It’s been awhile since I’ve used Opera as a web browser. I liked it when I used it, but certain incompatibilities, glitches, and tweaks posed some problems for me, and I eventually went back to Mozilla (Firefox wasn’t around at the time).

Today I decided I should give it one more shot. Opera recently released Version 8 of their browser, and I decided it was as good of a time as any. I can sum up today’s web browsing experience in 1 word.

impressed.

While I’m still not used to all of Opera’s features, I love the ability to do mouse gestures to navigate around. hold down your right mouse button and move the mouse to the left to go back a page, to the right to go forward. There’s others I haven’t discovered yet, but I’m sure I’ll love them too.

I know there’s a plug-in for Firefox that works similarly, but Firefox has a tendency to run slow. Opera scores again. It’s the fastest browser I’ve ever used. I’m currently running it on an 866mhz Pentium III machine. Opera has 6 tabs open and it’s running rather fast. However, it does eat a lot of memory, which is something that has not changed since I originally tried Opera. It still remains very fast, and I’m not sure if the two are related. (to maintain speed, it eats memory?)

Regardless, I definitely shall stick with Opera for awhile. The pros far outweigh the cons at this point.