm pretty darned sure IE6 doesn't have the ability to sync settings.

IE6 was released more than 10 years ago and doesn't even do tabs. The comparison is laughable.

Can Chrome display your bookmarks at the side in "split view", with bookmark folders and bookmark folder contents in their own pane? Really? Thought so...

> "I prefer being able to pick-and-choose features and I appreciate the rich playground for ideas of the Firefox extension ecosystem."

Well sure, and Opera has extensions, too. It just does some things out of the box that you can't even do with extensions for other browsers, OR for which you have to pay the prices of longer startup and constantly checking for extension updates before starting up.

FF (and Opera, and all browser) extensions are great; as long as you don't have many dozens of them. Then you really really want those features done in core code, not in Javascript and what have you.

Depending on how good your computer is, Opera will buckle sooner or later if you have very demanding pages. That does not usually happen with Chrome (unless you have a huge number of tabs, which doesn't usually happen to me).

Our usages differ quite significantly. Why does that make Chrome stone-age?

"You can also use ghostery (an extension) to block all these resource-consuming background scripts, just in case you have reached the limits of your hardware."

Plugins that are available to pretty much every browser aren't a compelling argument for superiority (http://www.ghostery.com/download), just developer awesomeness. I notice that under Opera it says "/Almost/ full detection", so it's not even as fully featured as on other browsers.

If you're allowing plugins, I'm not sure I can think of a feature in Opera that you can't acheive in Firefox. But of course the argument is that Opera gives you all of them out of the box (whether you need them or not), in which case you can't use widely cross-browser plugins to try and bolster your argument.

"And by the way, one last thing. The default option for Opera is to restore your tabs from your last browsing session, which was not the case for Chrome and Firefox last time I checked"

I almost never want to restore the last session, and when I do Firefox and Chrome (and Opera if you change the default settings) give me the option to without forcing it upon me.

A lot of the defaults in Opera seem to be geared around managing a large number of tabs. I don't have a large number of tabs. I have a few windows with max. a dozen tabs each and I use bookmarks and other tools to manage things I want to keep around long term. I know lots of people who do the same. Yours and my use cases differ. That doesn't make Opera or Chrome or Firefox poorer, it just means different design trade-offs have been made.

I used Opera almost exclusively from version 5 up to around version 11. Now I switch between the Opera Next preview builds and Chromium nightly builds.

As a heavy user of both browsers, I can say for sure that all of the things you mention work as well or better in Chromium.

It's also funny to me that you tout Opera's customization ability, then deride the other browsers for having plugins. What's a plugin if not a convenient form of customization? It's even more funny because Chrome can be customized so much better than Opera. There's no Opera equivalent of Vimium, for example.

And "You're a hacker?" Well, Chromium is open source, it doesn't get more hacker friendly than that. Not that I care.

I switched to Firefox a year or so ago, because Opera (both on Windows and Mac) became too unstable for me with 150+ tabs open. Since then, I have become accustomed to some Firefox extensions, mainly NoScript and RequestPolicy. Also, Firefox has an option to only load tabs when they are clicked on, which makes startup a lot faster (and more stable). If Opera has such an option now, I might switch back.

> And by the way, one last thing. The default option for Opera is to restore your tabs from your last browsing session, which was not the case for Chrome and Firefox last time I checked

Chrome's shortcut for 'reopen recently closed tab' is ctrl-shift-t. If you open a fresh browser window and do that, you get your tabs from the last session.

>right now opera:cpu shows me a round number of 115 tabs with 1.5 GB RAM usage

That's impressive, but I can't imagine having over 5 tabs open. It would be impossible for me to use that many at once.

I use tabs instead of bookmarks. Opera also has tab groups, so I can drag one tab to another to create a collapsible group of tabs related to a particular project. It's not unusual for me to have a handful of tab groups with a dozen of tabs in each, plus half a dozen of regular tabs for what I'm currently reading. The only down side with this is that browsing is slower when I just have started my browser and I'm waiting for all the tabs to load, but I don't close my browser that often. [Edit: apparently there are startup speed improvements in Opera 12 specifically for the many-tabs-open use case]

I also use the tab stacking feature, so many related tabs are grouped together. Right now I have 2 full column of tabs and groups on the left side of my screen. It's actually very comfortable, although sometimes I clean up a lot of them. Like another user said here, I use them as bookmarks, or in my case as "read-later" lists, so I never completely forget about something I want to do or read.

I think it's a matter of habit. You can't use so many tabs if you don't have (at least) a multiline tab bar, preferably one aligned vertically.