Look, I’m going to come out and say it. I’m just not into Thunderbird anymore. Sure, it has been a serviceable e-mail client for my needs at work, but its slow performance, weird filter behavior1, unfinished RSS feed support2, and a bunch of other low-level annoyances have made me start looking elsewhere.
Furthermore, Firefox 2.0 has been a disappointing “major” release, at least for me. The spell checking in text fields is the one thing that I can think of off the top of my head that makes it worth the upgrade3. However, being that the current build of Firefox 2.0 for my machine at work is a touch buggy, I decided that maybe I’d look elsewhere for a web browser, as well.
Thus, I decided to revisit that little Scandinavian browser. I’ve used Opera on and off through the years. There were lots of things to like: it had tabbed browsing before it was cool4, implemented mouse gestures for moving back and forth within web documents, and, unlike Netscape Communicator (the dominant web browser before IE ate its lunch), was tiny and fast. The sad part is that its support for web standards lagged way behind the state-of-the-art, and you had to either pony up some cash and buy it or watch banner ads. So, it fell out of favor with me. I’d revisit it on major releases (4, 5, 7.5, 8.0) and it just wasn’t enough.
I’m here to say that my first impressions of Opera 9.02 are pretty damn good. It’s cross platform; I’ve used it at work (on Foresight Linux) and at home (on the Mac), and it just works. But, in addition to being an excellent web browser, it’s also a pretty nice IMAP e-mail client, as well as a decent IRC client. As a bonus, it groks RSS/Atom and contains a real feedreader. All of these features rolled into one program that, while it isn’t free (as in speech), is free (as in beer). And, while it can no longer claim to be tiny, it’s still quite a fast browser. Finally, the Opera development team is like ESPN5 and constantly updates their weblog with news and weekly snapshots of betas.
So, as an experiment, I’m going to use Opera 9.02 at home and work for the next week or so for Web, Mail, RSS, and IRC and see how it goes. If you are a Foresight user, it’s just a conary update opera away!
1 For example: junk mail sometimes gets put in the Spam folder, and sometimes it doesn’t. I guess it’s just being moody.
2 It’s so bad as to be utterly unusable. Just take my word for it.
3 Of course, Safari has had this feature since inception, but only because it came free with NSTextView.
4 Ok, it was really an MDI window containing a bunch of subwindows, each containing a webpage. The spirit was there, I tell you.
5 See Chasing Amy for the quote.