I am running Vista Home Basic x64 and currently have Firefox 3.01 installed. I am intrigued by Opera 9.5 though, and I even quickly threw it on to give it a test drive.

First of all, and I know others will argue this, but I didn't think it was that much FASTER than Firefox, so I was a little disapointed there, though I did find it to be more stable. But I understand there are things you can do to make it BROWSE faster, like some add-ons or extensions. Is that true?

Everything else, from the short time I viewed it seemed ok. But but one thing that did bug me was the search box. It's so small!! Is there anyway to lengthen or stretch it out to a CUSTOM size?

That's allMy two cents:

FireFox has an addon called "FasterFox" which can speed up the application itself. DO NOT enable its caching utilities, its bad for servers.

Ultimately, you should JUDGE a browser by what it has to offer you, and how EASY it is for you to use. Speed shouldn't be youe first consideration.

I personally found that Internet Explorer 7 is faster than FireFox, but FireFox has features avaliable to me that are important: a good set of addons avaliable, spell check, better tabs, better quicklinks, advanced options that apply to me.Honestly I got back and forth between Firefox 3.0 and Opera 9.5

Both offer me things that I like and both browsers are extremely easy to use. I also use Opera mini on my Motorola Q9c.