Giving Opera a whirl round the dancefloor

[Kim]

After much nagging from a certain person here (you know who you are )

I am giving the Opera browser a whirl... I have to say it is about a billion times quicker on my 3 year old Asus than my beloved FF.. oh dear...

I have yet to try Dragonfly, of course I have to love that already because of the name

Very nice I must say.. does feel a bit like I am cheating on FF though

 

[pk698]

just DL'ed it and installed it.

holy snap, it's quite fast. I love it. looks like it's time to retire FF and move to opera.

 

[Decent60]

Here's one thing you should try: Run Firefox with the addons disabled. I thought for a minute that Firefox was getting slower and slower but really many of the addons were lagging it down (mostly the Adblock Plus lol).
Even if it is faster, there is less customizing that can be done compared to Firefox. However, if you like it, use and abuse it.

 

[Kim]

Here's one thing you should try: Run Firefox with the addons disabled. I thought for a minute that Firefox was getting slower and slower but really many of the addons were lagging it down (mostly the Adblock Plus lol).
Even if it is faster, there is less customizing that can be done compared to Firefox. However, if you like it, use and abuse it.

Yeah I think a big part of the problem is FireBug which I use every day so don't want to forgo. I only have a few other add ons not dozens or anything.

Firefox has been getting slower and slower and taking up more and more of my computer's resources, to the extent my machine is often unusable. Unfortunately I can't afford to replace it right now, so it is interesting to try a new browser which might work in the interim.

 

[SilverCircle]

Here's one thing you should try: Run Firefox with the addons disabled. I thought for a minute that Firefox was getting slower and slower but really many of the addons were lagging it down (mostly the Adblock Plus lol).
Even if it is faster, there is less customizing that can be done compared to Firefox. However, if you like it, use and abuse it.

True, most slowdowns and memory leaks are caused by addons - adblock plus and Firebug are two of the heaviest with the biggest impact. A clean Firefox isn't slower than Opera or Chrome for that matter, in some areas it is faster, because of its advanced use of Direct2D.

However, the point is: If you are a developer and need a tool like Firebug, you're stuck with the problems. Opera's Dragonfly is a viable alternative to Firebug and it comes with all the bells and whistles minus the performance problems. That's why it's great.

Also, Opera has built-in ad blocking that can handle thousands of filtering rules without slowing anything down.

 

[Kier]

Opera... the web developer's worst nightmare.

Get Chrome, forget about Opera.

FWIW, I do all my browsing with Chrome, but all my development with Firefox. Firebug surpasses everything else by miles.

 

[Cool]

just the same here...browsing with (google-free) chrome...working with ff. opera with some tools is not as fast and usable as ff...at least for me.

 

[Legend]

I miss operas old GUI. Cant stand the current one. Opera is quite fast, but I always end up going back to Chrome.

 

[Kim]

Opera... the web developer's worst nightmare.

Get Chrome, forget about Opera.

FWIW, I do all my browsing with Chrome, but all my development with Firefox. Firebug surpasses everything else by miles.

Well, the problem is I am a one browser kinda gal.. I have the others but couldn't be bothered changing browsers all day so the idea of using two is really out for me.

Firebug is very cool, but it is a massive resource hog on my old comp, sometimes I am literally frozen for minutes with FF these days, my whole machine I mean, not just browsing, I am paralysed a lot of the time, sometimes even having to resort to a hard reboot if things get really dire!

Chrome I am not so keen on anyway, I just never really took to it.

Safari I really like, but again.. the firebug thing.. argh!

I need more RAM (which won't fit into my computer as it is very small), or a new machine...

 

[Kier]

Firefox needs to be fully quit and restarted every couple of hours to make it bearable.

 

[Paul B]

FWIW, I do all my browsing with Chrome, but all my development with Firefox. Firebug surpasses everything else by miles.

Exactly the same.

Nothing comes close to Firebug and it's the only reason I still use Firefox.

 

[jmurrayhead]

Well, the problem is I am a one browser kinda gal.. I have the others but couldn't be bothered changing browsers all day so the idea of using two is really out for me.

I have IE9, Chrome, FireFox4, Safari, and Opera installed on my system. Like Kier, I use Chrome for my regular browsing and FireFox for developing. The others are for making sure things work in them.

 

[Kim]

I shall give the two browser option a whirl and see how it goes.

Seems needlessly awkward though.

 

[yavuz]

Firefox needs to be fully quit and restarted every couple of hours to make it bearable.

Yeap same here, I use many tabs at the same time - thanks to the Tree Tab Style extension - and my RAM usage goes up to the roof.

 

[Shamil]

I like IE9. I hate Opera. Safari is ugh. Chrome is ok, but I prefer Chromium