Web Browsers: Part 3: Opera 10
As stated in Browsers: Part 1: Opera 9; I have been testing Opera 10 for the last few weeks.
As with Opera 9, I like it. They have vastly upgraded the interface, and now it is much more pretty. However, they seem to have taken something from Microsoft’s books, making it look very pretty but totally non-functional. It is rather difficult to find many things which I found so easily in Opera 9.
As far as features go, from what I could tell everything that was in Opera 9 is still present. Quickdial is still there, and that was always a welcome feature. I didn’t really get a chance to mess around with the e-mail system in Opera 10, mostly because I didn’t want to screw up my IMAP synchronization. Nor did I get a chance to play with the IRC, Bittorrent, or many other features, but I expect they are much the same as they were in Opera 9, not the best, but at least functional.
The visual aspect of Opera 10, as I previously mentioned, is fantastic. At the top of the screen for tabs, you can pull the section down, and the tabs become a small preview of the page inside of that tab. It isn’t big enough to actually read anything, but at the very least it gives you an idea of what is inside of that tab. Alternitively you can also hover over the tab and it also gives you a preview. Something I discovered quite by accident is that when you have the permanent tab-preview open, if you hover on it, another preview is shown just below your mouse, as it would as if it was another tab. Redundancies of this type are rather annoying.
As with Opera 9, Opera 10 still suffers formatting certain webpages, a problem I have never run into in Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox.
Overall Opera 10 is a decent webbrowser. It isn’t lightning fast, but it does it’s many jobs well.
Up next: Apple Safari 4.
Web Browsers: Part 2: Google Chrome
Google Chrome came out about… a year ago now I believe, in a beta stage. Now it has been released on Windows (XP+ officially, it may work on older systems) as a fully stable browser, which is somewhat true.
I have used Google Chrome off and on ever since then. It has always been relatively stable, though I have had some problems. It seems to be fully compatible with every website that I have gone to, no problems with CSS or Javascript, or flash, or anything that I have encountered.
The visual style is, to me, appealing. It is minimalistic. Everything just makes sense. I love the way that every tab almost looks seems like its own window. Being able to pull the tabs out of the current window, to create a new one, is very seamless. Reordering the tabs is visually appealing as well, to me the visual aspect was definitely thought through.
Unfortunately Google has not officially opened up Firefox-esque addons as was promised. They are available in the “developer” version of the browser (appending -dev into the executable path in a shortcut). I definitely miss my AdBlock+ and NoScript extensions, as well as a few others that are more just personal preference than a practically globally used addon.
One of the biggest things that Google advertised as, pretty much, the main selling point of Chrome, was that each individual tab had it’s own process in Chrome’s own Task Manager. This is excellent, if it worked. I have done a few tests on it, both intentional and unintentional. When browsing with several tabs open I happened upon a website that crashed Chrome. I attempted to access the Chrome Task Manager to no avail, and had to restart the browser completely. This happened each time I ran into a crash-causing website.
Overall I have to rate Google Chrome very high. It is extremely user-friendly, visually appealing, fast, and stable.
The minuses are that it doesn’t have any add-on customization; the ToS was a little weird at first, but they quickly changed that; and also the “each tab has it’s own separate process” draw doesn’t work as intended.
EDIT:
I finally ran into a browser tab actually killing itself and not the entire browser. That was really nice, because I had some kind-of important stuff open!
Also, the browser is now working in Linux! I am using the latest version of Arch Linux using KDE 4.3. I installed Google Chrome through the Arch Users Repository. There are a couple of problems with it, firstly that I have to run it as a super user to be able change any settings. This of course makes it hard to download anything, since anything I do download will be owned by my root account, and I won’t be able to edit it, open it for anything, BUT! At least Google Chrome is out for Linux, and that’s all that matters to me right now.
Web Browsers Part 1: Opera 9
Over the next month or so I will be posting some personal reviews of the most popular browsers: Opera 9, Opera 10, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, KDE Konqueror.
I like Opera. I really do.
About 4 or 5 months ago I was an adamant user of Opera 9. I was pretty excited for Opera 10, though not completely thrilled; I thought the whole facial gestures thing was, well to be frank, retarded. Mouse gestures are bad enough, why would I want to make faces at the computer screen??
So back on topic, I used Opera 9 for, oh lets say six months (that sounds right to me). I like it a lot. It was really nice to have my mail, my RSS feeds, and my web-browser all in one application. Opera link is also pretty cool, you can sync bookmarks, and notes, but not e-mails (I guess that is what IMAP is for, right?). That is really frustrating. I like IMAP, but I want to see the exact same thing in each browser, that wasn’t going to happen. Oh well, it’s still an awesome browser.
I will mention the apps were really bad in Opera 9.
Opera has always been slower than FireFox. That’s just the way it is. It really isn’t too noticeable, until you use it constantly, and you really notice it gets sluggish, especially when loading images, or long pages.
Ultimately that is what made me switch away from Opera 9 back to Firefox. I just love the Fox.
Currently I am trying out Opera 10. After a few weeks usage I will report back on how that works.
Kilo-Tango
Kilo-Tango is pretty much fully operational. The gaming section (http://gaming.kilo-tango.net/) is moving along nicely, and is nearly all set up.
I am very pleased with the results of the community so far, I would prefer to have more people, but it’s only been about a month.