I have used Opera as a browser for pretty exactly ten years. That’s a long time, and although it was not always the best supported browser (in fact it got pretty much neglected by web designers around the world), at least it was the best, the fastest and it had unparalleled cross-platform support.
Most of the goodies, that we now take for granted, originated in Opera. Just think of tabs, sessions, crash recovery, mouse gestures, bookmark synchronization, …
Opera is still a good browser, but the Linux version has been pretty much behind for more than a year, and it still leaks memory. With a big session of maybe 15 tabs it starts out using 20% of my main memory, and after a while it consumes 40%, and then it gets noticeable and I have to restart the browser. OK, that’s normally after a week or two, but still.
Firefox is not an alternative. It has all features that I need, but it is too slow, especially with big sessions. So what?
Google Chrome was the answer. It is not yet as polished as Opera, its extensions are not yet as sophisticated as those for Firefox, but we’re getting there. Most important though, it is much faster on Linux, faster in GMail (small wonder 🙂), and it consumes much less memory.
Of course I’ll try Opera when the next version comes out, but I am not likely to switch back.
The image is a bit of chrome from Friday morning. It’s Sunday now, I’m on the train back to Vienna and instead of taking photographs, I have spent this Sunday cooking. Not bad either 😄
The Song of the Day is “New Company” from Solomon Burke’s 2010 album “Nothing’s Impossible”. Good stuff! Hear it on YouTube.