august 30, 2005It 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?
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