It was the speed that sold me on Opera. I have dial-up and Opera would render pages faster and also allow me to start scrolling on a partially loaded page (like at a video game site) much sooner than FF would. I found it interesting to read that the faster rendering speed is still noticeable with broadband. One thing I would like to see Opera incorporate is the “blendable” toolbar items and Livebookmarks that FF has. You might want to check the “notes” feature in the side panel, it’s very handy for saving short pieces of webpages (in text format) when you’re researching something. Also, Opera’s menus are easy to customize. I customized the right-click mouse menu so I could access every toolbar function from the mouse menu while browsing in fullscreen.

Okay first of all, an introduction (A bit unnecessary, but I’ve never commented here and it does have some bearing on my comment).
My given name is not Keiki, I just today decided to use the word as a pseudonym after reading an article which used it (According to the article keiki is a Hawaiian word for children).
I triple-boot Windows XP SP2, Ubuntu 7.10, and a custom linux distro me and some friends are working on.
I’ve been browsing with Firefox for a couple of years now, though I occasionally switch to Opera for a while, usually whenever I hear about a feature I didn’t know about previously or when I read an article that once again points out Opera’s good points.

Moving on to my actual comment, (Or response).
You mention testing the download speeds of the three browsers, Firefox wins this test, and while I love my Firefox I have to point out that Opera, if tuned for downloading can come close to matching Firefox’s results.
Site compatibility is a problem often cited in reviews of Opera, and while it is true that Firefox and IE are generally more widely compatible, many of the incompatibilities with Opera can be solved through UserJS and some messing with your configuration.
Those two things aside, good review. Obviously not intended to be indepth, but gives a good idea of Opera’s pros and cons.

Sincerely,
Keiki
Email me at: aidanmascarenhas@_____.com (Replace the underscores with google’s email service, this is to prevent bots from finding my email and spamming me )
(P.S, I know this is an old article and this comment likely won’t be read, but incase anyone does read it. I’d like to know what if any formatting you can use it comments, eg. HTML, BBCode etc.)

Hi Keiki,
I read your comments. Thanks for stopping by.
Regards, Ron

PS FWIW
Each comment area in any forum, blog and so forth usually has the ability for the mod to control comments & formatting.