They say that you either love the opera or you hate it. I don't really like the opera much at all. As to the browser, I haven't been all that impressed to date. But I've not switched browsers for a while, so I thought I'd give it a try, since Firefox seems to eat more and more memory all the time.
My first thought is that it's a pretty decent product. My second thought is that the forms aren't as nice looking as Firefox. It just doesn't look quite right. My third thought is that it seems to be pretty quick, so I'll likely try it out for a while, what with Firefox sitting over there gobbling up 350MB of RAM and all (even if it's not slowing me down, that just seems ridiculous). My fourth, and final thought for the moment, is that the main thing about switching is that Firefox has several keyboard shortcuts that I just adore. Opera doesn't seem to have them. That may be the deal-breaker.
In Firefox, I can use CTRL-SHIFT-ENTER to wrap a name in "www" and "org" or SHIFT-ENTER to wrap it in "www" and "net". I thought that Firefox had the advantage in setting up search engines, but Opera seems to have those too, it's just not as easy to do so (you have to edit an ini file by hand, but even that seems to be eased in a beta of version 9, available now). In on advantage, Opera does support natively the CTRL-TAB scrolling through tabs which I'm used to through Windows, and it also has mouse gestures built in. That's nice. So I'll likely give it a try and see what happens. More later.
Update: Okay, the scroll wheel on my mouse is a little wonky in Opera, but I could likely live with that if I have to do so. But I will likely miss my EditCSS extension from Firefox. However, Opera does have a nice Cookie browser and you can even edit your cookies. That's something that Firefox doesn't have. This might be a tough call, especially if an EditCSS-like extension is available for Opera. I may have spoken too soon. Though the cookie feature looked nice, it didn't seem to take, and in at least once case, I couldn't get to a site that required login (though doing so through Firefox worked fine). Ah well...
Update: I'm currently testing the beta of version 9, and it's not bad. The search engine interface is nice, and the whole product just seems a bit better, and I haven't had any of the cookie problems that I encountered previously. For a beta, it's actually quite stable. I may stick with it for a while and see how it goes. The only thing I don't like is that it's taken over my start menu, even though I've said to not set itself as default. That's a little odd. And the cookie, though it does seem to be working, does seem to have some issues where it won't go away. I like that Opera saves the tabs in use when I closed out last. That's cool. The tab preview is neat too, as is the color change when the tab contents change, so you know there's something new there, and memory usage is way better, with Opera using 25MB for four tabs, and Firefox using 100MB for five. More later.
