I wasn’t going to blog about this today, but enough people have asked about it that I will. The Opera company, who make a non-free web browser, are offering a free registration key for their full version today.
Please note that I still recommend Firefox over Opera, but for web developers who need Opera for testing, this is a boon.
Really? Have you tried Opera Lately?
It is so much faster that FF on Windows! And Konq. is a little faster than FF on Linux.
Good thing I got your E-mail on time or I might have missed it. 🙂 I played around with it a very little, and it is kind of nice. It did seem a faster to me, too. Firefox still has my heart, though. 🙂
Strange… I’ve run them both and it seems that Firefox/Deer Park is not only quicker to render, but is also more fluid in scrolling (thought both appear to double buffer). I find Firefox’s plugins absolutely necessary, too. I ran Opera for 10 minutes and kept trying to load Sage into a sidebar! Silly closed-source software!
Upon loading, Firefox.exe consumed 26MB of RAM, whereas Opera.exe consumed 32MB of RAM. I’m running a development version of Firefox, too, so I’m sure there are excess debugging symbols and what-not. Just some first impressions.
Both Opera and Firefox are quicker to render and more fluid at scrolling than IE7 beta. I didn’t compare IE’s memory footprint because much of its resources are hidden in Explorer.exe (though even so, it consumed 50MB upon starting).
So, depending on the page being rendered, it could be a toss-up between Opera and Firefox. I like FF myself because it’s leaner and has essential add-ons. IE7 is bigger, slower, and as non-standards-compliant as only M$ could be.
I can’t say I payed more for Opera than FF now, but I can say FF is open source and has NEVER charged people for use 🙂