Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Opera 10.5 on the Mac

I've been a long time Opera user (about 4 years) but decided to try Chromium on both my MacBook and in Ubuntu.
And yes, there's a lot to like about Chromium particularly it's speed. What I didn't like however was a much poorer quality Portuguese (Pt-BR) dictionary than in Opera and the fact that it just wasn't as easy to put stuff into speeddial as it is in Opera (and I'm using the Chromium speeddial extension which at least allows you to have more than 8 pages.
For example, I can't get Gmail into speeddial in Chromium (I'm using the Gmail extension to access my webmail) and Chromium's extended speeddial won't accept the login page for my bank account which means having to include a "further back" page which leads to me clicking three times just to get to where Opera's speeddial would put me after just one click.
While I'm by no means writing off Chromium, it's an excellent browser and can only improve.
However, I just like Opera.
So when the faster Opera 10.5 pre-alpha showed up just before Christmas, I couldn't wait to try it. And it's certainly very fast but.......wow it crashed so frequently to be unusable.
Back to Chromium.
Then this morning I found this and tried it on my Mac. This is a huge improvement. Yes, it crashed a few times but not to an annoying extent.
It's not clear whether or not this is the beta of Opera 10.5 which is already available for Windows users and is supposed to be out for Mac and Linux later this week. About Opera says it's Version 10.50 Internal Build 8189 but no mention of alpha or beta or pre-alpha.
Of course, many things don't work such as Copy Link Address and (for me anyway) Mouse Gestures. Also I'm writing this from Chromium because Opera 10.5 doesn't provide the complete blogger toolbar.
But, all-in-all this is turning into a very nice browser that will bring me back to Opera which I really missed.

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