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Opera the winner so far—as my replacement for the hated Firefox 3.5
August 19, 2009 | 5:25 pm
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By David Rothman
The Opera boosters are right. Opera should have made my little list of possible Firefox replacements.
Better, I should have tried it earlier. So far? It’s The One—which should please my friend Jon Noring, long an Opera fan.
Opera didn’t awe me several years ago because pages on it looked different from the renderings of more popular browsers. But these days the results are the same or very close to Firefox (click on the screenshot for more detail). I like the interface better than Safari and Google Chrome, and after a quick Googling, I found out how to include my favorite search engines in Opera 9.64’s upper-right-hand bar. The downside is that certain sites are for Internet Explorer and Firefox only. But if enough people like me drift over to Opera from those two “leaders,” maybe that will change.
Court, HeavyG and other Firefox victims—now over to you. Check out Opera and let me know if you share my current enthusiasm for it.
What’s more, previous versions of Opera have worked with an ePub widget, and we’ll hope that the current version soon will, too, at least for experimental purposes. May the day come when we see Opera doubling as a killer ePub-reader.
The ultimate complement, at least for now: I’ve made Opera my default browser. But I may change my mind, so stay tuned.
One cool thing about Opera: Although I doubt that the user community is quite as big as Firefox’s, it does have an rather engaged one—busy coming up with their own add-ons. So even though HeavyG is into plug-ins, he might well find some equivalents in Opera. I myself ran across a promising widget for Google language-translations.
My latest Opera-related issue: A spellchecker. Perhaps Aspell will do the job.
Update: The solution so far seems to be my just-installed Opera 10 beta, which includes an inline spelling checker—which, unlike Aspell, shows those squiggly red lines automatically when I goof.
Technorati Tags: Opera,Opera browser
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Comments:
What’s the problem with Firefox? We are finding that many secure sites etc work much better than IE, and we seem to be using it more and more at work. Even non techy staff say that it is easier to use.
Hi, Carol. Firefox is great when it works. But as noted, it’s Crash City, and I just am tired of these problems interrupting my work. I’m happy for you and your colleagues if Firefox is working reliably. It just isn’t for me, and Opera has the features I need. I’ve even downloaded the latest version with the inline speller. David
I used to use Opera quite a lot years ago. Even bought a few licenses back when they still used to charge for it. One feature in Opera back then I used to really like was that I could set it up so that I could have two windows side by side (this was before tabs came about) and I could have a list of links in one window and set up that window so that links would open up in the other window.
It might still be my main browser except that I really use and am very dependent upon a few FireFox extensions.
I don’t see Opera or Chrome or anything else having the variety of extensions available anytime soon so while I use other browsers occasionally FF is still the one.
It will settle down in due time.
You can also configure Opera to run Firefox’s GreasyMonkey scripts. I can’t remember where was the tutorial, but a bit of searching would do.
Extra tip: on the main adress bar type “g search term” to search with google. g stands for google. Similar for other search engines (w = wikipedia; a = ask; z = amazon; e = ebay). Opera rocks.
Alright, David, I’m going to give Opera a try. Being able to use Greasemonkey scripts, as Josep indicated, is a big plus. Like HeavyG, when I use FF I rely heavily on some plug-ins; without them Chrome still feels sort of naked, even if it does perform far better – to say nothing of how much quicker it starts up. I’ve gotten addicted to that about Chrome. If Opera takes a long time to start up, forget about it. I’m going to give it a try, though.
My main hope, though, is that the FF will get it together, and I can go back to using it.
Dynamic spellcheck:
http://opera.gt500.org/ospell/
Opera 10 will have something similar built-in.
Opera hint: use Shift+Arrows to navigate links spatially.
Opera page renderings probably looked “different” because they were more accurate. Anyway, your code isn’t all that hot to begin with (you can’t even write all the letters in the word “style”), so what is determining page rendering is browsers’ ability to hack through your code like a machete, not the code itself.
Joe: LOL. Mea culpa. Pay us $100 a year to augment the revenue from ads in this dismal economy, and we’ll crank out the same number of newsy posts and hire someone to get the TeleBlog coded immaculately. Seriously, it’s a simple matter of priorities and resources and business issues. Eager for a subscription fee? Or to volunteer? Thanks. David
Regarding the renderings – Opera was the first browser to score a perfect 100 on the Acid 3 test.
In the real world though, all that means is that Opera may not be quite so tolerant of web sites that aren’t written in strict compliance with web standards.
Great point, HG—one reason why Jon’s been such a major Opera fan. As for perfect compliance with Web standards at this end, we run WordPress, which isn’t perfect but probably is better than a lot of junk out there. It’s the templates and the maintenance and customization hassles that complicate things.
Thanks,
David
Wow, I’ve never crashed Firefox, even with dozens of tabs open. Older versions or the newest. Maybe I’m lucky.
That said, I think a lot of Opera and it was my browser of choice for awhile, until I needed to watch online video (Netflix, CBS Sports) that wouldn’t work with Opera.
@David: The downside is that certain sites are for Internet Explorer and Firefox only.
This is usually due to inept browser-sniffing. Rather than the site asking the browser “can you do x? what about y?” and so on, the page author knows a particular browser can do all that’s desired, so instead of a string of check questions, the author simply asks “are you browser A, version N+?” and simply says “sorry” to other browsers.
The practical solution to a site’s “why do you want to know?” question is to give the answer it wants to hear: Right-click on a blank section of the site, select “Edit site preferences” and then “Network” and choose to tell the site that you’re using IE/FF. The vast majority of the time that’s enough to make the site work properly. Masking hides more than Identifying.