Thursday, 8. September 2005, 09:09:39
I've been complaining about Opera 8's crash-prone-ness all over the place. I think I owe it to people to tell them why I believe it's so bad and why it's enough to make me switch.
The issue is simple, really: as long as Opera crashes during my most common activities, it lacks what attracted me to it in the first place. From being liberating and enabling, the Opera experience has become time-wasting and counter-productive.
I don't really
surf the web, and I'm not sure there are many people who do. I trawl, search and post. Only one of these activities is not seriously affected by the frequent crashes.
Trawling means carrying out routine visits to a large number of regularly-updating sites: webcomics, forums, blogs. For blogs, I use
bloglines. For forums, I use the "Post since last visits" function. If Opera crashes while I'm looking at forums or Bloglines, I lose data. When the session is restored, the Bloglines page I was looking at is marked as read and no longer shown, and the forums return empty search results. On DeviantArt, admittedly a marginal part of my trawl, the results of a crash are potentially worse: any artworks I've recently added to my favorites may be removed from my favorites as the session restorer turns up the Favorites confirmation page again. There may be better ways for DeviantArt to implement Favorites, but I am also sure there are ways to stop Opera from going to hell in a handbasket whenever I'm on the DeviantArt site.
Posting means writing stuff online to publish in a blog or forum. I don't think I have to tell anyone what happens if Opera crashes while doing this. I've taken to backing up longer posts in an editor window while writing them, but I don't think I ought to have to. In newer CMSes, queueing up my own webcomics also falls under "posting" so the problem cuts into a core part of my daily work.
Only search is not seriously affected by crashes, because searches are easy to reconstruct. They're still a pain in the butt though.
Opera 3.62, back in 1998, supported all those activities better than anything else out there. I quickly became a paying user and a strong advocate of the program. When Opera Software started turning their software from a Windows-only app to a cross-platform app, a decision which in the long run was one of the most inspired they ever made, it took several revisions before they came out with something that was as good (Opera 6). Even then, I had serious linux-specific issues with Opera 6, and when these resurfaced with Opera 8, I initially blamed the barnacles that had got stuck on my SuSE linux installation.
Then I got an iBook. An awesome little machine running Mac OSX Panther, and with all the library software as clean as driven snow. I installed Opera, made it my default browser, and was faced with the same issues I had on the linux machine: frequent, data-losing crashes. Fortunately, Safari works like a charm, delivering what Opera promises.
Still, I am very used to doing things the Opera way. On my other platforms (the Windows machine in my studio and the Linux machine at home), the idea of switching, moving over my bookmarks and my passwords, and getting used to doing things differently than I have been doing since 1998, makes me slightly queasy in the stomach.
Which is why I wrote this post in Opera. Uhm, better back it up in an editor window before hitting "Post"...
WIDGETIZE