Current mood:

sleepy

Opera 9.5 beta
Having tried Opera 9.5 alpha a while back and discovering that it didn't work with Google Reader, I gave up for a bit :) Now that 9.5 beta is out, I thought I'd give it another go, and lo and behold it works on Google Reader! Hooray!

My main reason for even bothering is that all the news about Opera always goes on about how it uses less memory than other browsers and it's much quicker and so on.
I have to say, so far it's all been rather positive :D It's sooooooooo much faster than Firefox that the few things which are annoying me about it at the moment seem pretty insignificant :)

Things I need to see about getting working better:

- AdBlock doesn't exist for Opera 9.x, so I now get to see how jammed full of ads the intarweb is nowadays on a lot of sites (a subject for a later rant, I think). I have a privoxy (formerly junkbuster) proxy at home which gets rid of a lot of this stuff, and there's a pretty good "block content" thing in the newest Opera but it's in need of a huge list of rules to get rid of stuff. Also, the built-in stuff doesn't get rid of stuff that AdBlock will, like CSS-based gumph and having flash always blocked until you click on it or something.

- Fonts seem a bit random at the moment, and sometimes look pretty nasty. My font selections seem to be ignored on some sites, but I can't find where to set them so that they are forced rather than using the fonts set in the CSS from the site.

- Getting numbered links on google searches (something that I had a firefox extension to do), so that once I've done a search I can hit a number and jump to that result rather than clicking.


I didn't like Opera in the past, but I think they've fixed an awful lot, and firefox seems to be getting bigger and bigger and slower and slower :o

Try it, you might like it!


[Post not sponsored by Opera, despite the overwhelmingly positive tang]