Given that Opera is now free (as in beer) I’ve been giving the new beta version a try at work. After all, it’s fast, it’s small and everyone sings its praises, so I thought it was about time I gave it a spin.
Opera goes for the Netscape approach – squeeze in a mail client, news & RSS reader and the kitchen sink. Oh, and a browser. I’ve never been comfortable with this approach – I prefer the unixy approach of interoperable tools that do one job but do it very well. And my feeling is that Opera suffers because of this. The RSS & news reader is mediocre, the mail client is gathering dust due to the requirement to use the apalling Lotus Notes at work (or the Outlook connector for Domino) and the browser is quirky. Yes, it’s a beta (beta two), but it does has a habit of sitting and waiting for connections, instead of actually loading them. A quick touch of the refresh button will fix this, but it is vexacious. Add to that the instability (Slashdot’s new and rather padded design kills it nine times out of ten) and general incompatibility with various sites and I’m back to Firefox.
Still, competition is good and Opera 9 is a vast improvement over earlier versions. Should they iron out the stability and connection problems it should be a very nice addition and a viable option for a main browser. And, for the keen, there’s always the nightly builds.
