I’ve been using Firefox for quite a while now and really like it. But I found out that the Opera browser is now free. So I tried it.
I have tried Opera before, but never liked it all that much. It seemed a bit fussy about certain things and didn’t display certain pages. It claimed to be stricter about web standards. maybe that was why. But the main annoyance was the ads in the free version that you could only remove by buying it. buying it wouldn’t be so bad, but I like the free browsers better anyway.
But they have made the latest version free. Apparently, they are satisfied with making a bit of money on Google referrals like Firefox does. They have put a Google search text box in the toolbar just like Firefox.
So, I’m trying it out. It seems very nice and they claim it loads pages faster then the competition. So far it seems to be just as nice as Firefox and I hardly notice the differences. I haven’t noticed any weird renderings of web pages yet either.
As a web author, I like to double-check my sites in other browsers, so it’s worth having Opera around to use. We’ll see how much I use it. I don’t know if it has any plugins like Firefox/Mozilla, but the RSS feed subscriptions work really well. That’s something I’ve never even played with in Firefox. (I prefer to use the email client Thunderbird for that. Or FeedDemon.)
You can try Opera yoourself at http://www.opera.com/
