Thursday, October 18, 2007

Opera: First impressions

So last night I had a rush of blood to the head and decided to download Opera- the web browser.

I am an avid fan of Firefox and last night I came to see why....

Opera was cool but there were key things which I found annoying different. For one thing everything was in a different place, from the refresh button to the load bar. Now I know you can get skins and all sorts to jazz up the look of the browser but for first time users like me there wasn't much I could relate with to make me actually want to move from Firefox. You can also supposedly customise Opera a lot...damned if I could see how though...maybe I was being stupid...

One other annoying thing was the fact that when you mouse over a link (say, in YouTube) it doesn't give you the link's title only the link's web address which can be really long and un-informative.

Opera also has tiny toolbar buttons- just like IE and one of the many reasons I HATE IE- what is up with that? I like to be able to find everything with my peripherally vision and not have to hunt out the damn thing to click on it- again, this could be solved with a skin? I am not inspired enough to try it!

The way the tabs are handled are also strange and quirky- for example there are above the address bar rather than below it which pisses me off having just used FireFox. It seems so much more sensible to have the tabs closest to the main window...I mean you are viewing everything there! Maybe there is a Firefox skin for Opera! lol!

When opening a new tab the tab says "blank page" for about 3 seconds before deciding to load the page you requested, that is just retarded in my mind- it makes it look like there is a lag time and lag in anyone's language is bad bad bad...especially for an online gamer like me hehe!

Other than that Opera is what it is: a browser- the "most compatible" browser out there.

It didn't inspire me, blow the back of my head out or even remotely prompted me to even contemplate moving from FireFox (but I will keep it anyway cos I want to use it to test my web pages out on it hehe).

Over and out for now

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