Back to Opera
Posted 4 months ago (17/04/08 3:30pmGMT) by Alex | 375 views (Popularity: 19%).Tagged with crash, firefox beta, opera, terrible, unstable and filed under
Right now, I’m browsing the web with Opera. I don’t paticularly like Opera, I think it’s pretty ugly, and almost no Google services work with it. But on the upside it’s quick. And most importantly, right now, it works.
Internet Exploder I wrote off for everything but testing web-pages a long time ago. When IE7 came out it confirmed everything I didn’t like about it: clunky, under-featured, sluggish and it makes web-pages look horrible.
Safari is so ugly it’s not worth a mention, and dubious Ajax behaviour ruled it out.
Mozilla Firefox has it’s foibles, but with add-ons like Firebug, and a good mix of standards support as well as Google powered services working on it, it was ideal. Well, kinda. The hitch?
I just couldn’t be dealing with a browser that chomped it’s way through 300,000k of memory (when I only had 512mb plugged into my machine). I knew that Opera could run off about 6k (and a damn site quicker, too). I’d read FF3 had about a gazillion memory leaks plugged, so I thought, “I’ll install a BETA”.
It was BETA5, and after that many goes, I thought it might actually work. How wrong I was.
True, it used way less memory. Start-up was still slow. There were some good features, but it knocked out all the add-ons I depend on. And most annoyingly, it crashed all the time Like, all the time..
Loads of tabs, no tabs, Gmail, about:blank, flash, no-flash, plugins, no-plugins. Any which way, it just falls over all the time. The Feedback Agent (which never really worked for FF2) still didn’t work, and so the good folks developing Firefox don’t get the reports that my web browser has a life of about 4 minutes before crashing out.
Firefox 2 has just released another update, 2.0.0.14. I knew when enough was enough. More memory leaks than a sieve, it still worked. Right?
Problem: Firefox 3 crippled my profile. Firefox 2 wont even run, it just crashes (or hangs) on start-up. Can I be bothered creating new profiles, transferring settings, installing add-ons, wasting time in the process just to get online? Nope.
All in all: dreadful. So it’s back to Opera.
2 Responses to “Back to Opera”
By Asa Dotzler on Apr 18, 2008 | Reply
I’d wager that creating a new profile in Firefox 3 would solve all of your problems. A new profile and a new install of Firefox 3 would offer to migrate all your settings from Opera and you’d be off to the races in the fastest, leanest, and most powerful and extensible browser in the world
But I’m a partisan
- A
By Alex on Apr 26, 2008 | Reply
I did give that a stab- but to no avail!
I soldiered on with a new profile for a while, re-entering passwords, installing plug-ins, but still the same-old crash crash crash.
I suspect Mozilla will be forced to propose beta 6. Or even back to Alpha releases.