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.

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