It was a brilliant marketing scheme by the folks at Opera to give out free licenses to their browser for a day. It seeds the browser into a world ruled by Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. It even got me to install and try it on my systems (Windows and Mac). On my Windows system, I use Firefox. On my Mac, I use Safari. After trying out Opera 8, I think I’ll stick with Firefox and Safari. Yes, Opera 8 is damned fast. But, there are some problems that I keep me away from it.
- Ad blocking: There is none built-in. There are some add-ons, but they do not come close to the elegance of the Adblock extension for Firefox nor PithHelmet for Safari.
- Website support: Ok, this isn’t all Opera’s fault, but some sites like Yahoo! Plus do not support Opera (I even tried changing the User-Agent string). This kind of sucks since I actually do use the Yahoo! Plus page. There are probably other pages that will complain that Opera is not IE or Firefox.
I have my own mail clients setup and running already (Thunderbird on Windows and Mail.appl on Mac), so the built-in mail client was not useful for me. The built-in chat client is actually an IRC client, and I don’t use IRC. So, other than rendering a page really nice and quick, I can’t see myself using Opera as a daily browser. Firefox is free and works just the same as Opera. Same with Safari. Anyone have a compelling reason to use (or even pay for) Opera?
Aug 31st, 2005 at August 31, 2005 7:33 am
Sadly, no. I hate to admit it, but I didn’t even grab a free license because I didn’t really have any interest in running the program.
Aug 31st, 2005 at August 31, 2005 12:40 pm
Hehe, I am going to play with my Mac version a little more over the next few days and see how it goes. I know for sure it won’t be my main browser, but I want to see what features I am missing out on. But, with Firefox and Safari out for free, I am finding it hard to see why anyone would pay for Opera.
Sep 9th, 2005 at September 09, 2005 11:14 am
I like it for the mouse gestures. I find it much easier to quickly browse the net using them. I also like the fact that I open up Opera and it has all my pages already open and refreshing. It took a little while to configure and not all websites work with it but the ones I do use work. It is good for me but for the average user I think it will not work as well as firefox. I still recommend FF for my less-then-tech family who seem to enjoy it and praise it very much, enough to actually recommend it to their non-techie friends! I didn’t like the ads in Opera but now without them I love it. I am just trying to add more features and customize. Still gettting used to it, I have to use IE at work…and hate it!
Sep 22nd, 2005 at September 22, 2005 12:43 am
I guess it depends on what OS you use.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html