Opera on Os X

For the past year and above I had been using Firefox on my iBook. It had been a wonderful browser especially from the users point of view - tabbed browsing, customizable search engines, etc. But of recent, since, both me and my wife are logged on to the iBook simulatneously, there was a pretty noticeable memory hog. Inspite of my hard disk having around 2.5g of space free, Firefox running from both the logins easily consumed more than around 800M. This was pretty huge and also resulted in significant slowdown of the machine. Even the Os X's faster user switching seemed to go slow.

Switching from one application to another, even moving across different tabs on the browser was also painful given the memory hog. I'm a person who generally has atleast 6+ tabs open in a browser - this is the main reason I shifted to Firefox as I didn't want multiple windows open at the sametime - navigating between multiple windows is seriously a big task!!! Opening more tabs on the Firefox - especially with lots of images and lengthy webpages started to eat a lot into the VM and the disk space. Lot of thrashing also took place.

I didn't want to move out of Firefox given that it had a lot of features and also it had a nice pop-up blocker that I found very useful. But I didn't have more real estate on my iBook to expand the RAM - already my extra RAM slot was filled up with a 256M. Neither do I have an idea to upgrade my system to a recent config.( Honey, I need money!!!). I checked out few sites that gave a reasonable thumbs up to Camino and Opera.

I opted for Opera browser after going through the comparisons. I downloaded the latest Opera 9 for Os x and started using it from today morning. It seems sleek, it starts faster than a Firefox. Lot of customization was also available. I liked the graceful integration of widgets in the browser - but i think it needs to grow up significantly if it has to catch up with Tiger's Dashboard widgets / Yahoo widgets. Also, the ability to open links in background tab is a cool feature. The best I liked was adding search engines and the mouse gestures.

To add a search engine (similar to Firefox integrated search), you go to any site that has a search box, ctrl-right click inside the search box and you have the option to add a search engine. This seems to be a great idea compared to what firefox offered - you have to go to the extensions website to get your search engine on to your system. Mouse gestures was cool - but I haven't yet explored the idea fully.

Day one was great - but I had to wait & see if I can go with Opera / have to revery back to Firefox.