Somehow, many years ago, I became dissatisfied with my old Netscape browser and had no desire to support Windows in any way, shape or form.  I was stuck with a Gateway laptop running Windows, but that didn’t mean that I had to succumb to Internet Explorer.  At the time, I was already worried about how much RAM browsers ate up and I couldn’t bear to have the computer running any slower than it already was.  Firefox, as you may recall, didn’t exist yet.

And so I discovered a plucky Scandanavian company making a free browser that advertised the smallest RAM footprint.  It also offered something called tabbed browsing years before any of the big boys even knew what that was.  I loved my old Opera 6 browser and stuck with them right up until the beginning of this year, when I was finally able to switch to from Windows to Mac.

At that momentous occasion, I remember looking into Opera and finding that it wasn’t really up-to-date for the Mac platform.  Today, that changed.  Opera 10 is now available for Mac.  I have downloaded it and done some test browsing and it looks like my plucky little friends from Norway have got it right.  I am very excited.  The Fightins does not crash and Fretbuzz.net is no problem.  I read both of these sites regularly and they both crash Firefox.  On Opera, it’s no problem.  Legal research on Lexis will still need to be done on Safari because I can not see the tables of contents on Opera or Firefox, but I’m still better off than I was.  Firefox is going to be retired and Opera will become the default browser as soon as I can learn to export bookmarks.