 With reads that Opera is out for Ubuntu, which was my first suprise to hear, I needed to figure out the hype about this new face on the scene.
I was reading one of the Lockergnome bloggers reference that Firefox and IE are catching up to Opera. The title threw me off, and some of the referring features mentioned were one's at least was familiar using in Firefox. Prior to his post though, people mentioned faster performance. I didn't think nothing of
The comment, assuming I'd best try before making judgment.
First things first, I downloaded the application right from Opera's website. With a debian package installer, I installed the application. Before I hit install, it mentioned an "older" one was availible in the repositories. I assumed possibly one of my extra repositories had it stored so proceeded installing it.
My first expiernce on my desktop was bad, but not related to the browser, but the flash player while jumping on Youtube. After resolving my problem, it was too late to test it out, so from work used it on my laptop.One of the first things I noticed when bringing up a new tab (Alt T) A speed dial option apeared where I could place some most common websites I visit. That was pretty keen idea.
The performance of te browser I saw on my Latitude d610 Laptop was not much of a noticable improvment though then what I got out of Firefox. I did notice an active tray icon. This reminded me of the Netscape precache icon, which I assume this was simular in that manner. Since I was on wireless, I am sure I'd might see an obvious change if I was wired in. Either way, precaching pages does improve the loadtime and can understand how people would notice a difference.
I noticed that the browser had widgets. Many times when I use certain add ons with Firefox, some were specificly designed for an OS platform. So I would expierence load errors on some of them. I didn't expierence that with the widgets I snagged from Oprah's site. That was nice that I had a seemless expierence.
Web sites with content didn't seem to look bizaar or badly formatted, which was a good thing. Obviously many versions of HTML ver 1.0 and up were reconized with in the browser, which in past expierence using a new browser on the web would be a pain when navigating. My laptop here didn't have any problems with streaming video from Youtube, and obviously used previous downloaded plug-ins associated with default Firefox browser. It was nice. Another avoidence of having to install the plugin's.
I didn't attempt to see if mplayer would kick on with any mov or avi videos online. So I can't tell you if there would be any problems. Generally, I'd say it was a very seemless transistion. My hope is that a automatic bookmark wizard would have apeared to transfer bookmarks over. I am not sure if this may be an option in their other platforms, but never prompted for that "Hey! let's get started!", The only thing that apeared was information in reference to it's Eula. Worth checking out. |
