Summer of 2009. A friend is over at my apartment. It must've been right after Opera 10 came out, because I was downloading the new version. I start the installer, my friend happens to be watching, and it finishes installing about 1.5 seconds later. The rendering of the first few pages I visit is also blazing-fast. "Wow, that's incredible! I'm going to install Opera as soon as I get home," my friend says. Those were good days. Quite a few of my friends have used Opera as a main browser over the years, and a few others have used it as a secondary browser. But 2009 was a great time for Opera. I'll agree that in terms of browser functionality, the innovation has been a lot slower since then. Back in 2009, Opera had so many features that other browsers didn't have. Now, a lot of browsers have caught up a lot of the ground. There are still power-user features that are uniquely Opera (12), but for awhile there, Opera had a monopoly on big-ticket features like Speed Dial and Link, too.
Whether Opera 10 is my favorite version, I don't know. Assuming it could render like Opera 12 and had today's Dragonfly, I probably wouldn't miss much from 12 (and having Opera Unite back would be nice). But I don't use 10.x today. I still have 11.x for one site I visit that works better with 11 than 12. But I haven't used 10.x or earlier other than for nostalgia for a long time.
I didn't use Dragonfly much until 2013, so I can't say how it compares to 2009. But I do like it as it is now. If I had to choose just one web debugger, I'd probably have to go with Dragonfly. It's unfortunate that it probably won't receive any more significant updates. But at least for now I can keep using Dragonfly and know that the web applications I build will work with Opera 12.
Funny that you should mention Firefox, my secondary browser. I just updated my Firefox from 3.6 to 24 ESR a month or so ago. It's not as bad as I expected. I guess they got some of the 4.0 issues sorted out. Granted, I'm not a Firefox power user, so I may not be missing as much as others (and the Find issue that the blog author finds so annoying is how it works in Opera, so that won't bother me even if I do upgrade to 27 or whatever the latest version is). But 3.6 was the high point for Firefox to me. Back then, everyone was so enthusiastic about Firefox, and a new Firefox release was a big deal. Then 4.0 came out, and, while it was a big deal, it had some issues at release. Ever since then it's been piecemeal releases, and while there are still plenty of Firefox users, it's hard to get excited about a "major" release with 3 features, of which you're likely to care about 1 at most. I miss the days when a new browser version meant real feature changes. Only Microsoft is any good at that anymore. Even Opera doesn't do significant releases these days.
I tried Otter Browser today. I managed to make it crash in less than a minute without even trying to . Guess it really is an alpha. I'll give it a few months and try again; fortunately Opera 12 is still doing pretty well on all the sites I frequent.
I had to register here after seeing Vista/7 referred to as Windows 6.x. I thought I was the only one who did that! Found my way here via My Opera, where I was a rare poster.
I pretty much agree with what j7n's suggested. I still don't know why Microsoft makes hiding file extensions the default. That's always one of the first things I change when installing Windows.
I'm also an XP user, and haven't made any plans to switch at this time, although I may do so. But even if Microsoft does discontinue support in April (and it wouldn't surprise me if they extend it - they extended 98's support in 2004 when it had similar marketshare to what XP does now), I don't expect to suddenly go online on April 9th and get deluged with malware. For one, because things don't change that quickly. I've used Windows without patching it for several months at a time without issue, and without always having anti-virus or a software firewall running, and it hasn't led to anything nefarious. I also used Firefox 3.6 as a secondary browser (to Opera, of course) until just a few months ago, with no ill effects despite not having any security updates for a few years. I did get infected with something a few years before 3.6 was discontinued - some sort of pop-up spam item - and the anti-virus was running, and it didn't even detect it. IIRC, I'd been browsing on shadier sites than usual, and perhaps I accidentally clicked an ad. But the point being, how you use the computer is much more important than always having a full security software suite and the latest updates. If you know what kind of stuff is generally shady and prone to viruses/worms/etc., and avoid it, you'll get very few viruses. If you trust everything on the Internet, click on all sorts of sleazy ads, go to sites that promise things that are too good to be true, and download files from shady sites, you can have all the updates and the best security software in the world and you'll still get overrun. Windows 6.x changes like ASLR may reduce the damage, but the user's actions are still going to be the biggest factor.
Myself, if Microsoft does discontinue XP support in April, I'll probably keep using it for awhile. Eventually, I may switch to 7, since there are a slowly-increasing number of programs that require Windows 6.x, and 7 doesn't suck nearly as much as Vista did in 2007 when I last used it instead of XP as a main OS. Or I may switch to Linux, but if I do that, I'll still have to keep XP around, since I have a lot of Windows software. But if you aren't prone to getting viruses now, I don't think you need to panic about switching to something else before April.
. Guess it really is an alpha. I'll give it a few months and try again; fortunately Opera 12 is still doing pretty well on all the sites I frequent.