Here are some suggestions for those looking for alternatives to Opera 12 (and use Opera Mail)

makavcio

makavcio

^ and ^^
I've just spent a coffee break on trying to make FF work like Opera. I tried to install those Tab Utilities, but the newest version seems to be incompatible with the latest firefox and the one I downloaded, a little older version, just made all my tabs flicker and no content is displayed in any of them. Lovely.

Will try Waterfox as son as I have several hours of spare time. It's good to know that there is something that will bring my Speed Dial, aka the most important bookmarks. Firefox just puts random content in its Speed Dial substitute. I bet there is logic behind it but I still need to discover it.

Deleted User

Deleted User

Originally posted by Makavcio:

^ and ^^
I've just spent a coffee break on trying to make FF work like Opera. I tried to install those Tab Utilities, but the newest version seems to be incompatible with the latest firefox and the one I downloaded, a little older version, just made all my tabs flicker and no content is displayed in any of them. Lovely.

Just use the newest 1.6pre5 from here, it works fine with the current firefox ( i use v25):
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/tab-utilities/versions/

blueboyns

blueboyns

Here is my "temporary" solution till Chopera starts to look like decent browser again

1. Iron (or some other 100% Chrome compatible clone). It's very basic but super stable and has bookmarks

2. Pig Toolbox extension!!!
(this is crucial as it provides old Opera level of mouse gestures usability and a lot of options regarding tabs and link behavior, and tons of other stuff)

3. Quick Note extension (not ideal but closest to Opera notes I could find)

4. Ad Block Pro extension

5. Ghostery extension

Not exactly Opera but so far very nice experience

salahuddin1

salahuddin1

Originally posted by Makavcio:

Hey, Salahuddin1
I tried to contact you through private msg system but it requires some kind of an account I'm unable to create... Hope you'll read this.

Hey Makavcio,

I've pretty much completely transitioned to SeaMonkey. The addons I use are: Adblock Plus, Flashgot and Seatabx (had to get this from a russian site, I can give you the link if you need it).

There isn't a Speed Dial extension that I found, but I never really used it much in Opera. To replace the functionality I needed for this, I just used the Bookmarks Toolbar (in fact, to create space, I dragged it up beside the top menu (where file, edit, view etc is). Of course this only works well if you have less than a dozen or so sites. There are SeaMonkey Speed Dial extensions called Speed Dial WebPage and Speed Dial, but they have not been updated for use in the latest version. I guess you can give it a try to see if it works.

I don't think you can get tab stacking functionality on SeaMonkey. You could try this addon: Tab Stacking

Obviously, depending on the functions you need, some of the other options mentioned here might be better. Firefox has more addons, so I can see Firefox or Waterfox with the Simple Mail extension more appealing depending on your needs. I haven't tried Simple Mail myself, but the email functionality of SeaMonkey is great. It seems just as robust as Thunderbird.

On a bit of a side note, I was tinkering around with Numion Stopwatch and SeaMonkey seems to be really quick in loading pages. In fact, Firefox, Seamonkey and Chrome seem to be mostly be about the same speed (within 1 second of each other), with Opera 12.16 being quite a bit slower and Opera Next being even slower than that. In addition, the odd page seemed to load exceptionally fast on SeaMonkey, but took particularly long on other browsers (betanews.com was one example). There was less than a handful of sites I found that did this however. If anyone is interested in testing this out to confirm/refute, I would be interested in the results.

laurenbacall

laurenbacall

So, after updating Firefox to version 25 I took the plunge to see how well Firefox could match Opera 12's basic functionality. Obviously nothing is perfect, and there are still numerous things missing/lacking, and I'll be outlining such things in a following post.

Firstly, an overview of the addons I have installed (in alphabetical order):

Addons

Adblock Plus - Most are familiar with this, blocks ads, elements, along with custom filters.
Add Bookmark Here² - Expands the default Add bookmark dialog box to display more options, and includes better bookmarking defaults.
All-in-One Sidebar - emulates Opera's sidebar. Makes Downloads, History, Bookmarks, etc appear in a customizable sidebar. Tip: the side grip toggle can be hidden from Firefox's View menu.
Bamboo Feed Reader - RSS feed reader. Decent, and is the only one that allows you to subscribe via Firefox's feed preview page directly.
Customizable Shortcuts Adds a Shortcuts preference pane and provides the ability to edit default shortcuts. Shortcuts can't be removed altogether however. Not anywhere near as flexible as Opera's offering but better than nothing. Note: some addons expect the default shortcuts and won't adapt to changes made to the defaults, won't break anything but worth noting.
DoubleClick ContextMenu - Adds the ability to double-click text to bring up context menu. Amazing this isn't default behavior.
DownThemAll! - Mass link downloader. I suppose it could be thought of as a more advanced Links panel
FxChrome theme - an alternative Chrome-like Firefox skin. For OSX at least it is much better than the default.
Greasemonkey - Userscript support and management.
ImageBlock - Add button to disable all images from loading. Replacement for Opera's View>Images>No Images.
LastPass - Superb password manager, and arguably the best version of the addon on any browser.
Menu Editor - Customize the file, context, and tab menus of Firefox. Also can handle most addon context menu items.
NoScript - Javascript/Flash/Java blocker/manager. Works as well as it ever has, but I must admit after lemonsqueeze's Opera addons it's UI is still a disappointment
Old Default Image Style - Removes the black background when viewing single images, and optionally provides a checkerboard background for transparent images. A weak replacement for Image Autosizer.
Prevent Tab Overflow - Allows more tabs to be displayed in Firefox's tab bar before scrolling occurs.
Private Tab - brings private mode to tabs, rather than just windows. Note: see below for my Stylish userstyle to match Opera's style.
Session Manager - A session manager.
Single Key Tab Switch - brings the 1/2 single key shortcuts to Firefox for switching between tabs. See KeyConfig for more single-key shortcuts. I personally use other methods for back/forward so this addon is mostly sufficient.
Speed Dial - a Speed Dial replacement. Includes some very nice thumbnail cropping and layout options per tile. Limited to grids and the zoom isn't dynamically adjustable, but it's okay if you rarely change that. See below for my settings. For anyone using Chrome Speed Dial 2 I believe is the best Speed Dial addon there is.
Stylish - userstyle manager. A must have for changing the appearance of various aspects of Firefox (and sites, too).
Tab Mix Plus - extends the tab customization options, and allows for Shift+click to close tabs, and Shift+click/Ctrl+click shortcuts to open in foreground/background tabs, amongst other essential things. See below for settings.
UnMHT - adds the ability to save web pages to the MHT format. A must have personally as I always save to single files.

Also see: Tab Scope (tab hover thumbnails with live scrolling + more), and Add to Search Bar (add custom searches to Search bar*).

* It should also be noted that Firefox supports custom searchs with keywords out of the box, simply right-click a search box, add a keyword, and it will be placed in your bookmarks folder as a special bookmark .

Well, that is quite a list! Below are my settings for Private Tab, Speed Dial, Tab Mix Plus, and more.

Stylish custom userstyles

Copy and paste the code in the boxes below into a new blank Stylish styles to look more like Opera.

Speed Dial tab icon + Private Tab icons & backgrounds
Changes the Speed Dial tab icon to match Opera's, as well as the private tab/window icon and backgrounds to match Opera's own. Note: I'm using OSX and the FxChrome theme, as such the backgrounds may need to be changed for other OSes as mentioned in my comments below.

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
@-moz-document url("chrome://browser/content/browser.xul"),
               url("chrome://navigator/content/navigator.xul") {
    
    /* Speed Dial tab icon replacement (for use with Speed Dial addon) */
    
    tab[label$="Speed Dial"] .tab-icon-image {
        width: 0 !important;
        background: url("data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAMAAAAoLQ9TAAAAb1BMVEUAAAD///////////8hKTInLzkqMTs3P0o1PUg+RVAhKjMnLzk8RE5DS1ZCSVQqMTwuOUk1QFA2QFA+Slk+SlomMT4uOEUuOEY2P002QE4kLTgkLTkjLDcpMT0pMT4rND4rND8wOEMwOEQuND8uNUBtnZekAAAAJXRSTlMAU1Rmt7i5w8XFxsbGxsfJ0dLS1NTV1tbY2Nra29vb3Nzd3d/fO+9ljgAAAFRJREFUGFedzDcCgCAAQ9Eo9ooFK3bvf0YHGDIw+Ye3JcCP6veJCODuu4sAynmqCMATwieA/DxCAtjbZiOAdBwKwvGRrUtgsGkptcEWK5UYbDx39QFlEgf07+e6BgAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==") !important;
        padding-left: 16px !important;
    }
    
    /* Private tab icon replacement + text underline removed (for use with Private Tab addon) */
    
    .tabbrowser-tab[privateTab-isPrivate] {
        text-decoration: none !important;
    }
    
    .tabbrowser-tab[privateTab-isPrivate] .tab-icon-image,
    .tabbrowser-tab[privateTab-isPrivate] .tab-throbber,
    .tabbrowser-tab[privateTab-isPrivate][pinned] .tab-icon-image,
    .tabbrowser-tab[privateTab-isPrivate][pinned] .tab-throbber {
        width: 0 !important;
        background: url("data:image/png;base64,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") !important;
        padding-left: 16px !important;
        border-bottom: none !important;
    }


    /* Private tab bar background gradient override (for OSX, to match FxChrome theme, may want to be changed for other themes) */

    #main-window:not([browsingmode="private"]) {
    /* background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, hsl(0,0%,90%) 0%, hsl(0,0%,65%) 50px) !important; */
        background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, hsl(0,0%,83%) 0%, hsl(0,0%,65%) 50px) !important;
    }

    /* Private window tab bar background gradient (for OSX, may want to be changed for other OSes) */

    #main-window:not([browsingmode="private"])[privateTab-isPrivate] {
        background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #bfc4d9 0%, #8f99a8 50px) !important;
    }



}

RSS feeds icon back in addressbar
Adds the missing feeds icon back in the addressbar. Personally I made a couple position and background modifications for OSX and the FxChrome theme.

Narrower pinned tabs size

@namespace url(http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul);
 
.tab-throbber[pinned],
.tab-icon-image[pinned] {
  -moz-margin-start: 0px !important;
  -moz-margin-end: 0px !important;
}

General settings

Speed Dial

At the moment I'm using a theme called 'Fresh and Cool style' :rolleyes: :lol:. It can easily be added via the site with Stylish installed.

As for the default tile size settings I'm currently using:

Minimum width: 200px
Maximum width: 1200px
Width modifier: 80 (% of the available size)
Minimum height: 50px
Maximum height: 400px
Height modifier: 35 (margin in pixels)

Tab Mix Plus
Instructions on how to add Shift+click/Ctrl+click suppport for opening links. To close tabs with Shift+click go to the TMP preferences>Mouse>Shift+click and select 'Close tab' from the first dropdown.

That's it for now, I will follow up this post with some general impressions so as to not make this post even longer :jester:

laurenbacall

laurenbacall

In this post are my general impressions using Firefox, as well as the addons mentioned above.

Firefox is a good browser, and because it is quite customizable it certainly scores more points than Chrome. Browsing is smooth and responsive (although Opera can be perceptively quicker in many cases) and there has yet to be crash or hang.

Comparatively Opera Presto has more overall UI polish and predictability - that is, as Firefox has so many addons loaded it doesn't always behave as predictably UI-wise as Opera does natively. Things such as custom context menu orders may revert back, and other small quirks. These things aren't deal-breaking however.

I could see myself adapting to Firefox if the time comes where Opera is no longer compatible with enough sites, or slows down to an usuable point. Until then I'll be switching back and forth between them trying out new addons. All part of the tinking fun

That said read on for various points that are worth mentioning.

Firefox annoyances

- When a page loading is manually canceled (with Stop/Esc) partially loaded images - even if 90% loaded - will become blank again, appearing as if they haven't loaded at all. Contrary to Opera's behavior of displaying whatever has already loaded.

- Location bar (aka addressbar) is more visually cluttered and has two lines per entry. Pressing the down arrow to highlight suggestions sometimes highlights a lower-placed suggestion, which is confusing. Also seems to be no recently typed addresses drop-down (it's possible to use the ~ character to restrict to typed history only however).

- While a page is loading after a link has been clicked, but before it has refreshed the screen, often there will be another link I'll open in a background tab quickly from the currently displayed page before the new one has loaded. Firefox only sometimes successfully catches these attempts, even if there seems enough time to.

- No ability to open searches in new tabs from textboxes. Same for the addressbar. In Opera it would be Shift+Enter, etc.

Features still lacking

- Tab stacking.

- Full keyboard shortcut customization (eg: any key combination desired including mnemonic). Not being able to tie every aspect of the browser's settings to a shortcut, or create custom buttons is disappointing, and I regularly miss many of them I had set up in Opera (stylesheets, tab operations, etc).

- Full-featured custom searches. While Firefox does include the ability to add basic custom searches via bookmarks with keywords they aren't accessible via a text selection context menu (in Opera it would be 'Search With>'). Additionally JSON autosuggestion can't be manually added to custom searches.

- Ctrl+click to save images (Alt+Ctrl+click if also a link). Likely this is possible to add support for via a script/addon but I couldn't find anything in my searches.

- Decent RSS feed preview styling. Far too basic compared with Opera's own and it's mods. It may be possible to style using a userstyle, but none could be found.

- Spacial navigation, eg: being able to use Shift+arrow keys to visually navigate links on a page. Occasionally useful for long link lists, etc, but not essential.

- Various great Opera-only addons and userscripts. The Google single-key keyboard shortcuts un-hijacker is one such sorely missed incompatible userscript :c Opera has a good many quality addons which often are more effective than comparable addons on other browsers.

Improvements over Opera

- On demand tab loading. A useful optional feature that only loads open tabs when clicked.

- Tab Mix Plus (certain features). Allows more thoughtful opening of tabs in relation to one another, eg: open related tabs next to each other, etc. Various other popup options are also grouped in this addon's settings.

That's most of what I've noticed while using Firefox over the past week. Everyone's configuration will be different according to tastes, so it will interesting to hear about other recommendations, too

frenzie

frenzie

Originally posted by laurenbacall:

- When a page loading is manually canceled (with Stop/Esc) partially loaded images - even if 90% loaded - will become blank again, appearing as if they haven't loaded at all. Contrary to Opera's behavior of displaying whatever has already loaded.

I really dislike that behavior.

Originally posted by laurenbacall:

- On demand tab loading. A useful optional feature that only loads open tabs when clicked.

I prefer Load Tabs Progressively.

serious

serious

great list, I am currently playing around with firefox 25 (the ux builds) myself and found these two to be extremely useful (because they remove needless stupidity from the browser):
- ~~last tab close button -> allows to close the last tab instead of being stuck with it~~replaced with tabmixplus
- ff rocker for rocker gestures (which I use all the time)

~~now if I could just find some extension that will restore the session also if only one tab is open when closing fx ...~~
ah, seems tabmixplus can also do that ... thats one crazy addon...

artmil

artmil

I try to customize ff as much as possible without addons and now i'm messing with about:config

Originally posted by serious:

last tab close button -> allows to close the last tab instead of being stuck with it

"browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab" seams to do the same.
Changing
"general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMaxMS" to 150
and "general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMinMS" to 100 seems to improve scrolling with my touchpad. The scrolling feels more like in opera.

frenzie

frenzie

Originally posted by serious:

great list, I am currently playing around with firefox 25 (the ux builds) myself and found these two to be extremely useful (because they remove needless stupidity from the browser):
- ~~last tab close button -> allows to close the last tab instead of being stuck with it~~replaced with tabmixplus
- ff rocker for rocker gestures (which I use all the time)

~~now if I could just find some extension that will restore the session also if only one tab is open when closing fx ...~~
ah, seems tabmixplus can also do that ... thats one crazy addon...

Tab Mix Plus also replaces Ctrl-Tab for recently-used switching, and allows configuring a list-based switcher—something I was potentially planning to write myself as a fork. Unfortunately, the Tab Mix Plus list-based switcher doesn't work nicely with ColorfulTabs. Of course ColorfulTabs will have to go because its functionality is less essential, but I did like that extension.

In the past I used some tabs enhancing extension for Mozilla, which has now become an integrated part of SeaMonkey. Firefox really ought to integrate Tab Mix Plus by default.

My primary issue with Firefox consists of bookmarks. All-in-One Sidebar added support for dragging links and tabs to its bookmarks, but adding keywords (nicknames) is more of a chore, plus it doesn't support them on e.g. folders. My wife (a Fx user) suggests I use URL Alias instead for adding both nicknames and search engines—although somewhat ironically she occasionally uses Opera/Presto's "create search" as the easiest means of retrieving the necessary URL parameters.

Still, I suppose it can be made workable.

Now for what I haven't figured out:
- status switches/indicators. I installed something called Status-4-Evar to obtain a status bar, but I can't seem to find any switches for e.g. Javascript, cookies, referer [sic.], CSS and the like such as you can find in Opera. I do most of the switching by keyboard, using those checkboxes primarily as indicators. In any case, can you get something like that in Firefox?

Originally posted by artmil:

I try to customize ff as much as possible without addons and now i'm messing with about:config

Instead of Stylish as detailed by laurenbacall you could also edit e.g. userChrome.css. Personally I feel that Stylish and GreaseMonkey are required Fx add-ons.

findkfn

findkfn

Features still lacking

- Tab stacking.

Have you tried the tab utilities addon that was mentioned above ?
Works perfect.
Just enable "dragtostack" in the advanced settings list.

serious

serious

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Tab Mix Plus also replaces Ctrl-Tab for recently-used switching, and allows configuring a list-based switcher

TMP is one crazy extension ... took me like 15 minutes to go through all the settings ô_0

Originally posted by Frenzie:

but adding keywords (nicknames) is more of a chore, plus it doesn't support them on e.g. folders

jop, also one of those tings where I could not find something yet ... but I'll keep looking

frenzie

frenzie

Originally posted by serious:

TMP is one crazy extension ... took me like 15 minutes to go through all the settings ô_0

Yeah, the settings could be organized a little better… but at least it has them!

laurenbacall

laurenbacall

Originally posted by findkfn:

Features still lacking

- Tab stacking.

Have you tried the tab utilities addon that was mentioned above ?
Works perfect.
Just enable "dragtostack" in the advanced settings list.

Originally posted by zhnujm:

Originally posted by Makavcio:

^ and ^^
I've just spent a coffee break on trying to make FF work like Opera. I tried to install those Tab Utilities, but the newest version seems to be incompatible with the latest firefox and the one I downloaded, a little older version, just made all my tabs flicker and no content is displayed in any of them. Lovely.

Just use the newest 1.6pre5 from here, it works fine with the current firefox ( i use v25):
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/tab-utilities/versions/

Tried it out, seems interesting. BTW the 'advanced' setting I could only find via the about:config dialog not via the GUI. The addon is essentially a replacement for Tab Mix Plus.

When stacked the tab background changes to a strange green in my theme, but Stylish could probably fix that.

Strangely Tab Utilities seems to add an irremovable toolbar full of buttons to links of 'Total Commander', 'UltraCompare', 'FreeGate', etc. Bizarre. Can't say I'd want to continue using it based on this experience.

salahuddin1

salahuddin1

Wow, that is a great list. Those certainly are a lot of extensions. Did you run them all on Firefox? What is the memory usage like with so many extensions?

Also, is anyone using the Simple Mail extension? I was thinking of testing it out with Firefox, but according to the reviews, it seems like every so often the extension gets broken with a Firefox update and then the extension developer has to catch up with a new version.

I used to use unMHT a while back when I used Firefox (before Opera) and I found that some files didn't work/save properly. Perhaps these issues have been ironed out now, but just in case, I have been saving websites to PDF instead MHT. I personally use Foxit Reader as my primary PDF reader (faster, more functional and lighter than Adobe) and it installs a PDF printer, so you can just print a website to a PDF file. There is also PDFmyURL, which you can drag to your Bookmarks Toolbar.

laurenbacall

laurenbacall

Originally posted by Salahuddin1:

Wow, that is a great list. Those certainly are a lot of extensions. Did you run them all on Firefox? What is the memory usage like with so many extensions?

I used to use unMHT a while back when I used Firefox (before Opera) and I found that some files didn't work/save properly. Perhaps these issues have been ironed out now, but just in case, I have been saving websites to PDF instead MHT. I personally use Foxit Reader as my primary PDF reader (faster, more functional and lighter than Adobe) and it installs a PDF printer, so you can just print a website to a PDF file. There is also PDFmyURL[/URL" target="_blank">http://PDFmyURL.com]PDFmyURL[/URL], which you can drag to your Bookmarks Toolbar.

Yes, all in Firefox v25. The memory usage is about the same as Opera, even a little less sometimes. As for PDFs Mozilla introduced a custom Javascript renderer in Firefox, so atm I think I'll stick to that for one less addon ;). They really are pushing ahead in that area, recently releasing Shumway, a SWF Flash file renderer in Javascript, too.

Deleted User

Deleted User

Originally posted by laurenbacall:

Yes, all in Firefox v25. The memory usage is about the same as Opera, even a little less sometimes.

Which version of Opera?

laurenbacall

laurenbacall

Originally posted by ersi:

Which version of Opera?

Opera 12.15. Looking at the Activity Monitor Opera is currently using about 100MB less virtual and physical memory, but it depends. When I replied initially loading a bunch of the same tabs resulted in the slight edge to Firefox.

A few months ago Opera didn't handle Flash very well and would swell up memory-wise so I enabled the plugins on demand feature which helped greatly. After extended use Opera for me can end up using quite a lot of memory until restarted.

I'll keep an eye on usage over the next week.

Deleted User

Deleted User

Weird how programs behave differently in different systems. Sometimes a matter of configuration, sometimes a complete mystery.

findkfn

findkfn

Originally posted by laurenbacall:

Strangely Tab Utilities seems to add an irremovable toolbar full of buttons to links of 'Total Commander', 'UltraCompare', 'FreeGate', etc. Bizarre. Can't say I'd want to continue using it based on this experience.

And you are sure thats because of tab utilities ?
I have no such toolbar here.