So for a big rivalry comes Firefox 3 vs Opera 9.5, both of which offer performance and functionality increases over the previous versions, and personally, are both dramatically different from their previous versions.

You can tell Opera is focused on merging your devices using it’s own platform with it’s Opera Link, which will allow you to synchronize your bookmarks across the Opera 9.5 desktop version and Opera 4.1 Mini(the one of two available mobile versions).  I see Mozilla as sinking behind with the seemingly low interest in Mozilla Weave.

Both browsers have had a design overhaul and I have to say I favor Opera’s interface over Firefox’s.   The Firefox interface is very old style text menu driven still, despite further attempts at getting away from this.  Opera has a very nice and sleek interface and is moving more towards the image/icon based navigation system.

Finally, speed.  Opera seems to be a decent bit faster (and yes I do have pipelining enabled with a moderate amount of tubes) and seems to run applications very well, despite not being one of the big contenders.

Despite all of this, I don’t think I’ll be quick to change.  The shortcoming of Opera is it has fewer addons (called Widgets in Opera) and those that exist seem to have less functionality, plus they seem to be part of their own system rather than integrated with the browser itself like Firefox.

I’ll probably use the two in tandem with one another, as I like them both quite a bit.  Plus the ability to sync my bookmarks with Opera 4.1 on my Tilt is pretty cool.  We’ll see how things go when Firefox Mobile becomes available.

Verdict: Use ‘um both

So I made the switch to Firefox 3.  Well, not totally.  I “figured out” how to run Firefox 3 alongside Firefox 2, mostly for testing purposes.

Firefox 3 seems to be a nice improvement in certain areas.  I’m not entirely convinced yet though, especially since I found an Oklahoma State University theme that only works with Firefox 2 (already tried changing the version number in the theme and reloading it, no rice).

Either way though, I may switch between the two as they both have their specialties.  However, I’m switching to Mozilla Weave for cookie sync and using Foxmarks for bookmarks since Google Browser Sync is being discontinued….rats