I can’t deny I am an avid Opera Fan. And I can’t deny I hate everything Netscape. But this is one nifty product from the Netscape shed that impresses me big time. I thought about downloading this from the net ever since I got the phat connection, but Mozilla name attached to it kept changing my mind. Then today, I met a guy on my local network who seems to be pretty ahead of me in these things. He gave me this browser from the local network, hence saving me loads of bandwidth and time. Come to think of it, why not we start a local intranet for the local users to get the latest nifty utilities. Naah… It’s asking too much from these local goons.

Back to the software. The first thing that impressed me was the starting speed. I was expecting it to start like good old netscape even though its a scaled down version of the original Mozilla browser. It amazingly started pretty quickly. The interface is lean mean almost naked. Not many buttons. Reminds me of the old generations of the browsers (IE 3 and Netscape 3). Opera and IE looks cluttered in front of this though the usability decreases with the decrease in buttons. But who cares till it works well. Loads pages pretty nicely. I heard its more compatible with the CSS standards than IE 6 which is really cool. Its definitely a mile ahead of the Netscape 6 I was currently using for testing purposes. This site looks pretty messed up in Netscape 6 and earlier versions, but FireBird manages it well. There are some issues which I think is my mistake in the HTML coding. Will look in to this.

This brings to the final verdict. I rate Mozilla second in my favorite list. Opera comes first. Its more hip and has more features. Though Mozilla provides a pretty cool browsing experience. Atleast it remember the values previously inserted in the text boxes which Opera does not. And tells me when it actually blocks a pop up with a small icon in the bottom bar of the browser.

Features: Tabbed Interface, Ad Blocks, Image Blocker (Complete off/Images from other servers off), Password Manager, Cookie Manager, download manager (can’t find any resume feature), Support for Extensions and Themes!

Thing I Hate: I can’t clearly see how much of the page is loaded. The progress bar is not exactly perfect. Opera is more strong here.