Tag Archives: Browser

I’ve been locked in to @opera as my default desktop browser for a few weeks now

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… and everything is going great.  I’ve just been all about this browser from Scandinavia for so long (could it be, on and off, ten years?), that I can’t let it go.  I’ve just finished many months using Safari because the earlier version of Opera 10 could not handle Google Calendar.  Although that problem is not currently solved, it is being very well managed.  The calendar simply has a tendency to be a bit too wide, so a little scrolling allows you to see everything clearly.  The one other issue I’m having is with the Nike+ page that I use to keep track of my running.  Opera, at least for Mac, can’t see that page at all.  Also, legal research at Lexis is still being done on Safari, but I haven’t tried the latest update Opera.  It may work, but the folks at Lexis have one of the worst websites of all time, so I’m inclined to not challenge it with anything remotely out of the ordinary.

Before going back to Opera, I did give the Firefox 4 beta a go and it was lovely, showed every page I could think of, but was slow with extensions.  In fact, it was slow without extensions.  I know everyone loves Firefox, but I’ve never had a good experience with consistent use.  Maybe once 4 is finalized I’ll give it another go.  It’s got tremendous features.

I haven’t gone back to Chrome for a long time, and I really don’t know why.  My main issue is that I have an aging computer (almost three years!!) and I need the lightest software available.  Chrome advertises itself as such and I liked it while I used it, and now can’t remember why I stopped. Maybe I should give it a go again.

But Opera is like an old friend, like a certain band that is so cool, but nobody else knows about it.  Plus, stuff from Scandinavia are awesome!

Opera 10 for Mac OS X

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opera

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.