Joe Whitehead

USA

PC Tech

Opera is ok but sometimes I need 'heavy' browser like IE or the Mozilla variants.

I love how Opera has a lighter footprint, supports easy use of 'saved sessions' although Mozilla has a similar feature, and how you can customize exactly what 'features' you want to disable. Don't like redirects but want rest of scripting? It's a lot easier in Opera.

I'm believing the predictions of almost anyone who's taken an economics class, is coming true. IE and Mozilla(or Firefox/etc.) are coming close to parity. There a lot of people who really don't care which browser, and once shown Mozilla, actually like that it doesn't support Active X spyware, etc. Not that I'm saying any browser is bulletproof! ;)

Since both of the most popular browsers are free and have almost the same user experience, there's going to come a point where for a while, we'll probaly see little growth relative to each other. The only really noticable costs are the time needed to get them configured (read: secured/customized), which is part of why IE's been losing so much of it's dominance. Realisticly, I keep IE/Mozilla/Opera on my laptop in case one of them works better on a site. I don't consider them to be exclusive.