Last week, I posted the article about browser speed comparisons. Opera 7 used to have a slow start up time, but amazingly the article reported that Opera 8 are so fast that I am curious to try it. I downloaded Opera 8.0 beta 1 (now at Beta 2, but I have not downloaded it yet), installed it, was amazed by its speed now. Tried it for few days now, customized it to my liking, and now I’m back to Opera. Firefox is still installed on my machine, but I have not used it for a few days now.
Don’t get me wrong, Opera and Firefox has its own merit, but for me, I still prefer Opera for its customize-ability and speed. All extensions that I installed in Firefox, and which I need, I can find a similar match in Opera, so I didn’t feel like losing anything now that I’ve switched back from Firefox to my good ol’ browser Opera 
As you can see from above screenshot, I can customize Opera until so minimal that I don’t need the normal File-Edit-View menu anymore. I just collapse it down to a dropdown button, thus giving me more space to view websites. Of course, I don’t really need that Back-Forward-Reload button as I can do everything by mouse-gestures, but I put it there, in case someone else is using my browser and they need those buttons
