Washington Post suggests installing Opera and Firefox on your family’s computer this Thanksgiving
10 CommentsPublished November 20th, 2007 3:14 PM EST By Daniel Goldman
The Washington Post’s technology columnist Rob Pegoraro has some tips for this Thanksgiving holiday season. In one of his tips, he suggests installing the Opera and Firefox browsers on your family’s computers.
From the Washington Post:
“Hey, could you take a look at the computer when you get a second? It’s been acting a little strange lately.”
“If you’re one of your family’s primary sources of tech support, you’ll probably hear some variation of that request this weekend.”
“I suggest… the Opera and Mozilla Firefox browsers (use Opera, not Firefox, on a older, slower machine)”
On the Mac side, he surprisingly omits the Opera browser. I’m not sure if that was intentional or whether he’s not aware that Opera runs on the Mac too.
So there you go. When visiting your family this Thanksgiving, do them a favor and give them a better browser.
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Not having run Opera on a Mac myself, I’d imagine the omission was harmless. Any tech columnist worth his salt will advocate against using IE, which is the default browser for Windows. This is not the case on a Mac, so the need to advocate alternative browsers is not great.
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BAMAToNE, but he did mention Firefox for the Mac.
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Perhaps he doesn’t know afterall.
He didn’t mention Safari, either. Maybe he’s just not a Mac guy!
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My first thought was that’s because Opera before 9.5 doesn’t feel quite right on Mac, but then Firefox before 3 is even worse, and both do fine in most recent versions.
Mac OS X has even bigger choice than Windows, with OmniWeb, Shiira, Camino and stable version of Safari.
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kL
Do not forget the excelent – but slower than Opera – iCab
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Opera 9.5 needs a new theme on OS X. It needs one that can directly integrate into Tiger and one of Leopard (I mean one that’s based on Safari’s theme, not some crappy concoction like the one in 9.5’s alpha build). Also, for some reason, Opera 9.5 takes 20-30 seconds to open now and I have no ideas as to why.
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DMXell, the more you customize Opera, the more configuration files it has to load into RAM… from site-specific settings, to content blocker, to toolbar setup, custom menus, newsfeeds, bookmarks, the new address bar site history feature, etc. My fresh install of Kestrel was faster than it is now–but the tradeoff for having custom search.ini and everything else makes the extra seconds worth it.
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…The only real things I customized were the toolbar setup and theme…. In which case is the same things I customized in older versions and they load up much faster. OS X has always had a bad port, 9.5 is just a joke porting-wise in my opinion. It doesn’t have a faster start-up time, it’s far slower. Even 9.4 Alpha was faster than the current Beta. They did something wrong.
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Considering some of the lingering performance issues with Opera on Unix based operating system, I’m not surprised that he omitted Opera for Mac.
While I’ve never tried Opera on a Mac (I avoid those things like the plague), it’s performance in Linux isn’t very good. I imagine that, once Kestrel is final, many of those issues will be worked out. Unfortunately, at the moment, I still see a lot of slow-downs on Linux that never happen in Windows.
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Perhaps we could start a whole new campaign. This Thanksgiving, present Opera for at least one friend/relative.