End of an Era
Monday, 2. November 2009, 14:39:31
Okay, it's not so dramatic as the title suggests, but it is for me.
With all due respect to our hosts, I'm not going to use Opera browser any more. It remains one of the best efforts out there, but it keeps breaking my heart. I've written about that often enough here, so it's probably not really news. The point is, the Opera developers keep making the same mistakes over, and over, and over. Bug reports don't help. Every release I have tried, starting back with Opera 5.0, has always done one particular thing so consistently which no other browser does: It locks into race mode and won't die without extraordinary measures to kill it.
I realize it is something in the basic structure of Linux which permits certain kinds of flaws to take over all system resources. Now, I suppose Opera is not yet multi-threaded, because on my dual processor machine, it only grabbed one CPU core. I was still able to walk through the process of killing it since the second core was unaffected. That's a good thing, but the folks at Opera still don't quite get it. These days, virtually nothing in a stable distribution of Linux does the race condition... except Opera. And Opera does it all the time.
It's possible the Opera folks will see this, but I seriously doubt it will register. I've tried hard to work with them, going through all the channels and notifying them this thing keeps coming up. After all these years, why don't they reconsider how they hook it into the X server? How about we stop having lock-ups from JScript, for Pete's sake? What does it take?
Sorry, but I don't have time to fight with it any more. Even if I have to compile it myself from source, my computers will be mostly Mozilla-based (aside from text browsers) in the future. I can't afford Opera any more. It may be free to download, but in terms of the hassles, it's too expensive to use.
With all due respect to our hosts, I'm not going to use Opera browser any more. It remains one of the best efforts out there, but it keeps breaking my heart. I've written about that often enough here, so it's probably not really news. The point is, the Opera developers keep making the same mistakes over, and over, and over. Bug reports don't help. Every release I have tried, starting back with Opera 5.0, has always done one particular thing so consistently which no other browser does: It locks into race mode and won't die without extraordinary measures to kill it.
I realize it is something in the basic structure of Linux which permits certain kinds of flaws to take over all system resources. Now, I suppose Opera is not yet multi-threaded, because on my dual processor machine, it only grabbed one CPU core. I was still able to walk through the process of killing it since the second core was unaffected. That's a good thing, but the folks at Opera still don't quite get it. These days, virtually nothing in a stable distribution of Linux does the race condition... except Opera. And Opera does it all the time.
It's possible the Opera folks will see this, but I seriously doubt it will register. I've tried hard to work with them, going through all the channels and notifying them this thing keeps coming up. After all these years, why don't they reconsider how they hook it into the X server? How about we stop having lock-ups from JScript, for Pete's sake? What does it take?
Sorry, but I don't have time to fight with it any more. Even if I have to compile it myself from source, my computers will be mostly Mozilla-based (aside from text browsers) in the future. I can't afford Opera any more. It may be free to download, but in terms of the hassles, it's too expensive to use.
WIDGETIZE
Brian # 3. November 2009, 01:28
J. Edward Hurst # 3. November 2009, 02:43
Bob # 9. November 2009, 00:27