The world’s best web browser – imho – is now ad-free!
Get Opera!
Opera advantages: fastest browser on earth, perfect tabbed browsing implementation, rss reader, email client, closed pages history, nearly the complete appearence can be customized! (just a small selection)
Addendum (2005-09-22 23:33): 1 Mio. downloads (german) in just 2 days!
previously from Kunming / Hong Kong now live from Germany
yes yes it might be a fast and neat browser – but here are some
opera disadvantages: (highly subjective of course)
still not open source, thus tight to inhouse-development – which is generally not so bad, but i like the thought of having the source-code for the software i browse around the www
not nearly as customizeable as other browser(s), partly due to the binary-distribution, but also due to the fact, that it seems “opera software ASA ” hasnt releeased any API or documentation for extending functionality
opera is more like the mozilla suite than anything else: its kinda bloated with features the unexperienced user might need – such as the email or the irc client. Frankly I never heard of anyone using those, but you have to install em anyways
and whats with the rss reader? i mean its not so bad, but its far from being nice aswell. opml import? opml export? customizing the feed-reader (even layout would be a starter)?
the opera-renderer seems to be working fast – but i still have the feeling that it screws up upon some css-stuff, which wouldnt be nothing new thinking about the major css-drawbacks you could experience in opera up to the 7.5 version or something like this.
dont get me wrong: i used opera for a “long” time – but switched to firefox more or less completly – i still have it installed and really like the low memory-usage of that browser-suite, but i would definatly miss a lot (from my highly customized ff) going all the way back to it.
Would be a lot more interesting to read about your motivations driving you in the hand of the devil which made you switch from FF to Opera instead of reading the propaganda PR-crap. 😉
Right, half an year ago I switched from Opera to FF (influenced by the mozilla pr machine). However, after some months of using FF as my default browser (yes, customized with planty stuff like mouse gestures, tabbed browsing and so on) i got sick of using FF. The Acrobat-PlugIn (in WinXP) caused a 100% cpu usage every time – not very convinient. More than this, I’m the guy who opens at least 20 tabs and most of the time I got a memory usage of about 50 MB and sometimes even more than 150 MB. That’s defintely too much!
The open source topic: Yes, it is right. To have the code to browse through might be a big advantage. But in fact, I never took a look into the sources of FF, Mozilla, lynx or other open sourced browser. Why should I? There is nothing I could be interested in. OK, a friend of mine wrote a small browser using mozilla’s gecko engine in less than a week. That’s not a big deal.
Conclusion: In my humble opinion, Opera has a better usability that fits my needs. Anyway, using FF instead of Opera is 1000 times better than using IE (which still cannot display transparent png-files). By the way: I switched from FF to Opera before Opera became free and I even was just a step a way of buying a license. 😉