Opera 9.6

Choosing a new browser.

On my home computer, every time I ran Facebook, the computer would stop talking to the modem.  After much diagnosis of the Ethernet connection and the modem, I finally discovered that the trouble was with Internet Explorer.  More and more IE has been causing my computer to hang.  The only cure is a reboot and then it is always a race to get things done before it needs to reboot again.

Lots of people recommended Fire Fox.  I gave it a try but many web sites I use just don’t look right in Fire Fox.  And some just refuse to work at all.

On my home computer Google Chrome was not an option since I am running Windows 2000.  Normally W2k is much more stable than XP but not with whatever the latest update to IE was.

My Internet connection at home is via satellite.  During most times of the day it is pretty slow.  Better than dial up but not really the broadband they claim it is.  I still consider it a low bandwidth connection.  So I did a search for low bandwidth browsers.  That is when I discovered Opera.

Opera loads web pages at least twice as fast as IE on my Hughes net service.  It has taken me a day to get used to the differences but I am really liking Opera so far.

My old W2k version of IE did not offer tabbed browsing but Opera does.  And the tabs work like I expect them to – not like the IE tabs that still sometimes opens up another memory hole instead of a new tab.

I love the way the pages load also.  I can actually start reading an article before all the junk loads.  With IE, it would often display a blank page until all the ads loaded.  It was really annoying to wait several minutes for  page to load only to realize it was not of interest.

I tested Google Chrome on my computer at work.  It has XP.  I like Chrome much better than IE.  Chrome seems just a little zippier on some web pages.  Especially Googles’ pages that I use a lot like gmail and adsense.   I assume Google has optimized these pages for their own browser.

I found a couple of sites that don’t seem to load right with Chrome.  My godaddy email program is one.  I had to use IE to send mail.  I could read mail fine but not send.

I am now using Oprea 9.6 on both computers.  I really like the crisp feel and quick loading of pages.  I just finished setting up the spell checker.  I liked IE spell better but I am sure I will get used to this one.  I have also discovered that the Spell checker will not work inside this wordpress window so I have to use the wordpress spell checker that I don’t like at all.

So for now, the winner is Opera.  But I will keep looking for other options.

2 Replies to “Opera 9.6”

  1. Hi

    Yes, I use Opera too. I’ve found it to be faster than everything else, tho’ I haven’t yet tried Chrome.

    Just a comment. If you’re using Windows 2000, is your PC oldish? Why I ask is that my 800Mhz, 256mb ram, 10gb harddisc laptop on XP was really struggling…, very slow to surf.

    In the end I changed to Linux… got hold of the latest Ubuntu linux release in its i386 alternate version for older computers and installed that as the operating system. Then I installed Opera.

    And I now use this, with my USB mobile broadband dongle. This kind of mobile brodband, in UK, is not brilliant if you’re in a weak signal area, and this was part of the reason why I chose to do just about anything that wasn’t too expensive to improve performance.

    XP would regularly hang up, and Internet Explrer notorious for it. With Linux just doesn’t seem to happen, and no need for all the anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall stuff that you need on Windows.

    rgds
    Andrew

    PS Why am i here? ( no not the metaphysical question). You responded to my Yahoo question on coolant leaks. As you can see if you click on link here, I run a liitle company, and my question was a bit of market research to get other people’s impressions of what is around.

    Thank you for response
    rgds
    Andrew

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