Opera

Opera 10 is IMHO the coolest release of the browser since the beginning of the project! It is just perfect!

Re: I guess you get what you pay for
Perhaps you were using the dynamic Qt version (which is often unstable) and an incompatible version of Java ? Opera has been getting more and more stable for me the past 10 versions or so. Currently on 8.0 I am able to keep it running with over 45 tabs open for more than a week at a time without a crash.

USER PID PPID PGID STAT STIME TIME %CPU RSS COMMAND

-----------------------------------------------------------------

raven 3329 624 3329 Ss Apr12 01:06:35 0.5 107680 /usr/lib/opera/8.0-20050316.5/opera

The current date is Thursday, April 21, 2005 at 0013.16 PDT (-0700 UTC)

Perhaps give 8.0 another shot.

Regarding plugins, they work fine for me (Acrobat, Flash, etc.), in fact Flash works far better in Opera than in other web browsers -- the zoom feature not only scales the page graphics and fonts, but also the Flash animations ! Wonderbar.

PDF Conversions
I'm offering my webpage to pdf convrsion utility to all of the browser projects and would love it if Opera accepted. I've built a online file conversion engine which takes public webpages, changes them to pdf docuiments and then e-mails the pdf document to the end user. A running copy can be found at www.2convert.com.

If you want it, let me know.

Charles

I guess you get what you pay for
As of 7.1.0 I am officially in the market for a new browser.
The suck factor has finally incremented past the tolerance
stop and I'm done. This has all the same 'features' as the
6.X seriies (spontaneous crashes, flakey rendering, poor
java and javascript support, poor flash support, poor plugin
support in general), with some new and improved flaws
(S L O W flakey rendering, flakey 'new browser' rules,
download directories must be selectedEVERY SINGLE
TIME. no option for download window to 'pop up' instead
of just creating a whole window. )

I'm done. There are some great features but the pain level is
too high. So long Opera, write when you get it to work.

Re: 'crashes'

> anyone else noticed a disturbing
> tendancy for opera to senselessly crash
> upon viewing any webpage after an update
> is available?

Absolutely. With each successive release in the 6.x series, I've been experiencing more of the sort of stability that made me leave Netscape.

The upside is that Opera keeps plenty of state, so when I restart, I'm back with all of my (dozens) of windows open. However, I distinctly remember it not crashing nearly as much back at 5.x.

I'm also noticing that 6.11 periodically flips out and starts chewing up CPU time like mad, hitting 90+%.

I'm a bit afraid to revert to an earlier version, though, since I'm not entirely sure my bookmarks and other such state would survive the trip back in time.

Perhaps it's time to install a centralized bookmark manager and upgrade my Mozilla install :)