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by karatchov 6021 days ago
I'm a long time user of Opera. Always surprised why it is very underrated.

Just for the record : * Opera is and was the fastest browser on limited memory/cpu machines * Opera is the most user friendly browser, it has always been so. (tabs, sync, speed dials, quick preferences, full zoom, email client, irc, skins, notes, downloader (btw, opera has the best "builtin" browser downloader ever, you can actually open files while downloading), history search (yes, opera's history search is the best), debugger and countless of small other useful details & features)

This browser is simply a treasure, yes I have tested every other browser and I keep a copy of FF with a bunch of plugins.

3 comments

Chrome comes very close. Its interface is actually cleaner than Opera's. I used to use Opera, but now I'm using Chrome. This new Opera has a better interface that leaves most screen space for the actual website, much like Chrome. Maybe I'll switch back to Opera.
chrome is taking the good path but its hard to stop some of the opera habits, including F4, F12, "/", past&go, direct search in Wikipedia/ebay
Exactly! It was so tough for me to change from Opera to chrome. But chrome is much more minimal and the faster load time was enough of a killer feature for me to switch. But this version is pretty impressive.
Not only that, according to this: http://www.geektechnica.com/2009/12/move-over-chrome-opera-n...

Opera even beats the webkit nightly in sunspider benchmark.

On windows. It makes a lot of sense to specify an OS in these cases.
I did a benchmark with Opera 10.50 alpha Chrome 4 dev and Safari 4. While the numbers not the same, Opera is still faster than Chrome and Safari. I didn't try webkit nightly because chrome dev outforms webkit nightly in my previous tests.

You can check it yourself.

> Opera is and was the fastest browser on limited memory/cpu machines

I used Opera 5 on my 50 MHz 486 when no other browser was truly up to the task. Continued using it on other machines until Safari 2 hit on the Mac.

I've always thought that Opera was by far the best browser out there, but Safari integrates so well with Mac OS X and ends up being quite good with SafariStand and Saft (now using Glims). I might go back to Opera someday though.