Around 4 years ago, I discovered Opera. I think it was around version 5? Free version had ad space at the top, or you could pay around $30 for a licensed copy. I fell madly in love and over time bought 3 licenses. Sure, some sites didn’t work quite right (IE specific stuff usually), but it was damned fast and I loved the tabbed browsing. After a while a newer version came out and when faced with an upgrade fee, I went back to Internet Exploder.
A year or so passes and then I got wind of Firefox. Don’t recall which “dot” release I started using it full time, but it was early on in the development cycle. So I’ve been using it for quite a while with just a brief break of a couple weeks while I checked out the Internet Explorer 7 beta. I wrote a bit about it either on this Wordpress blog or my previous one. In general it had some nice improvements but yet had a ways to go imho. Back to Firefox I went.
I was excited to see FF 1.5 come out this week (along with all the other geeks-with-blogs). I even had it downloaded from mozilla before the announcement page went up (shhh… don’t tell ‘em at work!). And while I’m happy to finally be able to move tabs around, the big 1.5 event was really a non-event. And, to be honest, it still seems to use a lot of memory.
Opera’s up to 8.x and has a free/no-ads version now. Faster than ever.
So the memory thing got me thinking today. I opened Firefox 1.5. Set 3 tabs up, checked memory. Started Pandora up — and realized where a lot of memory goes. I’m gonna blame Flash 8 for the moment. Minimized FF and started up Opera. Opened same 3 tabs. not a big diff, maybe 10MB less memory usage. (50′ish vs 60′ish which still seems like a lot /shrug). Started Pandora — yep, same deal. Suddenly I’m pushing 100MB. Holy crap. But then… I minimized Opera. not closed, minimized. And the memory usage dropped to 2MB. Minimized Firefox and noted no memory change whatsoever. Ok… pop Opera back up and memory usage goes up, but nowhere near as high as it had been. So what did I learn? Dunno… but both browsers use a lot of memory, however if you periodically minimize Opera and then restore it you seem to free up some memory. This doesn’t appear to work with Firefox. How interesting…
Then I looked closer at Opera’s Feed Reader and promptly fell in love. Sure, I can’t do Netvibes.com with opera, but the Feed reader it has built in is pretty sweet. So… I’m slowly migrating over to Opera full time for a bit. Yep, I’m fickle. 
Of course, I have to balance this with the fact that Opera doesn’t do extensions like Firefox does — and there are some things I’ll definitely still use FF for (see yesterday’s post about extensions).
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November 30th, 2005 
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