Hacker News Reader

Comment by katieben | Hacker News Reader

Who uses Opera and why?

I've been using Opera for about 11 years now. When I started, there was nothing that was better. Even with that huge advertisement widget. It still is extremely competitive, if not leading in most things. For casual browsing it is unmatched.

It's not about one feature; it's the completeness of the whole browser. Things that you'd expect in Firefox/Chrome in extensions are built in here. It's still as fast as Chrome to the user, never mind silly benchmarks. Give it a spin some time.

I gave it shot for a while because I needed the Turbo feature. I liked using Opera, it was fast and the new chrome-like GUI is nice. However... as soon as my internet was back at full capacity I changed back to Chrome. You say you like it because of the completeness, but I found that it was missing quite a few small things which I cannot live without. Off the top off my head I can only remember two things -

Tabs cannot be dragged in and out of windows

Text cannot be selected and dragged into the URL bar

Tabs CAN be dragged - at least on Windows and Linux - not sure about Mac.

I also fell in love with tab stacking. It's just easier to group tabs into stacks in a single browser window than having separate windows. In later case I spend waaay too much time clicking wrong window.

> Text cannot be selected and dragged into the URL bar

You can right click the text and select "Go to web address". It's quicker in my opinion.

but i dont want to go to a web address, i want to drag some text into the url bar and have my default engine run a query on that text

I agree with balakk on all of his points, since that's when i started using Opera too, around version 2. It still is the most complete browser experience without requiring any extensions.

Another thing that makes me stick to it is the integrated mail client. It's extremely minimal, out of the way if you don't need it. My browser is always open, so having a built in client, that indexes my email, and is searchable even if i'm offline is definitely awesome. I don't need to use Thunderbird, etc, since the minimal features are all i need. Give it a spin!

It has some features that are fairly unique and I appreciate their experimentation. For example, Unite makes it very easy for your average person to share music, files, a streaming webcam, or whatever from within their browser. It's a great way to do something like let a friend listen to a cool album you just discovered without either of you ever leaving the browser. I still prefer Chrome on the desktop but I respect the developers and what they're trying to do.

On the other hand, I do use Opera on my phone. I find tab switching to be much more natural than it is with the default Android browser and I also appreciate the option of proxying traffic through their servers where it is compressed and stripped down to a mobile format. It cuts down on bandwidth and cpu usage which I like, particularly if the data connection is being spotty.

Coming soon to a courtroom near you: RIAA has Opera shut down as an "illegal filesharing program".

I've been using Opera as my main browser for years, but also uses Chrome and Firefox.

Chrome; very fast, but crashes too often, and uses a LOT of memory (and messes up my Task Manager)

Firefox; lots of interesting add-ons, but slow and memory-hungry (and too often updated, with too many unstable updates)

Opera; very fast, very stable, best with regards to memory use. However, has problems with a few web sites (not compatible, maybe because they haven't tested "leading edge" technologies on Opera ?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com