And you have an Opera icon as your avatar. What's the [bleep]ing point. Let's put it this way: You're going to trust sources in which I don't know every aspect of the environment in which these benchmarks are tested on, as well as not knowing the sources are biased. Opera vs Firefox shouldn't be about the difference in milliseconds between the startup time. Hell, on my computer Firefox beats Opera.
Opera:
user 0m0.576s
sys 0m0.131s
Firefox:
user 0m0.018s
sys 0m0.009s
But in the end, do I really care? No. I've also taken several 'rendering' tests, showing that Opera was slightly faster to render than Firefox. There are several reasons for this, including the delay that Firefox takes to start rendering the page, for slower users. But in the end, do I really care? No. I use, and advocate the use of Firefox over Opera. Because, Firefox is open source. I've recently had a quirk with Mozilla vs Community development crap, and not allowing redistribution of custom builds of Firefox under Mozilla image/name branding. Though Firefox isn't my favorite browser, it's a hell of a lot better to me than a closed-source browser with support for one architecture. In all honestly, most of the Opera > Firefox debate is based on speed, which at the low times both Firefox and Opera run at, is irrelevant.