Graduating nicely from the Netscape browsers (especially SillyDog’s streamlined versions), I’ve used Firefox ever since its introduction as Firebird. I’m finding that lots of folks don’t even know Firefox is simply a repackaged/evolved form of Netscape which, I think, was the original browser (Netscape Navigator via Mosaic?).

For my purposes — without a tabbed version of IE available in the workplace, these more recent ‘portable’ versions of Firefox have made it possible for me to avoid IE at work altogether. (Just copy the whole Firefox Portable folder from your USB into C:\, that is, the root directory). They also make it possible to synchronize bookmarks between home and work by using the Xmarks extension, regardless which version of Firefox you use at home. And in my opinion the current Portable Firefox 3.5 is especially nice with the Metal Lion theme (skin).

For the moment I’m using the Portable Opera 10.00 Beta, mainly to explore the functionality of Opera compared to Firefox. So far I like certain Opera features quite a bit. One of them is the Transfer tab. Another is the ease of testing/installing/changing skins. And another is the extent to which components of the skin can be separately configured or even customized. I expect there’ll be a number of things that’ll make Opera the browser of choice for certain kinds of ‘werfing’.

I’m surprised however to find that so few skins have been developed for the Opera browser, though the Ibis-1 is pretty nice. I haven’t made it to Widgets yet but, given how few skins there are, I doubt development for Opera comes anywhere close to what’s available for Firefox in the form of extensibility. Nonetheless, I had no problem using the recommended URL for accessing my Gmail account.

Thanks also, ben, for recommending the Webmail add-on for Firefox.

Say, can anyone make a case for the Presto engine compared to Mozilla’s Gecko?

Nice idea – however, gmail is NOT working in Opera 10 – and not checking the browser doesn’t help matters. It’s just easier to open gmail with Firefox, or Seamonkey, or Midori, any browser not using the Presto engine.

Opera is running nicely, but it’s experiencing rather a few important compatibility issues right now. I’m using ‘webmail’ add-on in Firefox – so that’s taken over as my ’startup’ browser – checks mail for 6 accounts and if I click my icon it opens in a new window keeping mail sessions nicely separate.

and also check this
http://code.google.com/p/gmail2-for-opera/downloads/list?can=1&q=&colspec=Filename+Summary+Uploaded+Size+DownloadCount

;)

although it does load in the basic HTML view but not in standard view