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September 5, 2008

Opera is actually a pretty good browser ()

by fluffy at 5:23 PM
I've tried Opera several times in the past but I never really liked various things about it, such as weird UI issues (its bizarre insistence on MDI for so many years, for example). But Firefox 3 has been a bit annoyingly slow, and Chrome is a nice idea marred by a hell of a lot of Big Ideas getting in the way of getting the basics right, but various comments I've seen from people sick of hearing about both of those browsers reminded me of Opera (both on poe-news and on The Register). So, I'm trying Opera 9.5 out.

At least on Windows, it's pretty nice. It feels a little faster than FF3 (although TEXTAREA is a bit laggy), and its default key bindings are irritating but it was easy enough to fix those and make it behave exactly like Firefox. I really like how UI-wise it actually works with the native GUI instead of tring to do its own thing (unlike, say, Firefox or Chrome), and it's also the only browser I've ever seen which does a good job of doing smooth scrolling which still feels responsive.

So far the only bug I've run into is that the background on my 404 error animation doesn't move, which tells me there's something weird with how it deals with CSS background-position in DHTML or something. Also, there doesn't seem to be any way of adding a resize widget to the lower-right corner of the window (the default skin had one but this other skin doesn't). I'm sure there'll be other problems as well, but I think I'll give this a try for the next few days and see how it works out for me.

Comments

#11275 09/05/2008 06:15 pm
The Mac version is "native" in the same way that Firefox is, though. (As in, "mostly native but some widgets look and/or behave wrong".)
#11276 09/05/2008 08:49 pm
Opera's awesome. It was my default browser for years before Firefox became big.

Really, the only reason I stick with Firefox instead of Opera is the extensions.
#11277 09/05/2008 11:48 pm
Gooble gobble, google gobble, we accept her, we accept her.
Gooble gobble, google gobble, one of us, one of us.
#11278 09/06/2008 10:28 am
Argh. The slightly faster rendering wasn't really worth the WTFery in the rest of the UI. Tab placement/switching orders were not consistent (even when I changed the settings), text editing felt weird (especially with the lack of down-arrow-means-end-on-the-last-line), its address autocompletion was ridiculously bad (in that it tried to pull in too many sources but apparently didn't try to rank it by frequency of use, and meanwhile it would only allow searching on a single keyword at a time and didn't seem to pull from the full URL), and the last straw was that video playback would drop its framerate on windows in the background, so I couldn't, say, reasonably watch a video on YouTube or Google Video while having some other app (like a chat client) focused.