VicoChoi

I've been using Opera lately and I was just wondering would you guys recommend it? Cause I notice sometimes it uses like 5-10% of the cpu usuage.

koala

It's not as popular as IE or Firefox, but Opera users highly recommend it for its speed and versatility.

dai

i have been using it since version 3

sobeit

Its not that bad, I use it as a backup. Theres some features that will not work with it so be sure to keep firefox or mise for those pages.

Confruzed

I have used it for quite a while, and a couple of builds ago I had problems with it locking my machine up, but I did a repair on it and it started acting fine again. I really like it a lot.

myminpins

I've used it for years and will never use another browser again. It's VERY customizable and I really love it. It's rare to run into sites that won't work in Opera any more.

Regicide

I've been using it for probably a year now and I love it. I haven't done very much customization at all. I love the wand and speed dial though. It's spell checker is so much better then Firefox, I think.

DontGoogleMe

Ever since i started using it i havnt used anything else, speed dial and continue from last time ftw!

Tumbleweed36

I like it and have used it for a long time and through several versions. I use it about 40% of the time. I think it is a great browser and am beginning now to use it more than ever. It is a great program and I highly recommend it.

royalhonor

Opera is the fastest and safest browser by far. I will never touch Firefox again.

Kougar

I've been using Opera for not quite two years now, and completely recommend it for those people that need an alternative to IE or FF.

The big drawback to it is that it does have a steeper learning curve than say IE or Firefox though. It took me a good while to adjust but once I did I can say the first thing I always do now is install Opera on a new system install.

One of the main reasons I chose Opera is that opposed to Firefox, it has many of the features I want built-in. You don't have to manually test out dozens of plug-ins to find working ones that don't crash the browser to get the functionality you want. At which point you have everything working nicely before you update Firefox and have half of the now working plug-ins break again. It was way to time consuming not to mention frustrating.

Opera is rock stable, and on the rare occasion it has a problem (Or more likely the system does) you never lose open tabs when it crashes. It is also surprisingly customizable, you can move the tab bar onto the left/right-most sides of the window if you use a widescreen display for example.

Oddly I have just as many problems with sites not working correctly in IE7 than I do in Opera, so go figure there. My University uses WebCT... which while designed specifically only for IE, it also has the most problems with IE7 instead. The general perception that Opera doesn't work with many websites is no longer true, although there are always one or two that I still rarely find.

I have been able to test that the CPU usage is mostly caused by Opera being overly aggressive with memory caching. For the longest time I simply ignored it, but on one particular build version it was getting out of hand and someone had stumbled upon the solution and posted it to their blog.

Following their solution I manually set the memory and disk caches to fixed size limits and Opera has all but quit using any CPU cycles at all. The program will still increase its memory size as needed regardless of the actual setting you use, depending on how many tabs you leave open. Even worst case with a massive 200mb of RAM in use by Opera it doesn't even use 1% of my CPU now if the program is left alone to idle. It also stopped slowly increasing the memory usage as well, it has zero memory leaks. I could really go on and on, but my post is already on the large side...

I did run into that problem, but a reinstall later it went away. One of the in-place upgrades didn't go smoothly with one of the earlier 9.x updates or something.

koala

Welcome to TSF, Kougar. Great post
Do you have any more tweaks like this?

Kougar

Thanks for the welcome, Koala!

That was more of a end-user bugfix, I don't know why Opera developers haven't implemented it. Basically any disk and RAM cache setting other than "Automatic" will work, I personally use 60/50mb for the RAM/disk cache respectively due to my browsing habits.

Oh. Another common issue is Adobe's flashplayer... assuming a user just installed a clean OS, the first time he visits Youtube or TheWeatherChannel or any other site with video Opera will automatically prompt the user with a link to download Adobe Flashplayer. While this is handy, Unfortunately as with some Adobe products Adobe Flashplayer is buggy... I would suggest installing it anyway, but then to ensure Opera users do not have problems viewing streamed video and music I would strongly suggest also installing Adobe's Shockwave flash player as well. http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi? Both downloads take less than a minute combined to finish and install.

For whatever reason once I install both I have zero problems viewing streamed or embedded video, music, and flash files as long as I have the necessary codecs. If you only install flashplayer, the first sign of a problem that a user may see is that most videos will just stop playing within 2 seconds of starting, and music won't even play normally. This primarily depends on the version of Flashplayer used as well, however the newest one currently has this problem. For whatever reason, installing Shockwave player as well ensures any flash media works correctly, but it is not mentioned anywhere in Opera's message prompt or help files that I saw. ;)

Hmm, trying to think of other bugfixes and not simply features...

For users just starting out with Opera, to install the excellent spell checking feature here is a 3 step guide, it really is that simple and takes 1 minute: http://www.opera.com/support/tutoria...ra/spellcheck/ The spell checker can have almost any common language dictionary installed, and does very well with English to my surprise. Users can spell check any text boxes, or they can spell check individual words or single sentences by simply highlighting the specific word and right-clicking -> check spelling.

Nothing else is really coming to mind though, the above is all that I actually install along with Opera, and the two flash players need to be installed anyway for anyone that is on a clean Windows install regardless of browser.

myminpins

Hello, Kougar! I have been using Opera for over a year now and love it as well. I have my cache and history set to 10 mb and still Opera at times uses quite a bit of memory but never like it did in the past. I am also using Vista so that may have something to do with it, who knows?

Thank you for your helpful posts.

I do have one other problem with Opera. Maybe you have an idea?

Does anyone know how to fix this? The site is my work site and it works fine in Firefox, just not in Opera.

This is the entire error message:


On the page in question, it displays this:




Instead of this:

Kougar

Hey myminpins. I saw your other thread on this... I am not a coder though, I prefer to dig through piles of hardware than lines of code.

The only thing I could say it that the error message at least appears to speak for itself, something in the first line didn't survive XML parsing, and when that failed Opera tried to convert the program into a HTML page. Sorry I couldn't be any help.

myminpins

No worries, Kougar. I can see it fine in Firefox so I use that for that one page when I need to. Hopefully it'll get fixed somehow the next release of Opera (it didn't used to do this). :)

bloomer3

I am new to Opera and have just downloaded the most recent version of Opera Desktop (9.26). I feel rather stupid asking this but I can't seem to get a webpage to load. IE7 runs fine, but when I open Opera, I only see the error page entitled:Error! Could not connect to remote server. I have made an exception with Window's Firewall and am running Symantec Antivirus and have made an exclusion with that (although I don't believe that would effect it). I am using a Compaq Persario F500 running Windows Vista Home Premium and am connected via LAN on a college campus. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

myminpins

Did you possibly download the upgrade rather than the full version?

The full version is here: http://www.opera.com/download/

There should be no issues like you're describing if you downloaded the full version. I've never had that happen to me ever.

bloomer3

I redownloaded from the link you posted and I'm still getting the same error. I think it has something to do with the fact that I'm on a college camps and the networking and connections here are rather weird. Thanks for your help though.

dai

tools tab at the top/quick prefences/edit site preference
browser id
set as ie
see if this fixes it