Back to Firefox

Some time ago I wrote here (at least I think I wrote it here) that I was converting from Firefox to Opera. Firefox on both my Windows and Linux systems was taking many minutes to load, longer even than IE. One of the things that helped my decision to convert was the 10th anniversary free Opera keys, shortly followed by making Opera free.

But now I've gone back to Firefox.

I like Opera. A lot. But it has some flaws that are fatal to me.

• Doesn't run GMail reliably.
  • There are some features that seem to just not work, like looking up contacts as you type addresses.
  • There are times when Opera gets "stuck" on a screen that says "Loading...". When that happens it can sometimes be jarred loose using a bookmarklet that causes a refresh (but not by using the refresh button), sometimes by clearing the cache and reloading, and sometimes it requires restarting down the browser and logging into GMail.
• Doesn't run Outlook Web Access at all

  If my work (Windows) laptop isn't powered up but I want to have a look at work email, I have to use Outlook Web Access. This simply doesn't work in Opera. It works marginally in Firefox, enough to read and respond to mail.

• Doesn't run Blogger

  Not much to say here. Most of Blogger gets disabled when used via Opera

• Frequent crashes, especially with Bloglines

  Since I bounce around among several computers running multiple operating systems I've given up on deskto aggregators and am using Bloglines to track my reading. But if I get behind and there are a lot of unread items, Opera has a tendency to crash while loading the page. Other crashes in Opera aren't all that frequent but do occur often enough to be real annoying.

So the bottom line is that Opera has been once again relegated to the dustbin and I'm back on Firefox running the new 1.5 release.