Chosing a web browser

[Tellos Athenaios]

I use Opera myself, in preference to Firefox. Reasons why you might choose Opera:

• Speeddial. Bookmarks but *much* better; as the name implies you get “hotkeys” for the first 9 items in speeddial.
• Password management that I can make heads and tails of. Firefox has it, too, except that the part where automatic log in is supposed to come into play doesn't work as nicely. (Ctrl + Enter in Opera if you've selected the relevant form/textbox.) Actually Opera's entire personal details -> automatic filling in of forms works pretty smoothly.
• Fine grained control over things like cookies (you can set preferences on a website-by-website basis).
• Search using keywords. For instance typing “g hello world” in the address bar is a google search; “w hello world” a wikipedia search and so on.
• Download manager that can resume broken downloads, re-download etc..
• Built in mail client for IMAP/POP3 type mail; built in IRC client.
• Built in mechanism to block whatever content/site you don't want to see.
• 3rd party extensions like the kill button to zap adverts if you don't want to use the built in blocking mechanism. http://operawiki.info/PowerButtons
• Support for SVG (scalable graphics), MathML (mathematics markup language, useful if you are doing/reading Math a lot), (experimental) HTML 5, (experimental) CSS 3.
• It is fast, and I find its “Turbo” feature quite useful (compressed websites with reduced image quality and plugins disabled [you have to manually click a lego brick for each plugin item you do want to play] when I'm on a slower network.
• Standards compliant; which is mainly useful to know. Passes Acid3 test with 100% score; i.e. pixel perfect rendering.