The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Browsing for me was good (at one point, some pictures in an eBay auction stopped working-refreshing solved the problem though) but using the additional functionality like Mail and RSS resulted in it crashing when importing data. That never happened on the old version.
As a web browser it's pretty snappy and feels just a wee bit faster than Firefox 3.
Opera is pretty nice, IMO, too, but it's pretty "busy." There are so many things going on, and so many different . . . adjustments which can be made, it's just a bit overwhelming, at least at first. It is
fast, and seems very stable.
Opera is a browser that I want to love but just can't because it can be difficult. Random crashes for no obvious reason, and there are pages that it renders too slowly or incorrectly.
I'm a pretty serious Opera fan. It does sometimes have trouble with the rendering of some pages. I suspect that this is because Opera has good standards adherence and page designers probably don't test against it too often.
It also has a few bugs here and there. Currently, saving images opens a "transfers" tab, which is ok, except that it keeps opening them every time you save an image, so that you have a bunch for no real reason. I imagine they'll fix that one pretty quickly. I used to get the occasional odd window display bug too, in the previous version, but I haven't seen it in this version yet. *crosses fingers*
Generally I run Opera as my default browser for its interface features (tab-scrolling, mmmm) with flash and javascript turned off, and then run Firefox for specific circumstances, and for sites that require javascript or flash that I don't feel like whitelisting in Opera.
Opera (so far) seems slightly buggier, and slightly less supported by site designers (though I have come across a site or two that display correctly in Opera and not in Firefox, for what it's worth). I find the interface more productive, and it seems to use less memory. It doesn't have extentions like Firefox, but has a lot of functionality that you'd have to install extentions in Fx to get, like scrolling through tabs, or mouse gestures.
They're closer to each other now than they used to be. Firefox picked up the address-bar search functionality Opera had, and lost some weight, for example. I find that in using the two, in Firefox I tend to find a missing feature and install an extention to fix it, wheras in Opera I tend to keep discovering new features that I quickly become addicted to. Opera comes with more functionality out of the box, but is less expandable.
They're both free in dollars while only Firefox is open source.
Is that better? There's a ton of overlap between the two, and often different ways to do the same thing. If you're trying to pick one and can't decide, go with Opera because it's got features/an interface you like, or Firefox because it's got extentions you want. Or just use them both. There's nothing wrong with that.
If it hasn't become obvious by now on this forum I am an Opera fanatic. Discovering it has completely changed the way I work on the web and assisted me greatly in research for my law degree (final results on monday/tuesday, fingers crossed). Being able to use wrapped tab browsing during research allows you to right-click-open in new tab and continue what you were reading while another page, or several, load in the background without worries of clogging up the tab bar and losing visual referencing to all tabs in the process. Being able to save sessions for particular research topics (150 tabs and up in my case) and then go back to them the next day is heaven.
I have been using every and all alphas and betas of Opera 9 and what amazes me is just how much they managed to improve the final release build of 9.50 even compared to the previous weeks build. Its extremely fast and powerful. If anyone is considering using it on an MBP I would advise them to try the TTT-show skin (or any of the TTT skins) available from Opera site. You get 13 tabs per line with perfect clarity and ability to identify what each one is in perfect clarity. FF3 simply can't do that and that is unfortunate for people like me. Also I love the speed-dial feature for quick access to regularly used sites.
The 1st thing to do when you get it is to right-click on the tab-bar and select 'show hidden toolbars while customizing' then drag and drop what you want and de-select what you don't. You end up with a perfectly user-customized experience to suit YOU not someone else. FF 3 still can't really do this despite its myriad plugins. Also my personal feeling is multiple plugins can make a browser potentially less stable so I prefer to have all the functionality tested by the Opera team in-house.
FF3 is a great improvement but for me is still a halfway house between IE7/Safari and the incredible power of Opera. As people have said some specific site issues can arise but that is getting better and better all the time and if it crashes you just re-open and it keeps going with all your tabs again (same applies to FF). If you get hooked on Opera try this site for all the customizing of its features.
The one thing I can say Opera is missing is the ability to run the absolutely incredible Piclens add-on so I’ll keep FF3 for that. I personally think everyone will be fascinated by Piclens, available free here (also for Safari)
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
