Ok, just hours into my trial of Opera, things are not going so well and I may just have to suffer a bit with Firefox for the time being. Here’s what I have discovered and is bugging me enough to switch back to Firefox:
- CTRL-T: Gah! I can’t get myself to not CTRL-T for a new tab.
- CTRL-click: Another “gah” moment. There does not seem to be a way to open tabs by CTRL-clicking.
- Tab Order: Closing a tab does not select the next tab over, the previously selected tab is actually selected after the current one is closed.
- AdBlocking: One can use the filter.ini method, which requires a bit of work.
- Website compatibility: Not really Opera’s fault, but websites like my.yahoo.com (I need my portfolio) and mail.yahoo.com don’t work with Opera.
I really want to like Opera and I’ll keep it around, but I don’t think I can do day-to-day browsing with it. I’ll stick with Firefox (while hoping and praying that the developers will lighten up on the memory usage) for now.
Jan 30th, 2006 at January 30, 2006 1:20 am
I used Opera for about five years, but the later (better) versions had ads, so I switched to Firefox when it was still called Firebird. Painful for me, too!
One reason why I liked Opera was that the UI was fast. IIRC, most of Firefox’s UI is implemented via a XUL interpreter, so I’m thinking that’s why it feels so slow. I’m comparing my experience of Opera on a ThinkPad P3 300 MHz ~300MB RAM W2K laptop versus Firefox 1.0.7 on my current laptop, 1.6 GHz Centrino 2GB RAM WinXP. Same amount of tabs, 50+.
If you go back to Firefox, I recommend using SessionSaver so you can pick up your browsing session where you left off or crashed (the resuming is almost like using the screen command under UNIX). Opera has always had this functionality built into it the entire time I used it.
Jan 30th, 2006 at January 30, 2006 2:01 am
Opera is just not the browser.
Jan 30th, 2006 at January 30, 2006 4:03 am
It is easy to change keyboard bindings in Opera. Go to Preferences > Advanced > Shortcuts to edit keyboard shortcuts. Search for the shortcut you want to change (in this case New Page, and change it from “N ctrl” to “T ctrl”). Opera 9 uses Ctrl+T as default for this action.
Instead of control-clicking you can double-click or middle-click on an empty space (or use the New page gesture), or right-click select New page.
For ad blocking, see this page: http://nontroppo.org/wiki/BlockAdvertisements
Yahoo will hopefully fix those sites (they broke recently), and I have seen UserJS for the same sites.
Jan 30th, 2006 at January 30, 2006 8:45 am
Thanks guys for the tips. I will try out Opera 9. But, I think I will stick with Camino (Mac) and Firefox (Windows/Linux) for my day-to-day stuff.
Jan 31st, 2006 at January 31, 2006 2:38 am
Opera is NOT firefox (like Linux is NOT Windows)
It also took me some weeks to get used to it, but take it from me, you wont regret using it.
Since using Opera, my Browsing speed has increased
take some time
time = money so Opera even earns you money
Jan 31st, 2006 at January 31, 2006 8:27 am
Err…Never said Opera was Firefox.
And while I would love to get used to Opera because it is a cool browser, I can’t live without some of the sites that I could not use because they did not support Opera.
As for all that stuff about browsing speed increasing and Opera earning me money: Get real and stop exaggerating.
Jan 31st, 2006 at January 31, 2006 10:29 am
You’re so right that website compatibility problems with Yahoo properties often are not Opera’s fault - I made this little animation from Yahoo Mail source code a while ago:
http://www.hallvord.com/opera/demo/yahoo/composescreen.htm
Some of the worst problems are patched in browser.js and we keep an open line to the Yahoo web developers we know and nag them about fixing things. It will get better for sure. I can’t give more specific advice or comments without knowing more about the exact problems you saw.
Regarding the UI things that are different from FireFox: explore the ways to customise the UI a little. For example, I think the keyboard layout editor Jax explained above is really nice and simple to use.
Feb 10th, 2007 at February 10, 2007 1:11 am
CTRL-click - I think what you’re looking for is Shift-Ctrl-click, which is quite easy to get used to.
Maybe something else though…