Opera 10 Alpha – Peregrine

I’ve been using Opera 10 Alpha since it was released earlier this month. I have always liked the Opera web browsers, but it never made sense to me to pay for a program when there were free alternatives that worked as well, if not better, most of the time (first Netscape, then Firefox; I have never considered IE to be better than Opera). But when I heard of the new release, I decided to give it a try. It has been a few years since I’ve used Opera on a computer, but I’ve enjoyed using Opera mini on my last few cell phones.

I know that this is an alpha release, and therefore should not be assumed to be without flaws, and I have to say that, for the most part, I am really impressed by this release. Opera 10 is extremely fast and responsive, and renders pages at least as quickly as Safari and Firefox 3. I don’t care much about the way a program looks, as long as it works, but the placement of pretty much everything makes sense, and for those who don’t like the look of this interface, I believe that skins are available.

I tried Opera’s built-in mail module to access my primary gmail account, and I am not impressed. I’m giving it time to learn and using the filters provided, but so far, too much mail from my spam folder is ending up in my inbox. You can edit rules, but none of the rules allow me to filter by folder location, which would make removing spam from my inbox here a snap. So that’s not good. I only wanted to use the mailbox feature to see what it’s like, and as there are more than enough excellent desktop programs for accessing webmail, I don’t expect to make Opera my default gmail viewer any time soon.

I’ve grown so used to using Multiclutch, and am really sad that it doesn’t work consistently in Opera 10. It never works immediately upon opening the browser. Then, once I do something, the gestures I’ve programmed work like a charm – I just don’t know what that something is, so I can’t do it sooner in my Opera sessions. In terms of Multiclutch, I’ve just gotten this browser where I want it, and once I get the gestures going again, I’m not going to ever clear this session!

In all, I’m really enjoying trying different browsers on OS X. I think that Firefox has actually become the third place finisher in terms of my browser usage on this computer. Safari is pretty neat, and with the addition of Saft, as close to the perfect browser as I’m likely to experience. I stupidly left Saft in kiosk mode for about a week and could not for the life of me figure out where I’d gone wrong, but once I figured it out (I’m slow, what can I say), it was all smooth sailing again! I am even going to install Opera 10 on my Windows laptop, to see what I think of it there. I’ve used Safari on that computer, and have no desire to install it again, so I guess that the worst that Firefox can do on my Gateway is come in second.