And you just won’t find me using it, other than for a bit of testing. It is a shame, I can remember a couple of years ago when Opera was the best thing since bread. Not just sliced bread, bread. A wonderful thing. It genuinely did change the way I browsed, introduced me to keeping masses of tabs open all the time, all sorts of things.
However, it just didn’t move on. I hadn’t used it in ages, and so I came back to it to try out the beta. It runs like a dog, in terms of loading pages. I keep hearing how it is fast, well, it just isn’t firefox. It just doesn’t load a page as fast for me. I do use Fasterfox and Adblock, which may be a part of it, but I got really bored waiting.
It is utterly true that many of Firefox’s best features have come from or borrowed from Opera, however they are in my browser of choice now, and work better. That is the advantage that the development work done en masse on Firefox has brought. Opera stuck to its old business model for far too long, and fell far far behind. It is, on the desktop, a dying browser. I’ve seen usage drop from almost 10% to well below 1%, whilst Firefox has gone exactly the other way. It is the best on mobiles at the moment (and I use it there), but Mozilla has a mobile browser on the way, and their brand alone could cause Opera big problems in that market as well.
So much as I would like to like Opera, it isn’t going to happen.
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