Well, it's fast. But it's ugly. Even Firefox looks better than that on the Mac. Also it feels the need to store passwords it its own system. I like the fact that Camino and Safari store them in the keychain. If Opera would do that I'd give it a second chance. I'll stick with Safari I think.

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I have it on my old iMac, wanted to put it on my brand-spanking new iBook but didn't. Now I think I will and try it out. Maybe it'll join Omniweb and Firefox on my hard drive...

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My life in browsers:

Internet Explorer (Win) - no other choice for umpteen years
to
Opera (Win) - Oooh, I *do* have a choice. Me loves tabs and session saving.
to
Firefox (Win) - Wow, suddenly discover Firefox has all of Opera's capabilities (with extensions)
to
Firefox (OS X) - Stick with what I know and I'm addicted to Saved Sessions
to
Safari (OS X) - Learn to let go of saved sessions and learn instead to use bookmarks and RSS effectively

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Thanks for the tip guys. I'd downloaded the ad-supported version a couple weeks ago to test my new site design's compatibility. If only for testing purposes, it's nice to have a version without annoying ads. I think I'll still use Firefox as my primary browser (as I've gotten used to reading this blog and others using Live Bookmarks), but the newly registered version joins Safari 1.3 on my system for testing purposes. Thanks again!

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Thanks for the link. I'm going to stick with Safari for my PowerBook but I will try out Opera on my Windows machine.

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Hmm... uses about half as much memory as Firefox but page loading order is hacked around so that pages appear to load faster. Still... it's fast, and it has some cool features. I should investigate how to de-uglify it.

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Safari
Camino
Firefox
OmniWeb
Opera
Mozilla
Netscape

Any more browsers I need?

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To me, Opera was always that weird guy at the party who stood over in the corner and didn't say much to anybody, but was content to do his own thing. Not flashy enough to catch your attention; not popular enough to make you want to go talk to him, but not obnoxious enough to drive you away either. I'm sure he would've been a cool guy but who ever talked to him? You just took for granted that he was always there.

So, I'm downloading Opera. I've known about its existence for several years, but I've never had the urge to use it.

First, since I started my life as a PC user, it was IE and Netscape. Then, Netscape overcompensated to keep up with IE's popularity and actually got worse through its many revisions. So, I stuck with IE. And then Firefox appeared on the scene to save us from IE and its many security holes. I pimped out my Firefox and we've kept up a long relationship (I mean really pimped--it's gold and leopard and it blings).

With my Apple, I use Safari mostly. It's not as flashy as Firefox and doesn't start out with as many bells & whistles (until you download Saft), but it runs fast and looks pretty darned smooth.

I'll give Opera a try for a few days. He's stuck around the party long enough. Might as well find out what he's all about.

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8.....You forgot Shiira and iCab

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I've been using Opera just for testing purposes of new designs but I can't bear using it as a primary browser because of some of their odd rendering quirks. Same goes for Firefox. Safari, to my mind, just has the best, most advanced rendering engine.

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I grabbed a copy. Why not, it's free! I've been running it all day and already have 3 sites that have big issues. I've found 0 with Safari and Firefox after running them for months.

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It might have an impact. I like CSS. A lot. And I like the idea of using CSS for generated content, especially headings. This goes hand in hand with my loved of wikis, and my choice to discard word processors in favor of wikis -- one thing that many wikis (including my currently favored wiki, Instiki (well, Instiki/Pimki) lack as the ability to generate heading numbering.

And, as many a TA has commented, heading numbering makes my writing a far more pleasant experience.

However, while I love that Opera does CSS properly, it genuinely is ugly, and many of the choices that were made about how it looks and behaves differ subtly and disconcertingly from those of the browsers I'm most comfortable using (Safari and Firefox). So the ads weren't the only thing Opera has to overcome in order to gain my affection. (I'm more than willing to pay reasonable prices for software that's (a) cool, (b) not stupid, (c) useful, and (d) doesn't make me feel like using it is a chore.) But we'll see...

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Opera has a pretty rich community of themes, plugins and other face-lift kinds of things:

http://my.opera.com/community/customize/

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