Why I Use Opera

For about the last eight or nine years I've been using the Opera web browser instead of Internet Explorer or Firefox. I've been throughly satisfied with it since then and highly doubt I've ever switch to another browser for my day-to-day usage. There are some sites that just don't work in Opera, however, so I still use Internet Explorer every now and then (mainly just for a game site).

There are many reasons why I've stuck with Opera over the years. The main reason is that it's pretty fast and snappy and I can happily leave it running in the background. I tried Firefox several times but it was always so sluggish and slowed down progressively over time. I haven't actually tried Firefox 3, but I seriously don't see any need for it.

The newly released version of Opera (9.5) is even better. I had been following it with their "weekly" previews, but due to some changes breaking some pages for a while I ended up just using the 9.2 releases until they'd fixed the problems (ie. released 9.5). When it was finally released I made sure to install into a new directory (always had the weeklies seperate, so it was no different from that) just incase there were any problems and I could easily just continue using 9.27. I had to make a few changes to the default install, mainly as I don't really care for the new default skin (or any of the default skins actually), so I installed the skin I like (Operatic Orbit), plus also made some changes to the keyboard layout as the new defaults are more to cater for people coming from other browsers (like Firefox) and I'm used to the old Opera keyboard shortcuts.

It seems much snappier now. Opera 9.27 took roughly 8-10 seconds to start up from cold, whereas 9.5 takes about 3-4 seconds. Opening links from other programs (like a rss feed reader) used to take about 6 seconds on 9.27, but now are near instant on 9.5. I've never really noticed any of the claims that Opera is leaner on memory, as whenever I check the memory usage in the task manager it's usually in the 80-90 MB range (I know it's not a conclusive test, but it's the only test I can do quickly and easily). Opera 9.5 is still the same, with a current usage of 98MB and the browser having been open for 12 hours, three tabs open, one (gmail) for the whole 12 hours, and lots more tabs having been opened and closed during the day. However, it doesn't really appear to make any difference to my system, unlike other programs which use the same amount of memory in the task manager but make my system really slow. Also, 9.5 seems to close quicker too, with the process freeing it's memory and exiting before 9.27 would be even halfway done.

All in all I must say that I'm quite happy with Opera 9.5. The new speed increases on startup and opening tabs is very welcome, as it stops other programs from locking for too long while it waits for the browser/tab to open.