A night at the Opera
27th January 2008 by Jason C. Filed under: Web-development
Firefox has become over the years an indispensable tool for me as a web developer. Firstly, its standards support for css is very good, even if the current stable release doesn’t pass the Acid2 test. The extensions that are available for it are both numerous and useful, none more so than the web developers’ toolbar.
Trouble is, with all those extensions loaded onto it, it becomes one heavy browser. That means that when I’m off duty and just surfing around, I notice things like the pause between clicking the “new tab” icon and being able to type anything in the address bat of the new tab that just opened.
Enter Opera, a fast, light browser that until now had been on my machine just for testing. It’s so quick, sometimes I’ve finished reading a page before I’ve even clicked the link to visit it. And the back button is the fastest I’ve ever seen. Javascript-wise, it’s very quick too, just a tad behind Safari in my experience. Most sites work fine with it, but sometimes I find I have to fire up Safari instead, although that’s surprisingly rare considering its market share and my expectations.
