Yes, I've had to take sides in the browser wars: I use a laptop PC running Windows XP when I'm traveling on business, and it's just gotten too easy for malware to hijack it, as I mentioned here. At home in El Paso I'm on a Mac, and so far I've had no problems with Safari, the browser which comes with OS X.
I'd heard of Opera, and tried it on the Mac long ago because of its rumored speed. I didn't notice anything impressive at the time. But earlier this month, I downloaded Opera for the PC and gave it a spin. At first I didn't like it, but that was just a matter of getting used to some new ways of doing things. One of those new ways, to me, was tabbed browsing, which I've come to like. I didn't notice that Opera was any faster than Internet Explorer, but I continued using it anyway because of the security (hijacking) question.
Back home for the Christmas holiday, I downloaded and tried Camino, Firefox, and Opera for the Macintosh. This time it was apparent that Opera was quite faster than Safari and the two Mozilla browsers, Camino and Firefox. I liked it. One thing I especially liked about, in addition to its speed, was that Opera could be set to open from exactly where it last shut down, including two or more pages if I'd had that many open.
Unfortunately, Opera needs that feature, because it possesses another interesting one: it tends to shut down whenever it wants to! I'd noticed a few other rendering instabilities, which I'd for the most part ignored, but those plus the involuntary shutdown feature meant that I'd have to give Opera a pass.
It's a shame, too, because I really did, and do, like Opera -- and there's no cooler name for a browser anywhere -- but that instability was just too annoying.
I'm now sold on tabbed browsing, however, and I've set up Safari to do tabs. The problem with Safari is that now I'm spoiled by Opera's speed. But Camino and Firefox are sprightly enough. Not as fast as Opera, but faster than Safari, so I'm using/testing them.
Next week I'm on the road again and I'll be putting the Windows versions of Opera and Firefox through their paces on the PC. Something has to be better than Internet Explorer, a browser I never disliked until I began getting all sorts of spyware and hijacking attempts (one of which was successful in a major way).
So, what with two anti-spyware applications and five different browsers, this has turned out to be quite a bit more of a season of software than I'd expected. Plus I really need to learn something about setting up an RSS feed for this blog.
Oh, and that trip I'm taking next week? That, too, is for the purpose of learning another piece of software.
Posted by Craig Ceely at December 31, 2004 05:32 PM