Then I realized that Opera’s dev tools don’t include a screen ruler, a tool I use all the time through Chrome’s Pendule extension.  No problem, I thought – Opera has its own extensions, called “widgets.” Except, they don’t seem to work – I found a screen ruler widget in less than a minute, but it refused to properly install, and once it was done I still couldn’t actually run it.

Annoyed, I went on to find further annoyances. Amazon.com doesn’t allow Opera to use the “Look Inside” feature. Opera’s aggressive pop-up blocking led to sites that rely heavily on pop-ups becoming unusable, even when pop-up blocking was turned off. Some sites refuse to serve content to Opera at all, putting up a message that only Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox are supported. Opera does feature a handy user-agent switcher to trick these sites into thinking it’s Firefox, but that actually leads to further problems. Google, for example, actually does the right thing when it comes to Opera support, but GMail became a scrambled mess with my user-agent string set to Firefox.

So, while the original browser wars are well behind us, and while standards-based development has easily become the norm, we’re not out of the woods yet. The new battleground is the established trio of renderers – Trident, Gecko, and WebKit – vs. everyone else. While these three represent the vast majority of browsers in the world, things were not always this way, and site developers would do well to code to the standards and not to the popular rendering engines of the day. If your site really does have some advanced features, test for browser capabilities, not for the specific browser in use. That way, you’ll avoid what is surely the most embarrassing gaffe I’ve come across while using Opera – disney.com doesn’t recognize Opera, and so it assumes that you’re using an iPhone!

[If you're wondering what browser I actually use after all that ranting, the answer is Opera. I've really come to like it, and when an individual site doesn't work right, it's fast and easy to fire up Chrome, or even Firefox for those truly annoying sites. Don't even get me started on government sites that only open in Internet Explorer.]

But Firefox has always had its issues. The great Firefox memory hole has consistently shrunk with each new release, but it still exists, bringing the browser to a grinding halt with disturbing regularity. Page rendering speeds have improved over the years, but they haven’t necessarily kept pace with the increasing complexity of application-weight websites.

I want a browser that gets out of my way. Pages should load quickly and render perfectly, there shouldn’t be any delays switching between tabs, and the browser should have useful tools for analyzing and inspecting site source code – all while remaining stable and using a minimum of operating system resources.

So, lately I’ve been doing all of my browsing (and development) with Google Chrome. I started using Chrome last year on Windows out of sheer curiosity, but quickly dropped it and returned to Firefox. But Chrome, too, has been growing and evolving, along with the WebKit engine that it runs on. WebKit has the best CSS3 support of any browser, letting me test out all the newest techniques without waiting for Firefox to add support. Chrome is now quite solid, even in its developer releases, and incredibly fast. And while there are times that I miss the Firebug extension for Firefox, WebKit’s “Inspect Element” pane has evolved into a quite capable replacement for my purposes, especially when combined with new Chrome extensions like Pendule.

Am I done with Firefox? Certainly not. Firefox is the world’s second most popular browser, and for good reason; Firefox dramatically raised the bar for what users could expect from a web browser, and it continues to improve through regular releases year after year. It is still the browser that I would recommend to anyone for general use, and I will continue to test every site I create in Firefox (along with Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer). When using Chrome, I miss the ability to search Google, Wikipedia, and more from a tiny search box in the upper right (Update: I just needed to “Edit Search Engines“), and Firefox’s add-ons feel a lot more robust than Chrome’s extensions.

But at this time, for my own use, Chrome has supplanted Firefox.

(P.S. – I’m still looking forward to the impending Firefox 3.6. I may be switching back if I’m suitably impressed. It’s so wonderful to live in a time where we have real competition between browser makers!)

Image from Google Blogoscoped