Daynah championed Opera awhile back. She’s got better-than-mine taste in comics (or she’s just pickier), she writes clearly with intelligence, she’s witty, and has a sense of humor. I read her arguments for Opera over Firefox and contemplated that perhaps she might be ahead of the curve on browser selection. So I gave Opera a chance. I hung up Firefox and downloaded the not-so-big O, vowing to use it instead of Firefox for a WEEK.

Uh… wow. What a week (or so) of evaluating Opera on OS X. If I had to describe it in one word? Disappointing.

Here’s the running log:

7/11 – Started my weeklong trial of Opera. Latest version has been installed on my Macbook Air running OS X 10.5.2. Seems decent enough. Browse browse browse. Crashed right before 9 PM. heh. Happens to the best of ‘em.

7/12 – Several strange layout bugs at heavyink.com. Notified and sent screenshots to the HI folks. The speed dial thing is neat. So is the real-time status counter of page elements loading. Fyeah.

7/13 – No crashes today, but www.me.com results in http://www.me.com/unsupported_browser/en/. So Apple no likey Opera for MobileMe. A browser that doesn’t work with my $99 / year investment? Ouch. Another thing. I like speed dial, but I want a hot key for jumping to it and NOT opening up a new tab. Where’s the magic button or key-combo to go “back” to speed dial in a pre-existing tab? Seems silly to have such a nifty bookmark function that REQUIRES opening a new tab.

7/14 – Video doesn’t load at various places on CNN. Seems to work fine in Firefox 3 though. Random session timeouts with reservation system at amtrak.com. Works fine with Firefox 3, natch.

7/15 – Strange navigation behavior. “Back” and “Refresh” intermittently and frustratingly don’t function. Not sure what that’s about. Today, I also needed to change proxy settings, manually. Ugh. There’s no “Use this proxy for all protocols” checkbox akin to Firefox proxy config pane. Have to enter the manual proxy settings each time for the protocol I was using HTTP, HTTPS, FTP. ANNOYing.

7/16 – Opera is just unusable with Campfire, www.campfirenow.com. Scrolling is all borked up. Gah. Layout is funky. Also, simply entering a URL and hitting enter, https://mail.google.com results in the activity wheel, as if it’s working, but it’s not. Open a new tab, enter the URL, and it works immediately. Just weird. Firefox 3 works just dandy with Campfire, BTW.

7/17 – Redirect links from eBay to Paypal do not work. Which means “paying all” invoices with a click doesn’t work. Using Firefox works, though.

7/18 – Last straw. Again. Let’s say I’ve finished reading a random webpage on a random website. I want to now go to Gmail. Securely. Manually entering https://mail.google.com in the URL window and hitting enter results in nothing. Requires going to just www.google.com, THEN manually entering https://mail.google.com to get Gmail to work, or explicitly opening up a new tab. That’s fucking too weird AND annoying.

Opera has some slickness, such as speed dial and the element loading real-time counter, I’ll give it that. Memory and CPU footprint are low. The baby browser has totally grown up to tweener status! However, in my opinion, it’s just NOT competition for Firefox. At all. While I don’t think Firefox is perfect, I have nowhere NEAR as much disappointment with it vs Opera.

Finally, I don’t give a fuck HOW standards compliant a web browser is, if it can’t handle rendering pages from the most standards NON-compliant environment in existence, i.e. THE Internet, then that browser is dead to me. Dead, I say! Dirt nap for Opera.

Your mileage may vary. Feel free to try it out.