Opera

My windows machine is running off a bum drive and seeing as to how HDD prices are temporarily ridiculously high at the moment, I've decided to attempt a few workarounds to see if I can continue to use this erratically faulty drive for a couple of more months. The issue with the drive is in itself unknown. It just locks up suddenly with the HDD LED continuously on. Windows continues to be active for a while, but not terribly responsive. Sometimes, the issue sorts itself out after a while. Other times, the system reboots.

I have gotten used to relying on Opera's tab recycle bin feature to reopen closed tabs. However, earlier today, I found myself accidentally closing a tab in Google Chrome, and what's more I had an unfinished forum comment which I had worked on for 20 minutes in said tab. When I saw no recycler icon in the tab bar and no obvious feature in the preferences or options sections, I panicked.

I'm pretty sure that this wasn't happening with the 9.x releases. But, I found that when I middle-clicked in Opera to get the scroll icon and scroll up/down a page, all that happened was that whatever was in my clipboard got pasted into the page, with the page trying to navigate to the clipboard text. In Opera's defence, the paste action is generally the default action across all applications in Linux. However, this also made this behaviour inconsistent across different platforms and even across other browsers on the same platform.

With the advent of the Opera 10 Beta, I highly recommend that users check it out or upgrade to it. The biggest news is that one of my primary gripes, i.e., the lack of inline spell-checking, has been solved.

I've been something of a fanboy of Opera for a long while now. It's quick-loading, has strong caching and doesn't hog memory like Firefox used to. However, with FF cleaning up house for its 3.x family, by fixing all those memory leaks, improving performance by leaps and bounds and introducing those little features (page zooming for e.g.) that make things ever so friendlier, I'm of a mind to switch back to it.

The Flash plug-in for Opera in Kubuntu has been FUBAR-ed and it seems that it's caused due to an Opera bug w.r.t Flash player 9.0.115 which is fixed in the 9.50 betas. However, since Kubuntu etc. are still using 9.27, the only way to fix this issue is to go back to 9.0.48.

It's a bit unsettling how Opera (9.25) starts your download even before you've clicked "Save". For e.g., just now I wanted to download the Windows version of wget and visited the appropriate site and clicked on "download". I didn't click "save" and specify a download folder etc. and switched over to a video I was watching. There was also another download progressing at the same time.

A couple of the guys at work were having this rather inane argument yesterday on which was the better browser - Opera or Firefox.. apparently vi vs. emacs is no longer 'in' any more :S I generally keep away from these ultimately inconclusive arguments, but I thought that I might blog about it..

So here's my take on it (Versions: FF 1.5.0.4 Opera: 9.0). This is something of a draught at the moment:

Firefox plus points:

• Free and Open Source.
• Extensions, extensions, extensions.. the biggest plus point of Firefox.
• Vibrant developer community.
• Second most popular browser out there.