Comments on: Washington Post suggests installing Opera and Firefox on your family’s computer this Thanksgiving

By: Cyro

Cyro — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:42:46 +0000

Perhaps we could start a whole new campaign. This Thanksgiving, present Opera for at least one friend/relative.

By: GT500

GT500 — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 05:18:44 +0000

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.

By: DMXell

DMXell — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:43:12 +0000

…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.

By: IceArdor

IceArdor — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:39:37 +0000

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.

By: DMXell

DMXell — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:34:06 +0000

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.

By: Steve Barker

Steve Barker — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:18:39 +0000

Do not forget the excelent - but slower than Opera - iCab

By: kL

kL — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:10:16 +0000

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.

By: BAMAToNE

BAMAToNE — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:30:54 +0000

Perhaps he doesn’t know afterall.

He didn’t mention Safari, either. Maybe he’s just not a Mac guy!

By: Daniel Goldman

Daniel Goldman — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:01:27 +0000

BAMAToNE, but he did mention Firefox for the Mac.

By: BAMAToNE

BAMAToNE — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:59:06 +0000

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.