Opera 9.5 [modified]
-
The system I'm using right now is old and slow with barely enough memory to run XP (tried putting more in, but MB won't recognize one of the SIMM slots.) IE 6.0 runs fairly decent, but I've gotten used to firefox's tabs. However Firefox 2.0 is a memory pig and causes all sorts of grief on this system. Firefox 3.0 beta was better, but too unstable to be useful. I started using Opera 9 and except for a few quirks, it ran great. I just downloaded Opera 9.5. IT.IS.A.PILE.OF.CRAP. Seriously. It sucks bad. The color scheme is awful. The rendering is all over the place. It keeps stalling on web pages and throwing errors. They made changes to the UI for no damn reason. (Opera does one nice thing I wish Firefox did. I can click on a link with the middle mouse button and it will open the page in a new tab WITHOUT switching to it. Doh, staring my right in the face.) PS. Spun up Opera 9.5 to verify I wasn't just delusional. Nope. Rendering still sucks and some pages fail loading. I tried downgrading to 9.27. It won't run with complaints about mismatched components even after a full uninstall of all versions. They lost me as a customer for life. PPS. I installed Opera 9.5 on a fresh XP Virtual PC installation on a fast computer. I ran into the same problems I reported here. I stand by my statements. (I should also point out that while Opera 9.27 is pretty good, it crashes and/or locks up ON ALL SYSTEMS more than Firefox or IE. Periodically the internal data structure managing links in multiple tabs apparently becomes corrupt and the same link shows up in every tab. It does run good on low memory, low horsepower systems, but the more I used it, the more I disliked it and wouldn't recommend it.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Friday, June 13, 2008 11:22 PM
Why not give Firefox 3 RC2 a whirl? I've found it rather reliable.
-
The system I'm using right now is old and slow with barely enough memory to run XP (tried putting more in, but MB won't recognize one of the SIMM slots.) IE 6.0 runs fairly decent, but I've gotten used to firefox's tabs. However Firefox 2.0 is a memory pig and causes all sorts of grief on this system. Firefox 3.0 beta was better, but too unstable to be useful. I started using Opera 9 and except for a few quirks, it ran great. I just downloaded Opera 9.5. IT.IS.A.PILE.OF.CRAP. Seriously. It sucks bad. The color scheme is awful. The rendering is all over the place. It keeps stalling on web pages and throwing errors. They made changes to the UI for no damn reason. (Opera does one nice thing I wish Firefox did. I can click on a link with the middle mouse button and it will open the page in a new tab WITHOUT switching to it. Doh, staring my right in the face.) PS. Spun up Opera 9.5 to verify I wasn't just delusional. Nope. Rendering still sucks and some pages fail loading. I tried downgrading to 9.27. It won't run with complaints about mismatched components even after a full uninstall of all versions. They lost me as a customer for life. PPS. I installed Opera 9.5 on a fresh XP Virtual PC installation on a fast computer. I ran into the same problems I reported here. I stand by my statements. (I should also point out that while Opera 9.27 is pretty good, it crashes and/or locks up ON ALL SYSTEMS more than Firefox or IE. Periodically the internal data structure managing links in multiple tabs apparently becomes corrupt and the same link shows up in every tab. It does run good on low memory, low horsepower systems, but the more I used it, the more I disliked it and wouldn't recommend it.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Friday, June 13, 2008 11:22 PM
Dude, just wait another four days for Firefox 3 — Download Day[^]'s the seventeenth. :D
-
The system I'm using right now is old and slow with barely enough memory to run XP (tried putting more in, but MB won't recognize one of the SIMM slots.) IE 6.0 runs fairly decent, but I've gotten used to firefox's tabs. However Firefox 2.0 is a memory pig and causes all sorts of grief on this system. Firefox 3.0 beta was better, but too unstable to be useful. I started using Opera 9 and except for a few quirks, it ran great. I just downloaded Opera 9.5. IT.IS.A.PILE.OF.CRAP. Seriously. It sucks bad. The color scheme is awful. The rendering is all over the place. It keeps stalling on web pages and throwing errors. They made changes to the UI for no damn reason. (Opera does one nice thing I wish Firefox did. I can click on a link with the middle mouse button and it will open the page in a new tab WITHOUT switching to it. Doh, staring my right in the face.) PS. Spun up Opera 9.5 to verify I wasn't just delusional. Nope. Rendering still sucks and some pages fail loading. I tried downgrading to 9.27. It won't run with complaints about mismatched components even after a full uninstall of all versions. They lost me as a customer for life. PPS. I installed Opera 9.5 on a fresh XP Virtual PC installation on a fast computer. I ran into the same problems I reported here. I stand by my statements. (I should also point out that while Opera 9.27 is pretty good, it crashes and/or locks up ON ALL SYSTEMS more than Firefox or IE. Periodically the internal data structure managing links in multiple tabs apparently becomes corrupt and the same link shows up in every tab. It does run good on low memory, low horsepower systems, but the more I used it, the more I disliked it and wouldn't recommend it.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Friday, June 13, 2008 11:22 PM
I have seen a lot of web browser that don't function right in the beta stage on systems with low memory... I have several computers, from fast to slow. I am using "Avant Browser" on the slowest one with great results... I actually like it becuase it loads some of the webiste quicker the then "Explorer and FireFox" http://www.avantbrowser.com/index.html .....
-
The system I'm using right now is old and slow with barely enough memory to run XP (tried putting more in, but MB won't recognize one of the SIMM slots.) IE 6.0 runs fairly decent, but I've gotten used to firefox's tabs. However Firefox 2.0 is a memory pig and causes all sorts of grief on this system. Firefox 3.0 beta was better, but too unstable to be useful. I started using Opera 9 and except for a few quirks, it ran great. I just downloaded Opera 9.5. IT.IS.A.PILE.OF.CRAP. Seriously. It sucks bad. The color scheme is awful. The rendering is all over the place. It keeps stalling on web pages and throwing errors. They made changes to the UI for no damn reason. (Opera does one nice thing I wish Firefox did. I can click on a link with the middle mouse button and it will open the page in a new tab WITHOUT switching to it. Doh, staring my right in the face.) PS. Spun up Opera 9.5 to verify I wasn't just delusional. Nope. Rendering still sucks and some pages fail loading. I tried downgrading to 9.27. It won't run with complaints about mismatched components even after a full uninstall of all versions. They lost me as a customer for life. PPS. I installed Opera 9.5 on a fresh XP Virtual PC installation on a fast computer. I ran into the same problems I reported here. I stand by my statements. (I should also point out that while Opera 9.27 is pretty good, it crashes and/or locks up ON ALL SYSTEMS more than Firefox or IE. Periodically the internal data structure managing links in multiple tabs apparently becomes corrupt and the same link shows up in every tab. It does run good on low memory, low horsepower systems, but the more I used it, the more I disliked it and wouldn't recommend it.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Friday, June 13, 2008 11:22 PM
That's a shame. Works fine here.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
-
Steve Echols wrote:
and if it's as big o pile as you say it is,
Unless it's been damaged highly since the 9.27 release I suspect Joe was exxagerating a little bit because it's an excellent browser and much faster in general than any of the others at rendering pages from initial click. That's what happens though when you have a single company dedicated to a single browser product and not a haphazard open source or haphazard Microsoft effort.
"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do." - Walter Bagehot
John C wrote:
Unless it's been damaged highly since the 9.27 release I suspect Joe was exxagerating a little bit because it's an excellent browser and much faster in general than any of the others at rendering pages from initial click.
Excepting anything ajax heavy. 9.2x chokes if you try dragging anything in googlemaps and curls up and dies in the face of google street view. 9.5beta fixed the ajax performance issue everywhere I tested. I haven't given the release version a spin yet.
You know, every time I tried to win a bar-bet about being able to count to 1000 using my fingers I always got punched out when I reached 4.... -- El Corazon
-
The system I'm using right now is old and slow with barely enough memory to run XP (tried putting more in, but MB won't recognize one of the SIMM slots.) IE 6.0 runs fairly decent, but I've gotten used to firefox's tabs. However Firefox 2.0 is a memory pig and causes all sorts of grief on this system. Firefox 3.0 beta was better, but too unstable to be useful. I started using Opera 9 and except for a few quirks, it ran great. I just downloaded Opera 9.5. IT.IS.A.PILE.OF.CRAP. Seriously. It sucks bad. The color scheme is awful. The rendering is all over the place. It keeps stalling on web pages and throwing errors. They made changes to the UI for no damn reason. (Opera does one nice thing I wish Firefox did. I can click on a link with the middle mouse button and it will open the page in a new tab WITHOUT switching to it. Doh, staring my right in the face.) PS. Spun up Opera 9.5 to verify I wasn't just delusional. Nope. Rendering still sucks and some pages fail loading. I tried downgrading to 9.27. It won't run with complaints about mismatched components even after a full uninstall of all versions. They lost me as a customer for life. PPS. I installed Opera 9.5 on a fresh XP Virtual PC installation on a fast computer. I ran into the same problems I reported here. I stand by my statements. (I should also point out that while Opera 9.27 is pretty good, it crashes and/or locks up ON ALL SYSTEMS more than Firefox or IE. Periodically the internal data structure managing links in multiple tabs apparently becomes corrupt and the same link shows up in every tab. It does run good on low memory, low horsepower systems, but the more I used it, the more I disliked it and wouldn't recommend it.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Friday, June 13, 2008 11:22 PM
Joe Woodbury wrote:
They made changes to the UI for no damn reason.
Old news. They've made seemingly arbitary changes with every version from 5.x to now. At this point my expectation with a new major release is that I'll need to spend 5 minutes finding where the setting to control the change is to roll it back to what I like. Opera's GUI is massively reconfigurable, unfortunately that seems to've given their designers free reign to mess with it.
You know, every time I tried to win a bar-bet about being able to count to 1000 using my fingers I always got punched out when I reached 4.... -- El Corazon
-
Huh, wierd, I use Opera every day and I've been using 9.5 all day now and haven't noticed a single issue with it here or anywhere else.
"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do." - Walter Bagehot
-
The system I'm using right now is old and slow with barely enough memory to run XP (tried putting more in, but MB won't recognize one of the SIMM slots.) IE 6.0 runs fairly decent, but I've gotten used to firefox's tabs. However Firefox 2.0 is a memory pig and causes all sorts of grief on this system. Firefox 3.0 beta was better, but too unstable to be useful. I started using Opera 9 and except for a few quirks, it ran great. I just downloaded Opera 9.5. IT.IS.A.PILE.OF.CRAP. Seriously. It sucks bad. The color scheme is awful. The rendering is all over the place. It keeps stalling on web pages and throwing errors. They made changes to the UI for no damn reason. (Opera does one nice thing I wish Firefox did. I can click on a link with the middle mouse button and it will open the page in a new tab WITHOUT switching to it. Doh, staring my right in the face.) PS. Spun up Opera 9.5 to verify I wasn't just delusional. Nope. Rendering still sucks and some pages fail loading. I tried downgrading to 9.27. It won't run with complaints about mismatched components even after a full uninstall of all versions. They lost me as a customer for life. PPS. I installed Opera 9.5 on a fresh XP Virtual PC installation on a fast computer. I ran into the same problems I reported here. I stand by my statements. (I should also point out that while Opera 9.27 is pretty good, it crashes and/or locks up ON ALL SYSTEMS more than Firefox or IE. Periodically the internal data structure managing links in multiple tabs apparently becomes corrupt and the same link shows up in every tab. It does run good on low memory, low horsepower systems, but the more I used it, the more I disliked it and wouldn't recommend it.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Friday, June 13, 2008 11:22 PM
The color scheme change (default) made me raise an eyebrow... just one of those "why'd they do that?" moments - no biggie. Seems to be running fine for me - I think you need a system upgrade! You'll really enjoy a faster / more stable computing experience.
Happy programming!
-
The system I'm using right now is old and slow with barely enough memory to run XP (tried putting more in, but MB won't recognize one of the SIMM slots.) IE 6.0 runs fairly decent, but I've gotten used to firefox's tabs. However Firefox 2.0 is a memory pig and causes all sorts of grief on this system. Firefox 3.0 beta was better, but too unstable to be useful. I started using Opera 9 and except for a few quirks, it ran great. I just downloaded Opera 9.5. IT.IS.A.PILE.OF.CRAP. Seriously. It sucks bad. The color scheme is awful. The rendering is all over the place. It keeps stalling on web pages and throwing errors. They made changes to the UI for no damn reason. (Opera does one nice thing I wish Firefox did. I can click on a link with the middle mouse button and it will open the page in a new tab WITHOUT switching to it. Doh, staring my right in the face.) PS. Spun up Opera 9.5 to verify I wasn't just delusional. Nope. Rendering still sucks and some pages fail loading. I tried downgrading to 9.27. It won't run with complaints about mismatched components even after a full uninstall of all versions. They lost me as a customer for life. PPS. I installed Opera 9.5 on a fresh XP Virtual PC installation on a fast computer. I ran into the same problems I reported here. I stand by my statements. (I should also point out that while Opera 9.27 is pretty good, it crashes and/or locks up ON ALL SYSTEMS more than Firefox or IE. Periodically the internal data structure managing links in multiple tabs apparently becomes corrupt and the same link shows up in every tab. It does run good on low memory, low horsepower systems, but the more I used it, the more I disliked it and wouldn't recommend it.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Friday, June 13, 2008 11:22 PM
-
Opera's been free for several years.
You know, every time I tried to win a bar-bet about being able to count to 1000 using my fingers I always got punched out when I reached 4.... -- El Corazon
-
Dude, just wait another four days for Firefox 3 — Download Day[^]'s the seventeenth. :D
Kizul Emeraldfire wrote:
Dude, just wait another four days for Firefox 3
I am.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
-
The joke message type exists for a reason.
You know, every time I tried to win a bar-bet about being able to count to 1000 using my fingers I always got punched out when I reached 4.... -- El Corazon
-
The system I'm using right now is old and slow with barely enough memory to run XP (tried putting more in, but MB won't recognize one of the SIMM slots.) IE 6.0 runs fairly decent, but I've gotten used to firefox's tabs. However Firefox 2.0 is a memory pig and causes all sorts of grief on this system. Firefox 3.0 beta was better, but too unstable to be useful. I started using Opera 9 and except for a few quirks, it ran great. I just downloaded Opera 9.5. IT.IS.A.PILE.OF.CRAP. Seriously. It sucks bad. The color scheme is awful. The rendering is all over the place. It keeps stalling on web pages and throwing errors. They made changes to the UI for no damn reason. (Opera does one nice thing I wish Firefox did. I can click on a link with the middle mouse button and it will open the page in a new tab WITHOUT switching to it. Doh, staring my right in the face.) PS. Spun up Opera 9.5 to verify I wasn't just delusional. Nope. Rendering still sucks and some pages fail loading. I tried downgrading to 9.27. It won't run with complaints about mismatched components even after a full uninstall of all versions. They lost me as a customer for life. PPS. I installed Opera 9.5 on a fresh XP Virtual PC installation on a fast computer. I ran into the same problems I reported here. I stand by my statements. (I should also point out that while Opera 9.27 is pretty good, it crashes and/or locks up ON ALL SYSTEMS more than Firefox or IE. Periodically the internal data structure managing links in multiple tabs apparently becomes corrupt and the same link shows up in every tab. It does run good on low memory, low horsepower systems, but the more I used it, the more I disliked it and wouldn't recommend it.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Friday, June 13, 2008 11:22 PM
I've found only one obscure issue with Opera 9.5 that will cause it to crash; other than that it works perfectly. The Opera servers have been bogged down lately, but that's to be expected with a new major release. I actually like the new default skin, but that's up to the user anyways. One new feature that really wow'd me was Opera Link[^], giving you the ability to synchronize bookmarks, Speed Dial entries, etc between Opera browsers on different PCs and platforms. The Quick Find feature is a great addition as well, not to mention Dragonfly[^] - although it is somewhat hidden in the Tools menu. All in all, I'm thoroughly impressed with this release. :-D Oh yeah, the central location for "add-ins" (widgets) can be found here[^].
-
Do you have hardware virtualisation on your hosts? My employer saved a few quid when upgrading from our old P4 boxes by buying E2160 based boxes which don't support hardware virtualisation. I feel this is a bit short sighted, but don't have any hard figures to back it up. VMs are great though. We recently had to set up a product demo and all I needed to do was create a copy of my dev web server VM on our SBS, rename it and get our network guy to expose it on an external URL. When the client finished playing with it, we just switched it off. Marvellous!
Yes I do have hardware virtualization on the host server. My opinion on that is that either the product or the hardware has yet to figure out what to do with the other. The only benefit I got was that I could create 64bit VMs. That I can tell anyway...
-
The system I'm using right now is old and slow with barely enough memory to run XP (tried putting more in, but MB won't recognize one of the SIMM slots.) IE 6.0 runs fairly decent, but I've gotten used to firefox's tabs. However Firefox 2.0 is a memory pig and causes all sorts of grief on this system. Firefox 3.0 beta was better, but too unstable to be useful. I started using Opera 9 and except for a few quirks, it ran great. I just downloaded Opera 9.5. IT.IS.A.PILE.OF.CRAP. Seriously. It sucks bad. The color scheme is awful. The rendering is all over the place. It keeps stalling on web pages and throwing errors. They made changes to the UI for no damn reason. (Opera does one nice thing I wish Firefox did. I can click on a link with the middle mouse button and it will open the page in a new tab WITHOUT switching to it. Doh, staring my right in the face.) PS. Spun up Opera 9.5 to verify I wasn't just delusional. Nope. Rendering still sucks and some pages fail loading. I tried downgrading to 9.27. It won't run with complaints about mismatched components even after a full uninstall of all versions. They lost me as a customer for life. PPS. I installed Opera 9.5 on a fresh XP Virtual PC installation on a fast computer. I ran into the same problems I reported here. I stand by my statements. (I should also point out that while Opera 9.27 is pretty good, it crashes and/or locks up ON ALL SYSTEMS more than Firefox or IE. Periodically the internal data structure managing links in multiple tabs apparently becomes corrupt and the same link shows up in every tab. It does run good on low memory, low horsepower systems, but the more I used it, the more I disliked it and wouldn't recommend it.)
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
modified on Friday, June 13, 2008 11:22 PM
I've been using Opera for years as my primary browser...since late version 6.0. Opera is a GREAT browser that is SADLY misunderstood and quite often specifically broken by certain organizations with bad javascript and css (AHEM MICROSOFT!!! >.<). Opera is a stable, VERY fast, fully standards compliant browser that has a severe lack of respect in the community for no good reason. Opera is also probably the most compatible browser I've ever used, if not neccesarily by default for every site. Opera has the ability to mask itself as IE or FireFox, allowing it to work perfectly with sites that will initially not work if it is identified as Opera. (This is a good indication of people either not checking their "standards compliant" code in Opera, or specifically nerfing it so it won't work...try comparing the JS and CSS you get for most microsoft sites from both IE and Opera...you'll see the differences and why its a purposeful nerf). Once you configure a site to be masked as IE or FF, it stays that way for subsequent visits, so its a minor tweak you only have to do on the first visit. Some of the great things about Opera: 1) First browser to perfectly pass ACID 2 (yes, even before Safari did...) 2) Currently has the highest score for the ACID 3 test (Opera 9.5 passes at 80/100 vs. FF 70/100 and IE7 12/100) 3) Fully standards compliant for all CSS 2.1, and supports a significant subset of CSS 3 features. 4) Fully XHTML 1.1 and DOM compliant, including proper event models etc. 5) Its faster and has a much smaller memory footprint than any version of FireFox. 6) Was the first browser to have tabs (yes, even before FireFox) 7) Was the first browser to natively integrate mouse gestures. 8) Was the first browser to include a closed page trash can, so if you accidentally close a page, you can quickly recover it. 9) Was the first browser to automatically reopen all tabs when starting up after a previous close or crash. 10) Was the first (maybe only?) browser to support full page zoom, both above and below 100%. Also supports integrated small form factor/fit width view and inline print preview (which fully supports print media CSS styles). 11) Is the first (and only?) browser to support integrated and customizable address-bar search (type in g <something> to search google, y <something> to search yahoo, or add a custom one like d <word> to look up a word on dictionary.com). 12) Provides a feature called web panels, which appear on the left side of the browser and provide quick access to si
-
I've been using Opera for years as my primary browser...since late version 6.0. Opera is a GREAT browser that is SADLY misunderstood and quite often specifically broken by certain organizations with bad javascript and css (AHEM MICROSOFT!!! >.<). Opera is a stable, VERY fast, fully standards compliant browser that has a severe lack of respect in the community for no good reason. Opera is also probably the most compatible browser I've ever used, if not neccesarily by default for every site. Opera has the ability to mask itself as IE or FireFox, allowing it to work perfectly with sites that will initially not work if it is identified as Opera. (This is a good indication of people either not checking their "standards compliant" code in Opera, or specifically nerfing it so it won't work...try comparing the JS and CSS you get for most microsoft sites from both IE and Opera...you'll see the differences and why its a purposeful nerf). Once you configure a site to be masked as IE or FF, it stays that way for subsequent visits, so its a minor tweak you only have to do on the first visit. Some of the great things about Opera: 1) First browser to perfectly pass ACID 2 (yes, even before Safari did...) 2) Currently has the highest score for the ACID 3 test (Opera 9.5 passes at 80/100 vs. FF 70/100 and IE7 12/100) 3) Fully standards compliant for all CSS 2.1, and supports a significant subset of CSS 3 features. 4) Fully XHTML 1.1 and DOM compliant, including proper event models etc. 5) Its faster and has a much smaller memory footprint than any version of FireFox. 6) Was the first browser to have tabs (yes, even before FireFox) 7) Was the first browser to natively integrate mouse gestures. 8) Was the first browser to include a closed page trash can, so if you accidentally close a page, you can quickly recover it. 9) Was the first browser to automatically reopen all tabs when starting up after a previous close or crash. 10) Was the first (maybe only?) browser to support full page zoom, both above and below 100%. Also supports integrated small form factor/fit width view and inline print preview (which fully supports print media CSS styles). 11) Is the first (and only?) browser to support integrated and customizable address-bar search (type in g <something> to search google, y <something> to search yahoo, or add a custom one like d <word> to look up a word on dictionary.com). 12) Provides a feature called web panels, which appear on the left side of the browser and provide quick access to si
I have used opera on several computers for quite a while and found it to be poorly designed and implemented. I have not found it markedly faster than Firefox. It also crashes more than Firefox or IE. It locks up more than Firefox and IE. In some cases, the internal data structures tracking links gets corrupt and every tab adopts the same link. It deals with image tags inconsistently. Every now and then, I run across web sites that give Opera and Firefox fits. IE never has a problem with these sites. It does run on systems with low memory better than the other browsers, but I'd never use it as my first choice on any other system. My own experience has the been the opposite of yours; the more I've used Opera, the more I disliked it. The only reason I keep it installed on various systems is for testing purposes.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
-
Yeah, I have no problems with it either & I have been running it since it was released. Something obviously got screwed up when he upgraded. -Dee
Nope. Tried it on a VM with a clean XP install on a very fast system and it had the same problems I reported. I stand by my statements.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
-
I have used opera on several computers for quite a while and found it to be poorly designed and implemented. I have not found it markedly faster than Firefox. It also crashes more than Firefox or IE. It locks up more than Firefox and IE. In some cases, the internal data structures tracking links gets corrupt and every tab adopts the same link. It deals with image tags inconsistently. Every now and then, I run across web sites that give Opera and Firefox fits. IE never has a problem with these sites. It does run on systems with low memory better than the other browsers, but I'd never use it as my first choice on any other system. My own experience has the been the opposite of yours; the more I've used Opera, the more I disliked it. The only reason I keep it installed on various systems is for testing purposes.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
Having used Opera on over 20 systems for over 5 years, and never having any problems with it (I don't think its ever crashed on its own once...only time it crashes is when the entire system crashes in my experience). I also don't think that FireFox or IE really ever crash on my systems unless there is some other, fundamental reason for it. In a well-maintained system, software can run perfectly for an indefinite amount of time. I think there might be some other reason for your experiences (especially if you have enough crashes in all three browsers to be able to tell that any one of them crashes more often than the other). There are numerous reasons why applications can become unstable...one of the most common but least understood being poor power signal or insufficient power, with too much heat comming in second. Granted, severe bugs can cause an application to crash, but once an application has reached its third generation or so, especially applications that get regular updates pushed the moment they are made, crashes should be very infrequent. Frequent crashes of any application are usually a sign of some external influence or interference with normal operation...might want to check into it. All that aside, even if you just plain and simply don't like Opera even if you find some other cause for it crashing, there is no reason to go on a hostile crusade against it. There are plenty of alternatives, and its largely due to individuals such as yourself that Opera has an unwarranted bad rap. Its a solid, stable, fast, efficient browser that sports twice as many features and integrated tools as any other browser, and has sported them since long before any other browser "innovated" them into their own feature set.