in "lesser" machines (eg. 233Mhz pentium) you will notice that opera is much faster, in more modern machines I don't know... I think that the 2G+ machines can chew more than I can feed...

Opera wasn't an option for me since it's paid, the mozilla birds are work in progress, with features coming and going (but each time more stable)... I'm just waiting for the birds becoming more mature to change again... until then Netscape is ok.

I work for a company that has suffered a lot during the dot bomb period, so almost always I must discard paid options if a free alternative is available.