5 ms·

I don't know why I would ever switch from Chrome or Safari to Opera. On a Mac, Opera still has text rendering issues (http://imgur.com/a/9bK1j http://imgur.com/

by cmelbye 14y ago

I don't know why I would ever switch from Chrome or Safari to Opera. On a Mac, Opera still has text rendering issues (http://imgur.com/a/9bK1j http://imgur.com/a/9bK1j), scrolling stutters, and there's a noticeable difference in page load speed (Opera is much slower than Chrome, at least on my computer).

Tomis02 14y ago
Features.
- rrreese 14y ago
  Care to expand this? A quick look at the linked page shows a bunch of under the hood improvements that will appeal to web developers, but as a user I remain ignorant of why people use Opera. To be clear I used to use Opera back when they where the only browser with tabs, but that was close to a decade ago.
  - nuttendorfer 14y ago
    Download manager, BitTorrent support, very good email application included, feed reader, Opera Turbo speeds up browsing if you are on a slow connection by compressing everything on Opera's servers (optional), integrated IRC client. Opera really is a web suite, not just a browser.
  - rplnt 14y ago
    Features that has been there for ages. It's not like they are essential to have in a good browser but once you get used to them it's painful to switch. For me it is configurability (if that's a word). Primarily ability to configure controls out of the box. For keyboard, mouse and mouse gestures. This includes dozens of custom actions, even javascript, all of which can be combined using logical conjunctions. No other browser I tried allows you this, not even close. Configuring the UI is pretty straight forward as well, and if there is anything not available through the UI you can always dig into config files. Some other features it's hard to browse without: global and per-site configuration of: blocked content, pop-ups, javascript, cookies, plugins, on demand plugins, images, custom layouts, .... edit: and back button actually works as expected That's just a small subset of dozens of features I miss in other browsers. I don't use any of those extra apps (reader, mail, torrent, irc, ...) but they don't bother me either. And what I miss in Opera? Switching tabs by their position (alt/ctrl+number in many tabbed applications). That's it. What bothers me is that many sites do not work properly or are completely blocked in Opera. The former is due to low market share of Opera, the latter is because people are dicks (hi google). Just write that it's not supported and I won't call your support line, don't make me change my user agent all the time (luckily I can configure this per-site :P). edit: Totally forgot this but other comment pointed it out: Opera can handle a lot of tabs, no other browser I tried could do this: memory, performance and UI wise.
  - Tomis02 14y ago
    Not really. I've told countless people about how Opera really is the best browser, by far, and how people using Chrome and Firefox are stuck in the stone-age of Internet Explorer 6. I'm getting tired to repeat it. Screw it, I'll do a quick run. Depending on how good your computer is, Chrome will buckle (freeze your computer, in my case) sooner or later after you keep increasing the number of tabs, due to the one process per tab design flaw. That does not usually happen with Opera (unless you have some very demanding pages, which doesn't usually happen to me), it will keep going as long as you have the RAM to supply it. Right now opera:cpu shows me a round number of 115 tabs with 1.5 GB RAM usage, plus the plugin wrapper grabbing an additional 400 megs. Given that this particular computer has 12 GB of RAM I think it's very reasonable. Of course, I don't have a rocket computer at home but the performance is very good as well on a mediocre laptop. Now, what good does it do to have 115 tabs if you can't see them or switch between them at your wish? In Chrome you have one line of tabs that keep pushing against another, and at 115 tabs you could not select your tab properly, nevermind reading the tab title. In Opera I just configured my tab bar to wrap to multiple lines and aligned it vertically on the left side. I also have tab groups that work very nicely to minimize unnecessary clutter. I can also turn the tab bar off altogether and move between tabs with ctrl + tab or right mouse button + wheel, or hold ctrl + tab + mouse click. The possibilities for customization are so numerous I can't be bothered to describe them all. Opera is a true browser and it has all these features out of the box without getting in your way. You're a hacker? Where's your curiosity? Explore Opera's features (like mouse gestures, keyboard navigation, and so on) and see for yourself. And by the way, one last thing. The default option for Opera is to restore your tabs from your last browsing session, which was not the case for Chrome and Firefox last time I checked (and if that didn't change it's retarded, although I would understand the reasoning, they don't want to encourage you to keep your tabs open because the browser might buckle under the pressure of 10 open tabs). So really, feel free to keep open as many tabs as you like. You can also use ghostery (an extension) to block all these resource-consuming background scripts, just in case you have reached the limits of your hardware. I have enable 'plugins only on demand', so no Flash player will be loaded without my explicit consent. Again, this is out of the box. Also, content blocker. And so on and so forth.
    - PerryCox 14y ago
okamiueru 14y ago
For me, it is because it simply works straight out of the box, with all the features I use all the time. For me, it is several of the following reasons: * mouse gestures. * the speed dial. * the ease to create custom url-bar searches. * thumbnail images of tabs (to check a potentially nsfw link at work). * in page link or text search using ',' or '.' * the ability to search for links in the sidebar, and select all of them (e.g. to copy to a wget script, etc.) * the ease to customize the content block. ... and probably other stuff, which doesn't come to mind. Also, and this is important: I'm not trying to convince you here. Just pointing out that some will say the exact thing on the switch from Opera to Chrome, Firefox or Safari, with good reasons of their own. Whatever floats your boat. Also, mind you, I have firefox and chrome installed. Firefox I almost never use, and chrome is useful to see shiny WebGL stuff, which has a lot more support. Sometimes also to see new CSS-demos that are broken in Opera (mostly because of lazy developers who don't include the -o- extensions).
ernesth 14y ago
> Opera is much slower than Chrome, at least on my computer It is the contrary on my computer: chrome is painfully slow, whereas firefox is OK and opera is faster. I guess opera is not the best for everyone.
- jonpacker 14y ago
  I can back that up, it's the same case for me.
- aw3c2 14y ago
  same here, I would also be very unhappy without opera's instant backward/forward navigation.
  - Osiris 14y ago
    Awesome feature. I hate that other browsers ask you to resubmit a form when navigating back. Opera just shows you the cached page that it bad before. Combining that with the mouse flip gesture, browsing is a breeze. In Chrome you have to click BACK or use BACKSPACE (or a mouse with a dedicated nav button). In Opera, I click the right then the left mouse buttons and I'm back at the previous page. Alternate to go back forward.
tintin 14y ago
This might also be a font-issue. Most of the time websites embed different font-types like eot, ttf, woff and svg. But some types lack font-hinting. It depends on the order in the CSS file which supported font browsers will use.
rplnt 14y ago
The scrolling might be due to "smooth scroll" enabled: opera:config#UserPrefs|SmoothScrolling It is (was some time ago at least) disabled by default in Chrome, Firefox and even on linux version of Opera.
antihero 14y ago
Text rendering looks horrific here on Linux, too!
- colanderman 14y ago
  Looks beautiful here on Linux. Just make sure to pick good fonts (Sans, Sans Serif, and Sans Mono are solid choices) and that qtconfig-qt4 looks OK.
JohannL 14y ago
The bookmark management, hands down. Other browsers are for testing and sites that don't work well in Opera; while Opera is for organizing all of the things, especially with things like nicknames for bookmarks and created searches. It also has plenty of themes which actually change how much space stuff takes up... hmm, it's kinda like KDE versus Gnome, with Opera being KDE ^^ There may be apps for Gnome to make it more configurable, but that's just not the same...

by cmelbye 14y ago

Tomis02 14y ago

Features.

rrreese 14y ago
Care to expand this? A quick look at the linked page shows a bunch of under the hood improvements that will appeal to web developers, but as a user I remain ignorant of why people use Opera. To be clear I used to use Opera back when they where the only browser with tabs, but that was close to a decade ago.
- nuttendorfer 14y ago
  Download manager, BitTorrent support, very good email application included, feed reader, Opera Turbo speeds up browsing if you are on a slow connection by compressing everything on Opera's servers (optional), integrated IRC client. Opera really is a web suite, not just a browser.
- rplnt 14y ago
  Features that has been there for ages. It's not like they are essential to have in a good browser but once you get used to them it's painful to switch. For me it is configurability (if that's a word). Primarily ability to configure controls out of the box. For keyboard, mouse and mouse gestures. This includes dozens of custom actions, even javascript, all of which can be combined using logical conjunctions. No other browser I tried allows you this, not even close. Configuring the UI is pretty straight forward as well, and if there is anything not available through the UI you can always dig into config files. Some other features it's hard to browse without: global and per-site configuration of: blocked content, pop-ups, javascript, cookies, plugins, on demand plugins, images, custom layouts, .... edit: and back button actually works as expected That's just a small subset of dozens of features I miss in other browsers. I don't use any of those extra apps (reader, mail, torrent, irc, ...) but they don't bother me either. And what I miss in Opera? Switching tabs by their position (alt/ctrl+number in many tabbed applications). That's it. What bothers me is that many sites do not work properly or are completely blocked in Opera. The former is due to low market share of Opera, the latter is because people are dicks (hi google). Just write that it's not supported and I won't call your support line, don't make me change my user agent all the time (luckily I can configure this per-site :P). edit: Totally forgot this but other comment pointed it out: Opera can handle a lot of tabs, no other browser I tried could do this: memory, performance and UI wise.
- Tomis02 14y ago
  Not really. I've told countless people about how Opera really is the best browser, by far, and how people using Chrome and Firefox are stuck in the stone-age of Internet Explorer 6. I'm getting tired to repeat it. Screw it, I'll do a quick run. Depending on how good your computer is, Chrome will buckle (freeze your computer, in my case) sooner or later after you keep increasing the number of tabs, due to the one process per tab design flaw. That does not usually happen with Opera (unless you have some very demanding pages, which doesn't usually happen to me), it will keep going as long as you have the RAM to supply it. Right now opera:cpu shows me a round number of 115 tabs with 1.5 GB RAM usage, plus the plugin wrapper grabbing an additional 400 megs. Given that this particular computer has 12 GB of RAM I think it's very reasonable. Of course, I don't have a rocket computer at home but the performance is very good as well on a mediocre laptop. Now, what good does it do to have 115 tabs if you can't see them or switch between them at your wish? In Chrome you have one line of tabs that keep pushing against another, and at 115 tabs you could not select your tab properly, nevermind reading the tab title. In Opera I just configured my tab bar to wrap to multiple lines and aligned it vertically on the left side. I also have tab groups that work very nicely to minimize unnecessary clutter. I can also turn the tab bar off altogether and move between tabs with ctrl + tab or right mouse button + wheel, or hold ctrl + tab + mouse click. The possibilities for customization are so numerous I can't be bothered to describe them all. Opera is a true browser and it has all these features out of the box without getting in your way. You're a hacker? Where's your curiosity? Explore Opera's features (like mouse gestures, keyboard navigation, and so on) and see for yourself. And by the way, one last thing. The default option for Opera is to restore your tabs from your last browsing session, which was not the case for Chrome and Firefox last time I checked (and if that didn't change it's retarded, although I would understand the reasoning, they don't want to encourage you to keep your tabs open because the browser might buckle under the pressure of 10 open tabs). So really, feel free to keep open as many tabs as you like. You can also use ghostery (an extension) to block all these resource-consuming background scripts, just in case you have reached the limits of your hardware. I have enable 'plugins only on demand', so no Flash player will be loaded without my explicit consent. Again, this is out of the box. Also, content blocker. And so on and so forth.
  - PerryCox 14y ago

okamiueru 14y ago

For me, it is because it simply works straight out of the box, with all the features I use all the time. For me, it is several of the following reasons: * mouse gestures. * the speed dial. * the ease to create custom url-bar searches. * thumbnail images of tabs (to check a potentially nsfw link at work). * in page link or text search using ',' or '.' * the ability to search for links in the sidebar, and select all of them (e.g. to copy to a wget script, etc.) * the ease to customize the content block. ... and probably other stuff, which doesn't come to mind. Also, and this is important: I'm not trying to convince you here. Just pointing out that some will say the exact thing on the switch from Opera to Chrome, Firefox or Safari, with good reasons of their own. Whatever floats your boat. Also, mind you, I have firefox and chrome installed. Firefox I almost never use, and chrome is useful to see shiny WebGL stuff, which has a lot more support. Sometimes also to see new CSS-demos that are broken in Opera (mostly because of lazy developers who don't include the -o- extensions).

ernesth 14y ago

> Opera is much slower than Chrome, at least on my computer It is the contrary on my computer: chrome is painfully slow, whereas firefox is OK and opera is faster. I guess opera is not the best for everyone.

jonpacker 14y ago
I can back that up, it's the same case for me.
aw3c2 14y ago
same here, I would also be very unhappy without opera's instant backward/forward navigation.
- Osiris 14y ago
  Awesome feature. I hate that other browsers ask you to resubmit a form when navigating back. Opera just shows you the cached page that it bad before. Combining that with the mouse flip gesture, browsing is a breeze. In Chrome you have to click BACK or use BACKSPACE (or a mouse with a dedicated nav button). In Opera, I click the right then the left mouse buttons and I'm back at the previous page. Alternate to go back forward.

tintin 14y ago

This might also be a font-issue. Most of the time websites embed different font-types like eot, ttf, woff and svg. But some types lack font-hinting. It depends on the order in the CSS file which supported font browsers will use.

rplnt 14y ago

The scrolling might be due to "smooth scroll" enabled: opera:config#UserPrefs|SmoothScrolling It is (was some time ago at least) disabled by default in Chrome, Firefox and even on linux version of Opera.

antihero 14y ago

Text rendering looks horrific here on Linux, too!

colanderman 14y ago
Looks beautiful here on Linux. Just make sure to pick good fonts (Sans, Sans Serif, and Sans Mono are solid choices) and that qtconfig-qt4 looks OK.

JohannL 14y ago

The bookmark management, hands down. Other browsers are for testing and sites that don't work well in Opera; while Opera is for organizing all of the things, especially with things like nicknames for bookmarks and created searches. It also has plenty of themes which actually change how much space stuff takes up... hmm, it's kinda like KDE versus Gnome, with Opera being KDE ^^ There may be apps for Gnome to make it more configurable, but that's just not the same...