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Wednesday, October 6, 2010

I'm trying out Opera Web Browser again

I'm trying out Opera Web Browser again. I haven't really used it more than a few times in the last 5 years. But, Opera has been Popping up in the Tech Blogs allot lately and it's supposed to be really fast. Well, I didn't find it to be all that fast... I surfed around a bit on a few of my favorite Sites, including my own web site with my MP3 Music Downloads and Players DonSongs.com (http://donsongs.com/). My first page with a one song player and a Youtube video loaded pretty darn fast. I was able to watch Videos without having to manually install Flash. That was real nice!:) But after that it was all down hill. My music players took way too long to load. Then I went to, http://zap2it.com/ and it never did completely load correctly. Now, to be fair, this happens on that site sometimes and it has been happening allot lately. But, the thing is, the plain page with just some text, links and Pics loads allot faster in Firefox when this happens. I guess I should have already mentioned... I'm running Fedora 13 and Firefox 3.6.10 on my System. Next I went to http://hackaday.com/. It took way too long to load the home page. Then I saw an interesting article that I haven't read yet, http://hackaday.com/2010/10/05/bronze-casting-with-makerbot/. It loaded much faster, more like I wold have expected from a "Fast" Web Browser. From there I went to a link in the Article, http://www.foundry101.com/new_page_7.htm and it loaded pretty well. This site is mostly just Text and Pics though. So, My take on the new Opera 10.62's Speed! Not so impressed. Besides the lack of Promised Speed, and I have 14.78mbps Download and 2.05 Upload Speeds on two different testing Sites right now in Opera...

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
 
http://www.speedtest.net/

[URL=http://www.speedtest.net][IMG]http://www.speedtest.net/result/980028519.png[/IMG][/URL]



Notice that none of my links here, are actually links? Well that's because when you copy and paste from Opera into Thunderbird e-mail which is my favorite e-mail App for 5 years running... You can't use the ctrl-v keyboard short cut as I am accustom to doing. Nor can you use the normal paste from the Edit menu. You have to use Paste Without Formatting, resulting in a Text only Paste into your e-mail. What a Royal Pain!:O This alone would stop me from using Opera for any serious Web Surfing. I use the "e-mail this page" feature constantly to Post things I find on the Web to my Blog. And the e-mail this page feature didn't work either. Not until I manually added Thunderbird into the Opera Setup. I took me 3 tries to even find the place where you could do that. And it's lucky I know how to manually add an App by typing its command line name into the Advanced area. In this case it was easy, just "thunderbird". Or the e-mail this page feature would not be working for me at all. Another thing, I love to just hold down Ctrl and click on a link in Firefox to open a Page in a New Tab. I do this always without thinking about it. At first I thought this feature was working. But alas:O I just had my fingers in the wrong position and was hitting the Shift key instead. That works, not Ctrl:O You may be able to change that setting. But now I just don't care any more... I may open up Opera from time to time if something isn't working well in Firefox. But then again that's what I have Chrome for;)

Welcome to Opera

Opera 10.62 is here! Our best version of Opera yet gives you great features that make the Web wonderful, all in a package that looks beautiful and refined. Discover our passion for making great browsers by experiencing the speed and capabilities that Opera offers.
Get started
Try something new
Get a mobile browser
Why Opera?
New in Opera 10.62

Opera has reached an even higher performance score, with security and stability updates.
For more information, see the changelogs.
New in last, major version (Opera 10.60):
Our further-optimized JavaScript engine is over 50% faster than in Opera 10.50.
Search suggestions for selected providers help you find results more easily.
Enhanced support for advanced web standards such as HTML5 and WebM video is now included.
Opera can prompt you to share your location, making geolocation-supporting websites more useful.
Opera 10.62 feature map

Move your mouse pointer over the red dots below to learn about exciting features of Opera.

Go there...
http://www.opera.com/portal/startup/

Don

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