Last post from Firefox?

Well, I might be crossing over to the Dark Side. Or perhaps, back to the Dark Side. Still staying with Linux, you understand, because the ability to watch Windows viruses bounce off the Teflon of UNIX--jeering all the while--is just waaaaay too much fun. Since I pretty much have to maintain a Windows computer for cross-platform testing anyway, it's just as easy to throw iTunes there for the weekly podcast synchronization.

But I have to say that I'm rather impressed with Opera 10's ability to play well with both the open- and close-source teams. Normally, I prefer to install software from the Ubuntu command-line because it's so much cleaner than downloading packages and running the included installer. Unfortunately, in this case, the "help" on the Ubuntu site was completely worthless. But, because I actually trust Opera's programmers to be competent, I rolled the bones with the download. Guess what? It hooked straight into the installer and I was up and running in minutes.

Opera was my browser of choice for several years: Even then, when you had to pay for a banner-ad-free version, it was totally worth it. Heck, Opera offered tabbed browsing in 2000, if not before. (I remember Internet Explorer 6 coming out and being absolutely gob-smacked flabbergasted that they still hadn't gotten the memo about tabs--like people were somehow grateful to chew up the taskbar with a multiplicity of IE tabs for the privilege of looking at more than one web page at a time.) Then, too, there was a certain contrarian satisfaction to walking The Third Way when the entire Web seemed to be living in a Cold War mindset dominated by the Netscape and IE superpowers. (Seriously, you'd visit a website that was doing all the browser detection b/c IE JavaScript and Netscape JavaScript were like apples-and-kumquats, and some websites would kind of freak out. It'd be like walking into the middle of a rumble between "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" partisans wearing a "Firefly" t-shirt...)

But here's what's sealed the deal for me. Several minutes ago, I tried tracking a package on FedEx's website. Firefox's Flash plug-in freaked out, so I had to use an alternate FedEx page. So, for giggles, I checked it out in Opera. Not a problem. Near-giddy with that outcome, I bopped over to java.sun.com to check out applets. And WAAH-HOO! No blank grey square when an applet was supposed to be. Why didn't I think of this when I was taking that Java Games Programming class at WTC this spring? [insert forehead smack]

Please understand that the point of this post is actually not to bash Firefox, which has any number of things to recommend it. Nor is it actually to laud a for-profit company (which is now apparently paying the bills by going upscale with "enterprise" software offerings, and more power to them). But an organization that can straddle the two worlds of open and closed source is definitely something to cheer on. And to make it so painless for someone who is still such a big-time poser when it comes to *nix operating systems? Wow. Just freakin' Wow. After Googling "opera browser Linux," the only thing I had to think about was whether or not my version of Ubuntu was Gutsy Gibbon or something more recent. After that, I was auto-magically directed to a download for the AMD-64 architecture, and it was off to the proverbial races.

Yes, it's awesome to be able to pull things apart and fix them--I was born in the hospital where my Dad worked in maintenance, a job he held until he retired, so it's sort of in my upbringing, if not actual DNA.

Yet even as a strong advocate of having an open source option, somethings I'm not interested in tweaking. The browser is one of those things. Why? Because I write a lot of stuff for the browser. Pulling it apart to make it work better with my software would be rather silly, as I can't expect the rest of the world to install my customized version. Not to mention that I'd then have to maintain my flavor of the browser as well as the software running inside it. You might be able to do that sort of thing inside a large corporations whose paranoia about cooties (in this case from unclean outside software) rivals that of Howard Hughes. Not bloody likely that I'll be nailing down a contract like that anytime soon. And by "soon," I mean "before I retire."

So, again, kudos to Opera for providing a polished product that doesn't treat an unfashionable (i.e. non-Windows/non-Mac) platform on an unfashionable set of hardware (i.e. 64-bit AMD) like a third-class citizen. Which makes me almost wish that they were still charging for the product, because I'd be more than happy to throw a few Jacksons at them for that.