When Opera 9 came out, I decided to give Opera another shot. After all, it is among the most lightweight browser with one of the faster rendering speeds in the Mac universe. It also has something that most other browsers on Mac OSX lack, good memory control.
Unfortunately, after months of dedicated use, I’ve decided to switch again back to Firefox. Firefox is slower, but at least it’s reliable.
Here’s a list of the reasons I decided Opera still sucks on the Mac:
1. Unstable. And I don’t just mean that it crashes often, but some of its features simply work only sporadically. Take, for example, spell check works only some of the times. Other times (and usually when I needed it the most), the option is just grayed out, unavailable for use. Restarting the browser usually fixes the problem but not always.
2. Weird bugs. This is kind of an extension of the first problem… There are some bugs that show up for no reason; and then they just go away automatically. One of them has to do with clickable links. Sometimes links simply become unclickable for no apparent reason. This is extremely annoying.
3. Not so good ad blocker. In terms of ad blocking, I think Firefox, coupled with GreaseMonkey and Adblock Plus, is still the king — they block out 99% of all my unwanted ads, including those inline underlined ads. Opera has a nice implementation. Unfortunately the execution is still pretty behind in comparison to Firefox. One time it blocked out ALL of the images on Apple Store page, which kind of freaked me out for a second.
4. Opera is still not accepted by some unfriendly sites such as Peerflix. That means I’d have to fire up another browser just to browse those sites and quit again.
Yeah, I know. Four reasons don’t seem like a big deal. But the first 2 reasons alone have annoyed me for a pretty long time. And today when the spell check refused to work again, it was the last draw for me — Opera had to go.
So I am back on the sluggish Firefox. I read the next version is going to be optimized for OSX for sheer speed. I can’t wait!!