Laurabelle's Blog

I've used Opera in the past, but I was not completely won over. Partly it was the advertising; mostly I was just happy with whatever I was using at the time (probably Firefox in one of its previous incarnations as Phoenix or Firebird).

Now that Opera is free-as-in-beer, I've decided to give The Other Proprietary Browser another shot. I have to admit that I am decidedly impressed by their Linux download options; not only can I get Opera packaged for my distribution, they distinguish between releases and offer package versions with the proper dependencies for each release. Very sweet.

I was impressed by their attention to detail, but I have to admit that if they hadn't offered at least one Debian package, I might not have bothered to give Opera another run. I don't have time to mess around with tarballs or any other nonsense.

I had no problems installing the package, though something's funny with the dependencies. When I started the application, it complained about needing Motif, but libmotif3 (which is available) doesn't show up in aptitude under Recommends for the opera package. I don't know why not. We'll see if it complains again on start-up.

Opera looks pretty spiffy so far. I've had to tweak some of the styles on niceperson.org; I never tested my site in Opera, because I didn't have it installed. (Well, I might as well fess up; I was lazy.) Other than that, I've just been playing with widgets and figuring out how things work.

One thing I have noticed is that Opera seems a bit faster than Firefox, at least for startup. This is good. However, the slowness of Firefox may well be caused by all the extensions I've added, all of which provide some functionality that I don't want to give up, now that I've got it.

I suspect that I will stay with Firefox for primary browsing, but it's good to have Opera around for testing purposes. Props to Opera Software for ditching the ads; it may well bring them a larger market share in these days of Internet Explorer losing popularity and Firefox falling victim to a few high-publicity security bugs. Three cheers for application diversity!