Just Browsing

A Week at the Opera, Initial Impressions

Today we kick off Just Browsing’s ongoing Browser of the Week series. I installed Opera on my MacBook Pro this morning, though I couldn’t cut the Firefox umbilical cord entirely and I’m still using it on my other computer (a Windows XP box). I’ll be delving into some of the more notable Opera features over the course of the week. In the meantime, here are some of my initial thoughts:

• Overall, the product makes a very good impression. Installation was quick and painless. Opera is fast and memory consumption seems reasonable.
• Migration from Firefox could be improved. I would have liked to import all the tabs open in my current Firefox session, but I couldn’t find an option to do so. There is an option to import Firefox bookmarks, but I wasn’t prompted to migrate automatically when I installed Opera.
• The most recent version of the Flash plugin is apparently preinstalled. All of the browsers I’ve tried have a good Flash story, but in this case I didn’t have to do anything when I visited a video site. There was a message about the Flash player loading and a few seconds later the video started.
• The speed dial feature is cool. When you open a new tab, you are presented with nine website thumbnails in a telephone keypad layout. They are initially empty, but it’s easy to configure them to point to specific websites that you visit frequently. This is a great example of using what would otherwise be wasted screen real estate (in Firefox newly open tabs are empty) in a productive way. There is also a search box on the speed dial page, which uses Yahoo! Search by default. (The search box in the upper right hand corner defaults to Google.)
• Changing the default browser is hard on Mac. Bizarrely, you have to do this from Safari’s preferences dialog. I would have expected Opera to offer on install to be configured as the default browser.
• There are two context menu options for opening new tabs, one to open the tab and switch to immediately, the other to open it while remaining in the current tab. Depending on the situation, I tend to prefer one or the other approach, so I appreciate the choice.
• Mouse gestures are built-in and useful (especially for returning to the previous page). I might go ahead and install the relevant addon for Firefox since I have a feeling this is a feature I’m going to miss when I switch back.
• Tab thumbnails appear when you hover over a tab. This might be useful when lots of tabs are open and the full title of each tab is no longer visible in the tab bar.
• The downside of Opera’s relatively small market share is already apparent. Google Reader, for example, doesn’t work quite right. The “Manage Subscription” link which floats at the bottom of the feed sidebar in Firefox isn’t visible at all in Opera. And the scroll bar for the main panel seems to get confused once in a while and displays a bunch of white space at the bottom instead of sizing automatically to the size of the window. I can’t seem to reproduce the problem right now, but I’ll post a screenshot if it reoccurs.
• The thing I miss most (predictably) are Firefox extensions. I don’t actually use that many of them, but I’ve come to depend on some (AllPeers, Flashblock, FireFTP, ForecastFox, Live HTTP Headers). I’ll be looking into what alternatives Opera offers (user scripts, widgets, etc.).
• Despite the many positives, I haven’t seen anything yet that would compel me to consider switching permanently from Firefox.

Update: Turns out that Opera uses the same shared Flash runtime as Firefox, so a virgin install would not have the latest version preinstalled.