Opera is getting on my nerves

07 Sep 2008
Opera has been my browser of choice for ages. I originally chose it because it followed the standards pretty closely, has multiple tab support and remembered what was in each tab when it was shut down, it has a lovely wand feature to remember passwords and I love the bookmark system. It also used to have a very simple interface and easy keyboard shortcuts for everything I needed.

In recent years, other browsers have begun to copy these features as well. Firefox and even MSIE now have tabs and can remember what they contained without additional plugins. Supportingn standards has improved aswell in other browsers.

I still kept Opera because there is an unidentifiable quality about it that I can't find in firefox.
Since the last upgrade however, Opera has changed its look and feel tremendously. For some reason, they now use some crappy theme that I'm still now used to and doesn't seem to make things any more practical. They've also changed the handy shortcuts to be closer to Firefox's.
And the memory consumption is off the chart.

I currently have 4 tabs open: XKCD, the blogspot edit form, a forum dealing with Fedora 9 and Planet Debian.

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
26395 deepstar  20   0 1142m 408m  21m S  0.7 20.2  76:45.72 opera

That's right! It's eating 1.1GB of virtual memory. Why ? I have no clue.

Maybe I should be on the lookout for another browser...