Friday, January 13, 2006
I've been using Opera as my primary browser at work for a couple of months now. I've really grown to like it. The key features for me are performance, stability, and session persistence. I am a massive, massive abuser of tabs, on the order of dozens open in a single window, with half a dozen windows open at once. The only thing that keeps me from opening more is that even Opera starts to crawl at this level, but it's still better than Firefox. Secondly... Opera has crashed maybe 3 times on me. Firefox would crash on me on average once a day. That was especially annoying because Firefox does not save your tab session. Opera does, which makes it easy to restart the application to flush out memory leaks (which both Opera and Firefox have), and also to restart in the rare case of a crash (would work for system crashes and power problems too, of course). I still haven't gotten completely used to Opera, and some things still annoy me, like how it switches you to the last used tab when closing a tab rather than the adjacent one like Firefox. Opera also doesn't have nearly as many extensions as Firefox either. Even so, I find the benefits greatly outweigh those inconveniences now that Opera is free. Give it a shot. You may like it. Ironically, the performance and stability issues are much less of a concern for me now that I am getting on the del.icio.us and RSS reader bandwagons. Still, better is better, right?