Rhyous

Continued from Not Firefox, Chrome, or IE: Its Opera’s new 10.51 boasts being the fastest browser on earth (Part 1)

Opera, you had promise. I tested you out and you did seem a little faster. I used you all day long.

For the first half of they everything went smooth.

• I loved the zoom feature, and if other browsers have it, it is not as obvious. I liked how every element zoomed. It wasn’t just the text that got bigger, everything got bigger.
• The speed dial feature is nice.

But then things went downhill fast.

• Opera didn’t work with the forum software my company uses. This was a deal breaker in itself, but we are upgrading in a few weeks and the browser should work in the new version.
• Then I tried to download the Voice interface and it just says failed and won’t tell me why.
• I tried to make my book marks toolbar and it wasn’t as easy as I would have liked. I still don’t have one made.
• My brother called and needed me to connect to his computer remotely, but the remote control is initiated at a web page, which didn’t work with Opera, but worked with IE or Firefox. I used IE.
• Don’t ask me why I checked this site today (I am not really a Trekky) but www.startrek.com didn’t work. Then I closed and opened the browser and it started working…that is just odd.
• I could have surpassed and forgotten about these issues with something like IE Tab. I found one but no easy installer, and I am not up for research and tweaking for this review. The lack of an easy install for this feature was the final straw.

Opera has been around a long time, and I am quite surprised that it didn’t work out for me for even a full day.

Not Firefox, Chrome, or IE: Its Opera’s new 10.51 boasts being the fastest browser on earth

This article says: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/can-microsoft-really-build-a-better-browser.ars

Opera 10.50, released a few weeks ago? It’s the fastest browser on the chart. It’s faster even than prerelease versions of Firefox and Chrome, not to mention faster than the public IE9 Platform Preview build

I tried it personally today and I have to say that there were times when it did feel faster to me. But there is a lot of testing to do before I can decide whether to make the jump to using Opera as my primary browser.

According to this article: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/firefox-may-never-hit-25-percent-market-share.ars
Opera only has a 2.35 percent of the market share.

To me there are pros and cons to Opera based on the details above:

Pros

• Lower market share means it is less likely to be a target for hackers as they usually target larger distributions.
• It is the fastest browser.

Cons

• Sites are probably not testing their browsers on Opera.
• Less users could mean less reported issues, less features, less plugin development, etc…

I am going to use Opera for the next week or two as my primary browser and I will post a second review about Opera. I will update this post with a link to it. This article will discuss whether Opera will remain my primary browser and if so, why? If not, why not?

Update: It wasn’t weeks, it was a day: Sorry Opera 10.51, though you’re a fast browser, I had to get rid of you fast: (Part 2)