I tried Opera for a day

No, Dad, regardless of the title, I’m not talking about Wagner or Puccini or that kind of opera… sorry. But with Firefox 3 coming out yesterday, I figured I’d be the contrarian and give that other browser a try; Opera was promising more features with version 9.5, and I hadn’t played with Opera in quite a while. So yesterday was Opera trial day. Mind you, I’m a quite-happy Firefox user, but I figured I should give it a try.

My first impression when starting Opera: It’s pretty. I like the UI, though admittedly I’m a sucker for new, shiny toys. But it looks good. And the rendering looks good, and it seems fast. So far, so good. Sadly, on my list of comments/thoughts about Opera, that’s pretty much the end of the good things.

Then there’s my list of annoyances. First stop: Gmail. I keep Gmail open all the time, and use the Google Talk function embedded in Gmail as my primary chat engine. It seems to be the only thing that’ll function here at work. Well, the GTalk panel doesn’t even load in Gmail. Quick Google search, and ah, I can use the &nobrowsercheck option in the URL. Then it shows up. Cool!

But it ends up there’s a reason Gmail doesn’t load chat in Opera; it doesn’t work. You can’t initiate a chat with anybody from the chat panel, it won’t pop up the little window. If someone else starts the chat, then you can pop it up, but you can’t pop it out; it’s stuck within the main Opera window. No good to me.

Another Google search provides my next try for GTalk: load it up in the “Panel” aka sidebar. It loads up better there, but again you can’t pop out chat sessions; they’re all stuck within the panel. Given that I like to have more than one session going at once at times, this just won’t work for me. Bummer.

Oh, and as long as I’m talking about searches - one weird thing: the hotkey to get up to the search box is different between Opera and Firefox/IE. FF/IE both use CTRL-K to put your cursor in the search box. Opera uses CRTL-E. Would it have been that hard to stay consistent?

Firefox users who check out Opera quickly notice that there are no extensions for Opera like there are for Firefox. Opera proponents quickly point out that some of the most popular “extended” functionality in Firefox is built-in to Opera natively; they cite Mouse Gestures and Content Blocking as examples. Now, Mouse Gestures I have to give them. I love using Mouse Gestures and they work well in Opera. Content Blocking… not so much.

I’m hooked on Adblock for Firefox. It just works. The net it casts for ads catches most all the ads without filtering out the pictures I want to see. Opera has a built-in “content blocker”, but it’s not very user-friendly. Right-click on a blank area of the screen, and choose Block Content. Then it highlights all the blockable items on the screen. Then you have to click on the ones you want to block. By default, it blocks everything from a pretty high level in the domain the ad is hosted. This is fine if the ad you’re blocking is from an adserver, but for some of the sites I visit, the ads are hosted right on the domain… which means Opera ends up blocking ALL the images from that domain, including the ones I want. Yes, you can fine-tune it, but it requires opening up another dialog, and it’s a pain. I’ll take the Adblock extension for Firefox any day.

Other little annoyances: I’ve grown to love the Remember The Milk extension for Firefox that embeds my to-do list into my Gmail screen. Not available in Opera. The drag-and-drop arrangement for my fantasy baseball team in Yahoo Fantasy Sports? Not available in Opera. It’s little things like that here and there that make my choice easy.

This morning with some relief I clicked on my Firefox shortcut and was happy to see FF version 3 loading up. This is a browser worth keeping.