A night at the Opera on Mac OS X...

Just installed the newly free-as-in-beer Opera on both my Linux "daily drive" box and on my iMac. Since my iMac (original recipe clamshell) only has a 300MHz G3 processor, I have to be very, very careful about apps and what they demand. My blue-and-white G3 also is similarly proc-limited, with a 350MHz G3. So far it seems like Opera is a lot faster at rendering, although it is not as good at rendering pages that are no sweat for Firefox.

Speaking of Firefox, it was similarly no sweat to upgrade it here. Much easier on Mac OS X than on Linux. Opera 8.5 looks very, very Mac-like...very Aquatic. IE is, well...a piece of crap. Firefox looks like a Gnome app just about wherever it's deployed, Safari is all brushed-metal and Panther Finder-esque, but Opera really looks like it belongs.

I would be more enthusiastic about this app if it was F/OSS. But since Mac OS X isn't Free, I suppose it's less of an "impurity" in this context.

I am going to give it some more torture tests, with some demanding websites. But it seems like this iBook struggles less with Opera than with any other browser. Looks good.