Browser Hunting

Lately I’ve come to loathe my favorite browser, Opera, which sucks because I love it and I can’t leave it.

I’ve actually run into many people who have no idea what Opera is, which is amazing to me because it’s one of the top 5 browsers out there. What gets me is, if it’s so popular and the Opera crew is so into making it a better browser, why isn’t it a better browser yet?

I’ve gotten so used to using Opera that no other browser stands up to it at all. And that’s just because of the things on Opera that I love to use. It has nothing to do with its performance, which is good for it, because its performance sucks.

Opera is constantly lagging my computer, sucking up as much RAM as it can, and freezing. At random times, it’ll just freeze. And then it says across the top if it that “Opera Is Not Responding.” Yeah? No shit, I couldn’t tell by the fact that everything on my screen stopped responding all together.

Every now and then it’ll force close out of nowhere. No warning, no nothing, it won’t even be acting up. Everything will appear fine and then BAM! It’s gone. That’s where the Opera crew come in to play. A pop up message will come up telling me that there was an incident and I can fill out a form telling them what happened so they can work on the issue. I’ve filled out the fucking form and nothing has changed. So now when I get it I just cuss them out.

With that said, I have gone over quite a few other browsers and just can’t seem to get the hang of using any of them. Again, performance isn’t an issue, it’s all of the extra bullshit that I like about Opera that I either can’t get at all on other browsers, or they suck on other browsers.

The biggest thing I like about Opera is the Speed Dial page. You can save as many links as you want to it, so when you open a new tab the Speed Dial page pops up and you can just click on any one of your favorite websites and it’ll open right up. You can rearrange these links in any order you want, change them, delete them, whatever. The best I’ve found on other browsers that offer this feature is that I can add links. I’m frequently rearranging them, and on every other browser with this feature you can’t do that. You’d have to manually delete and re-add each and every link in the order you want it.

The three biggest things I use my browser for is Facebook, email and Youtube. Opera is horrible at all three, just because it runs so slow. I’ve used other browsers and test those three sites out with each one and I’ve discovered some that work great in browsing those sites. But if they don’t have the things I like from Opera, I delete them and move on.

So far I’ve tried IE (I think up to 8), Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Maxthon, and SlimBoat. If you have any suggestions please let me know. I’m willing to try anything, but I’m telling you now exactly what I’m looking for and I’m sure I’m not going to find it.

I wanted to build my own browser but that’s actually not so easy to do, so if anybody who has the smarts to build one reads this and would like to tackle the challenge, we might be able to come up with a great browser. In any case, I’ll take recommendations for now on what you use and what you like, because as I said, I’m willing to try anything once.

As much as I hate Opera’s non-responsive ass, as much as I scream and cuss at it when it becomes non-responsive (which is like every ten minutes) I’m still using it, and I think the people at Opera know that, which is why they’re not fixing a thing that’s wrong. Because they know I’ll continue to use it.

Someone, anyone, HELP!