I have been running the latest Firefox release, 3.01 for the past few weeks and I have finally come to the conclusion that it's still not fast enough for me to use as my default browser.

I have tried doing a few tweaks, which have sped things up some, but I'm still not impressed with it's overall loading of pages and images. So now, after reading about how fast Opera is, I think I'm going to at least try it out.

One of things that concerns me though, is that I currently know nothing about add-ons or plugins or whatever you might call them for Opera. My main concern at this point is finding some kind of utility that will sync my Opera favorites with my Internet Explorer favorites automatically. In Firefox they had a neat little utility called PlainOldFavorites, and basically what it did was put a Favorites menu on the top toolbar, next to Tools and Help etc.

The neat thing about this was that I could add a favorite under it in Firefox and that favorite would then also show up in Internet Explorer Favorites. There was no need to add a favorite or a bookmark to Firefox, then open up IE and have to add the same favorite there. PlainOldFavorites did it automatically for you.

So I wanted to know, is there something similar for Opera? I also don't know much about the bookmarking system for Opera. Is there something built into that, that will do the same thing?

There were just a few other plugin items that concerned me while I have been thinking about this switch. I enjoy using StumbleUpon in Firefox, but they make no toolbar for Opera. I did however find an alternative, so I am covered there. This is what I guess I will be using:

Opera Stumbler: A StumbleUpon Toolbar For Opera

I was also hoping to find a Google toolbar for Opera, but after much searching, I found out there is nothing available for Opera yet. But apparently I understand that you can customize Opera's search for Google. Correct me if I am wrong about that.

Finally, I think I have also found some nice ad blockers for Opera. Here's some links for those:

Opera Browser Wiki :: Blocking Adverts In Opera
Opera Browser Wiki :: Opera Adblock

So I think that covers all I need for now to get me started. Like I mentioned though, my main concern is finding a real nice favorite or bookmark syncing utility that hopefully will work as good as PLainOldFavorites does in Firefox.

I look forward to your comments.

Opera 9.60 is best desktop browser. I have been using it for last 2 years. Really fast, simple. And 9 speeddial shortcut on homepage makes it even better for quick access to your favourite sites. You can select your colour theme and feeds are more convenient than other browsers.