Corporealshift

I Love Opera!

Most people are familiar with the browser Opera, but how many people really use it?  In general it is overlooked for more common browsers such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.  You may recall that I recently purchased a Dell mini netbook, and of course I was using Firefox.  However, it became sluggish and problematic with multiple tabs open, even in Ubuntu.  So while searching for an alternative I decided to try to use Opera.  Since that day about two weeks ago I have completely converted all of my machines to Opera and it is my main browser. Here’s why.

It’s fast and efficient

Not only does Opera seem to load pages faster than Firefox(I haven’t measured it) but it generally seems to use significantly fewer resources and RAM than Firefox.  For my netbook that is an excellent thing, but on all my machines it is always nice to have a more efficient browser. It’s Standards Compliant Firefox has always been the browser of choice partially because it adheres relatively well to the W3 standards for design and development.  Opera is even more standards compliant than Firefox, which is always a good thing since you will get better functionality out of websites.

It’s Secure

This one isn’t too much of an advantage over Firefox.  I do like that any time a site pops something up it gives you a checkbox to prevent scripts from being run in the page anymore.(You know those “Your computer is infected!” pop-ups that inevitably install malware, Opera allows you to stop scripting when those pop up so you can close them without triggering anything)  However Firefox does have the amazing no-script addon available, which provides even better anti-scripting technology.  Another downfall to Opera is that it doesn’t use DEP or ASLR technologies(What are DEP and ASLR?) to tighten security on the application itself.  But compared to Firefox as it comes from the company I feel that having the ability to prevent scripts from running in the manner that Opera does is a great option.

It’s more than just a Browser

Not only is it a web browser but it also works as an RSS feed reader and a torrent downloading applications.  It can also do mail right in the browser although I haven’t played with this because I still love the G-Mail interface.  It’s still nice to have one program that can do all of these things, instead of multiple applications with a more specific functionality.

Overall I have been incredibly satisfied with Opera and am not going to return to Firefox anytime soon.  It’s lightweight, it works well, and it’s fast.  And on top of that it has more functionality than Firefox does.  My biggest issue is the lack of add-ons.  Since Firefox is such a popular web browser there are a lot of great add-ons available, which is not the case with Opera.  There are widgets and they can provide somewhat similar functionality to add-ons but they do not integrate as well with the browser as is the case with Firefox.  Overall it is a small sacrifice for the benefits to me, especially on the performance and standards front.  Opera will be my choice of browser until Mozilla fixes the resource management issues in Firefox or adds some functionality which I just cannot live without.

Tags: Browser, Firefox, Internet, Opera

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 4th, 2009 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Computers, Web, Web Design, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.