I ran through my planned trial week with Opera, and I’ve decided to go back to Firefox. I definitely think that Opera has fewer memory leaks, which is a plus, and I really like the session manager. However, it never felt right – there were differences switching from IE to Firefox, but Firefox was never irritating. Opera never seemed intuitive about when it opened things in the same window as compared to in a new tab, as compared to some strange sub-window to a tab. I had trouble getting it to put and keep my bookmarks in the order I wanted. I couldn’t right-click on a bookmark or tab to change its properties or open it in a new tab or window. All together, it didn’t work for the way that I wanted to use it.
So, I set up a Firefox extension to enable a session manager for it, which will also enable me to close Firefox on a regular basis even if I haven’t finished with all of my tabs. I’m almost tempted to try out the Firefox 2.0 beta, but I think I’ve had enough browser fun for the month.
Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek
Hi Amanda,
Have you considered Camino? I switched to it from Firefox a couple months ago because I also felt Firefox was getting slow and bloated. It has nothing fancy, but it has tabs which I can’t live without. I also installed “CamiTools” which adds some nice browsing features, like searching by just typing the word.
I’m actually on a PC, not a Mac, so it doesn’t look like Camino is an option for me. Looking over the descriptions on their site, though, it seems like a really nice option for a Mac user – nice user control over tabbing, bookmark ordering, etc. Those two things, for me, are manditory in any browser I use.