It looks like at least some of the Firefox font issues are fixed in Ubuntu 8.10. The fonts are comparable in size to Opera now, but Opera's fonts still look slightly better. They also seem to have fixed the "use system proxy settings" so that it actually works, which is neat. The thing is, Opera does have a lot of nice features that I do like about it, like the fact that it groups popups in a per-tab basis, and you can configure things like popup blocking and whatnot on a per site basis. If it wasn't for the fact that it seems to have weird issues with flash performance (today I was watching Zero Punctuation, and the audio kept on going fine, but the video would stop and then run really fast and then stop and then run really fast.), and I have had flash actually lock up the browser, so that only one tab locking up thing must have been a fluke. It's really too bad that I actually want to use web content that needs flash, since my life would be so much easier without that plugin. Anyways, I'm contemplating switching back to Firefox, for reasons that are completely not even remotely the fault of Opera. We'll see where this goes.
I just had flash cause Opera to have a conniption fit. And you know
what? The only thing that crashed was that one tab. The entire rest of
the browser went on working just fine.
they sure have injected a lot of awesome into it in the meantime. (And try using ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab in Opera sometime. It sure
seems like Opera has beaten Google to the punch with the whole "you've
got some of your OS in my browser" thing)