This wasn’t the post I was going to write tonight, but whilst double checking my facts (What? Come on, no on fact checks these days!) I discovered that the problem I wanted to write about was in fact limited to the one browser that I had been using to at the time – Opera.
I’ve been using Opera as my primary browser for a long time, since version 3 in early 1998. Back then it was like a breathe of fresh air compared to Netscape and Internet Explorer – so much faster, so more more secure, so many customisations possible. Subsequent releases added features that have gone on to be adopted by almost every other browser.
But in the last year or so, something has gone a bit wrong. I now find myself using Firefox to read Gmail at home (but, oddly, not at work) because neither of the two ajax powered interfaces work reliably in Opera. Likewise I post to this blog using Firefox because the plugin I use for crossposting to Live Journal breaks the ‘write post’ page interface in Opera. If I’m trying to geocode a batch of photos in Flickr then Opera will often hang or refuse to display the maps.
The problems are not consistent (as I said, I can use Gmail at work but not at home) and can’t really be pinned down to a fault with either the browser itself, the coding on the sites or my set up. It’s just a combination of all three which is making Opera increasingly unreliable when it comes to Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).
Look at the release notes for recent versions of every major and you’ll see that performance, especially RIA performance, is a major goal at the moment. Opera is rightly famed for its overall performance and speed on normal web pages but it seems to me that the performance with ajax requests is lagging behind other browsers.
Will I switch to Firefox anytime soon? I doubt it. I have ten years worth of experience with Opera – I know its quirks and secrets and it has so much that I need available straight out of the box – how many Firefox addons would I need to do the same? Is there even an addon that replicates something as simple as Opera’s “paste and go” function?
The fat lady isn’t singing yet; but she is warming up, just in case.
frustrated
I’m getting quite into Google Chrome at the moment – probably that means I’m some kind of corporate moron, but there ya go. I still use Firefox a lot, but on my crapped out Windows XP boxes, Chrome seems to load up in about a fifth of the time.
A large portion of Mozilla’s funding comes from Google. So Chrome vs Firefox really isn’t a matter of corporate moron-ness. I think Chrome is interesting and has some nice features but so far it’s too unreliable to use – I get a lot of errors and even crashes when using it.