Solo Technology

Just a quick followup from this morning’s post on Opera 9 beta. In short: I freakin’ love it. I’ve used it as my primary browser all day long and have been enjoying it. Why? Well, let me hit a few of the high points:

1. Sure, I’m a tab freak. And we all presumably know the tricks about “middle-click” a link to get it open in a new tab, right? In opera, if you go to the new tab, read it and then close it you return back to the originating tab. Cool.
2. Tabs have their little “x”s right there on the tab. I love that.
3. Widgets are nifty. Very much like what you get with Yahoo! Widget Engine.
4. Pretty much every site I tried today worked.
5. Vroom - rendering pages is still zippy.

What’s not so great?

1. Minor, but the wysiwyg editor for the blog isn’t too keen about working with Opera. It kinda works but forgets to wrap lines and stuff…
2. While I kinda like the Widgets, I wouldn’t mind being able to turn them off. For the life of me, if that’s an option I’m not finding it!
3. I’m not so sure about the memory footprint.

5 Responses to “Opera 9 Beta Followup”

1. Rich G. on April 20th, 2006 5:50 pm
   

   And the tab behavior on closing one was what drove me away from the beta. I don’t want to go to the originating tab. I like the firefox way that takes me to the one to the right. I open several files sequentially and I want to read them that way… Not go back to the page that I started from. What’s the perk to opening multi-tabs if I keep going back to the original every time I close one?

2. chris on April 20th, 2006 6:04 pm
   

   For what it is worth, I’m pretty sure it can be tweaked under Preferences -> Advanced Options -> Tabs.

3. Anthony on April 20th, 2006 7:12 pm
   

   You can switch widgets on and off by pressing F6. (It’s under the Tools menu.)

4. chris on April 20th, 2006 7:22 pm
   

   Hey Anthony, I found the F6 thing earlier today, but wasn’t sure if that really “turned off” widgets or just hides ‘em. Do you know? When I hit F6 they pop up so quickly that I kind of suspect they’re already loaded and waiting.

   Not a major annoyance, per se, but definitely something I’m curious about.

5. Rich G. on April 21st, 2006 3:16 pm
   

   He’s not telling you that he’s curious because he’s a footprint/memory monitoring savant.
   I wouldn’t be surprised if he could tell us the difference in memory usage between classic and xp themed desktops lol.
   The version of the beta I used there wasn’t away to adjust tab behavior when I closed it that I could find. I kvetched about that lol.

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