Jason’s postings and stuff

Okay. Enough. I’ve been using Firefox since before the 1.0 release came out. I enjoyed version 0.8, even if it crashed a little. It was light weight and fast. Browsing was fun and fully featured again. KHTML wasn’t bad, but still didn’t support enough of the Web as I would have liked.

I finally moved to Firefox fulltime last year, hanging onto the 1.0x series for quite a while. I found it leaked memory, despite having only flashblock installed. I’d find it was using upwards of 500M of RAM after a week of being left open, having cycled through many tabs throughout the week. Eventually, predictably, and consistently I had to restart my browser for that feeling of speed and joy to return.

I finally moved to Firefox 1.5 when I stuck Kubuntu 6.06 on my laptop. It still felt like the same Firefox, mostly. I had been mostly satisfied with 1.07. There weren’t any improvements in 1.5 of much interest to me. I still had to restart 1.5 once a week, which felt wrong. I’d grown so accustomed to dealing with Firefox’s quirks I stuck with it. Firefox had by this time surpassed my daily usage of Konqueror from years prior.

With Debian Etch being released and my desire to install Kubuntu 6.10 on my laptop, I found myself moving to Firefox 2.0. I was mostly happy with 1.5 — just like 1.0x — with the obvious exception of the weekly restarts. However, I found Firefox 2.0 actually boasted some features I enjoyed. The spell-as-you-go, which KDE’s Konqueror has had since at least KDE 3.3.2, finally made it into Firefox as a shipped feature. That was pleasing. Firefox 2.0’s recovery of the session after a failure was also pleasing to me.

Unfortunately, I stumbled upon several issues that are complete deal breakers. First, the memory leak issue is still presently, though in Firefox 2.0 I found myself restarting Firefox more often than ever before. My Web site choices and browsing habits have not changed between 1.5 and 2.0. Worse yet, Firefox 2.0 was completely unusable on my laptop, saping battery power with its nonstop gettimeofday() calls. Worse still, on my workstation, Firefox 2.0 would hang for five seconds between opening new, blank tabs. I have no idea why and the behavior persists even after a completely fresh start of Firefox 2.0 with no open tabs. The browser history list also seems to lag out for up to ten seconds on a completely idle system when I start to type an address. Such behavior was unheard of when I used prior releases of Firefox.

As such, I downgraded to Firefox 1.5 on both my Debian Etch workstation and my Kubuntu 6.10 laptop. However, I have finally grown bored with weekly restarts and other minor quirks with Firefox. In a fit of rage, I did something I’d decided I’d never do: I downloaded a copy of Opera, a QT-based browser that for years was only available in exchange for money amid a sea of decent, completely Free browsers. Now, the Free part doesn’t much matter to me, but the free part certainly did. Opera finally removed that roadblock, but with Firefox, I decided I didn’t much care at the time.

However, in the few hours I have been using Opera, I have found it to be nothing but a pleasure to use. It’s been easy to configure, it’s extremely fast. I quickly downloaded a nice KDE-like theme for it. I tweaked the fonts a little. I started browsing familiar pages finding they all render exactly as I expected they should. Thus far, Opera is even using a sensible quantity of RAM. (I have 1GB of RAM, but when Firefox 2.0 gets up around 512M of used RAM, that’s just insane…)

Needless to say, I am very, very pleased.

Today I became an Opera user.

Update, May 23rd. Still an Opera user. Awesome browser!