Opera vs Firefox and Thunderbird
Why
A frequent dig by Firefox fans at Opera is that Opera is "bloated".
Usually what is meant by that is that the default user interface is more
complicated relative to Firefox. In the past this was true, but the latest
version of Opera is much more streamlined in that area, so I thought it worthy
of a test.
"Bloat" could also refer to higher resource requirements (memory,
CPU, hard drive), given that Opera
has so many more features built-in compared to Firefox. So I wanted to
investigate that, too.
Test Environment
Test machine was a VMware 4.5.2 virtual machine running a clean installation
of Windows 2000 (SP3) in 192MB of memory and video set to 1024×768 and
32-bit colour. Host machine is a 1GHz Athlon, 512MB memory, nVidia GeForce 4
440MX video card, Windows 2000 SP3. Tests were conducted on 20th
April 2005.
Browser Comparison
| Opera 8.0 | Firefox 1.0.3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Download | 3.59MB | 4.60MB |
| Installed space (does not include user profiles) | 5.09MB | 13.6MB |
| User Interface | 10 buttons | 8 buttons |
| 2 fields | 2 fields | |
| 6 top-level menu items | 7 top-level menu items | |
| 48 second-level menu items | 52 second level menu items | |
| Page Display Area (res:1024×768, scrollbar included) | 1018×608 (79%)1 | 1024×613 (80%)2 |
| Startup Memory Requirements | 14MB | 17MB |
| Startup CPU Time | 7sec | 6sec |
| Load 20 Sites3 | 70MB | 66MB |
| CPU Time to Load 20 Sites4 | 1:30 | 0:54 |
| Close 20 Pages | 49MB | 47MB |
| Minimise, wait | 9MB | 3MB |
| Restore, wait | 11MB | 8MB |
| JavaScript Benchmark5 | 14.82 | 29.02 |
- The most space efficient Opera ads were selected - the Google relevant text
ads. The graphical ads would reduce the available space by 30 pixels of vertical
space (to 1018×576 (75%)) and reveal the main toolbar, adding 9 buttons.
Registration of Opera removes the ads, increasing available page display space
to 1018×636 (82%). - By default, Firefox does not show the tab bar. That would add one extra
button, and subtract 29 pixels of vertical space (to 1024×584 (76%)). - ABC News,
BBC News,
Yahoo News,
Amazon,
Arstechnica,
Barnes and Noble,
CBC Canada,
Sports Illustrated,
Expedia,
The Motley Fool,
Fox Sports,
FreeBSD,
How Stuff Works,
LawMeme,
New York Post,
New York Stock Exchange,
New York Times,
National Post,
Slashdot,
ebay (all those saved as an Opera
bookmarks file: bookmarks.adr) - Approximate times. 1536/256kbps ADSL link. The above 20 sites were bookmarked
into a folder and the "open all folder items" option selected. The
start page for each browser was set to "about:blank", Java was
disabled, popups blocked, caches were cleared. The Windows Task Manager was
running "always on top". Of note was that after loading all the
pages, Opera averaged a 30% CPU load and Firefox about 10%, presumably to
handle image animation, background JavaScript, etc. - Each browser was tested five times, the best and worst results discarded,
the average (arithmetic mean) of the remaining three tests is the final
result. Popup blocking was disabled. The raw results were: Opera (13.64,
14.80, 14.86, 14.97, 14.80), Firefox (29.44, 26.78, 28.44, 29.39, 29.22).
Email Client Comparison
To do this, I exported my "live" Opera mail Received folder (3504
messages) into a single 54.1MB MBS file. These messages were then each imported
into a fresh install of Opera and Thunderbird. Since Thunderbird doesn't support
importing plain MBOX files, I followed
these
instructions to copy the MBOX file directly into a new folder file.
| Opera 8.0 | Thunderbird 1.0.2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Download | 3.59MB | 5.75MB |
| Installed space (does not include user profiles) | 5.09MB | 18.5MB |
| Installed space (user profiles only, after import) | 66.1MB | 56.7MB |
| User Interface | 13 buttons1 | 10 buttons |
| 1 field | 2 fields | |
| 7 top-level menu items | 7 top-level menu items | |
| 56 second-level menu items | 67 second level menu items | |
| Startup Memory Requirements2 | 16MB | 18MB |
| Startup CPU Time | 5sec3 | 5sec |
| Minimise, wait | 1MB | 2MB |
| Restore, wait | 3MB | 7MB |
- Includes the "New page" and "Closed page" buttons, which
are really only applicable to web browsing, not doing emails. - Includes selecting the "Received" folder in Opera, and the
"Imported" folder in Thunderbird. - Opera's time here is much quicker than the browser time because a blank page
was selected as the starting page, whereas the browser time includes loading and
rendering the default startup web page. If Opera was being used only as a mail
client (like Thunderbird is only a mail client), then loading a web page doesn't
seem likely.
Combined Browser+Email
| Opera 8.0 | Firefox 1.0.3 + Thunderbird 1.0.2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Download | 3.59MB | 10.35MB |
| Installed space (does not include user profiles) | 5.09MB | 32.1MB |
| Installed space (user profiles only, after import) | 66.1MB | 56.7MB |
| User Interface | 20 buttons | 18 buttons |
| 3 fields | 4 fields | |
| 7 top-level menu items | 14 top-level menu items | |
| 56 second-level menu items | 119 second level menu items | |
| Startup Memory Requirements | 16MB1 | 33MB |
| Startup CPU Time | 7sec | 7sec |
- Includes the startup page, and opening a Mail window to view the Received
folder.
Summary
Download and Storage Requirements
Opera is a smaller download, definitely still important for the many people
still on dialup. Particularly when browsers are regularly updated.
Once installed, Opera uses 9MB less space than Firefox. If all you consider
is the size of your hard drive, that doesn't sound like much, however, many
people install a browser onto their USB thumb drive (~128MB) or onto a mini-CD
(~50MB). In those situations, every MB counts, and Opera delivers.
For email storage, Opera requires about 15% more space than Thunderbird,
presumably for the indexing used for the lightning-fast text searches.
Memory Requirements
Opera requires a little more memory than that required by Firefox to surf
the 'net. Firefox releases much more when minimised, which has resulted in some
complaints that Firefox takes too long, sometimes over a minute, to "wake
up" when restored. Restoration seems to be a mixed bag with a variety of
results.
CPU Requirements
Firefox was much faster than Opera when loading the 20 test sites. This was
the only significant difference between this and my earlier tests last year. In
those tests Firefox was similar to Opera.
Since this was such a big change, I looked a little closer using Ethereal:
| Item | Opera | Firefox |
|---|---|---|
| Between first and last packet | 131.714 sec | 66.090 sec |
| Packets | 16341 | 11017 |
| Avg. packets/sec | 124.064 | 166.698 |
| Avg. packet size | 395.872 bytes | 575.514 bytes |
| Bytes | 6468941 | 6340439 |
| Avg. bytes/sec | 49113.598 | 95936.788 |
| Avg. Mbit/sec | 0.393 | 0.767 |
| Throughput (black=Opera, red=Firefox) |  | |
It looks like Firefox is able to better utilize the available bandwidth, with
a fairly constant fast transfer, while Opera was not only less consistent, but
slower as well.
Update: I've been contacted by some other Opera users who have been unable
to replicate my thoughput issues. Their experiences were that Opera and Firefox
were basically the same. I'm investigating. Possibilities are that my internet
connection is through a Linux box acting as a firewall and that I'm using a
virtual machine and that those could be doing strange things. However, I would
have thought that those things would influence Opera and Firefox equally.
Another issue that clouds the speed issue is the fact that many web sites do
not compress their data for Opera, but do for IE and Firefox, in spite of the
fact that Opera is just as capable of handling it. Google, Amazon and Yahoo are
three popular sites that have this issue (see also this
Opera Forums
thread). It's unlikely to be deliberate, more a white-list of browsers that
support compression, as opposed to a black-list of browsers that don't. However,
the end result is that due to the lack of compression, Opera is forced to
download a lot more data compared to IE and Firefox, which naturally enough,
makes things slower.
User Interface
Opera Software have significantly improved the default user interface from
their previous versions. The starting state of both browsers is now comparable.
In terms of display area, Firefox squeezes in a few extra pixels.
Conclusion
Opera does not display any evidence of "bloat" of any sort. Apart
from the throughput issues (which may be just my setup), it appears to be
smaller, lighter, and as fast (if not faster) in all respects.
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