Wow! Opera Browser is amazing!

Thoughts & Feedback
#1

Well my story goes like this:

I have an 64bit destkop pc, a 32bit only laptop and an android phone. I was always using chrome/chromium until google stopped chrome builds for linux 32bit devices and I was unable to get flash for chromium because pepperflashplugin-nonfree downloads flash from google servers, so it doesn’t find anything on 32bits systems (please tell me if there is any way to get pepper flash on 32 bit chromium).

So, for the past 4 months I’ve been using firefox on all my devices (since I want to have all my bookmarks synced). But, firefox is just too sluggish with really high cpu usage (even the RAM usage is much higher than it used to be). Nowhere close to chrome’s performance which feels really fast and smooth (even if it has high RAM usage when you have many tabs open).

So today I decided to try something new. I was considering midori at first but it doesn’t have any android build (and I think it doesn’t support synced bookmarks at all). So, I gave opera a shot. Well, I’ve never been more satisfied!!

  1. I created an account, I imported bookmarks from firefox and all synced perfectly at all devices!
  2. It feels fast and light as hell!! Really smooth (maybe even better than chrome), when RAM usage is lower than chrome’s (I think even lower than firefox, even if I didn’t do any specific test)!!!
  3. Flash worked even with my 32bit laptop. For some reason it shows that flash version is 23 and the type is PPAPI even if I don’t have pepperflashplugin-nonfree installed. Maybe it’s really the version 11.2 and it’s just faulty information, or maybe opera has it’s own version of flash like chrome, if anyone knows what is that happening please let me know (it doesn’t really matter since all videos that require flash play smoothly until now).

Please share what you think about opera and if you have encountered any problems. If you haven’t tried it, I really recommend it!! In fact, I will install it on my mothers’ ubuntu pc and android phone as well tomorrow.

3 Likes
#2

Opera is the wonderful browser that no one uses. I will give a try but I have some questions as youre using it.

  1. Opera have been branched, so which one are you using?
  2. What about the addons FF has.Firefox is slow to me because I use a lot of addons + lots of tabs.
#3

I installed opera from Software Boutique on my main pc and I downloaded from the site http://www.opera.com for my laptop. Both say version 40.0.

Well firefox is slow even in safe mode (with all addons disabled). I think that begun when they started using gtk3. Additionally, when you listen to music from youtube for example, if you move the current tab to a new window or another window, then the music stops for 1 sec and starts again. I think this is because firefox treats differently windows and tabs, where opera and chromium/chrome treat each tab or window as a separate process (so moving them doesn’t cause any delay). Finally, the cpu usage is 2 to 3 times higher on firefox than it is on chrome or opera. Maybe I ll give pale moon a try sometime, but now I am supper happy with opera.

#4

About the flash player.

I found out that the package adobe-flashplugin has both NPAPI flash (version 11) suitable for firefox and pepperflash (version 23) suitable for chromium/opera which works on 32 bits systems too. For some reason I always used flashplugin-installer package for firefox and pepperflashplugin-nonfree for chromium which doesn’t work on 32 bit systems. So, now that I know that, I switched back to chromium. Don’t get me wrong, opera is just amazing, I am just used to chrome’s style and extensions. :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

I'm switching back and forth between OperaDev and Vivaldi.

I love Vivaldi's looks. It's just beautiful, it can be easily customized to match the theme of the OS, but memory usage is awful compared to Opera, also there's not really much 'useful' feature actually.

vivaldi.png1600×900 133 KB

I'm using OperaDev, not the stable one, cause I love the surprises, I enjoyed their free VPN and builtin adblocker long before they hit stable channel. Not all surprises are good though, sometimes the update breaks the browser.

I left Firefox back then to give other browsers a try, when I got back to it they've changed the scrollbar behavior, I don't like it. I never use Firefox as my main browser anymore, it's just there as a backup browser, just like IE.

Final words, I would still recommend Opera any day for their free VPN and builtin adblocker. Just be careful using their sync feature, they've got a data breach recently (to me that's a sign they didn't give enough care to their users' data)

2 Likes
#6

I was reffering to that. I knew there were two branches but don’t know their names

@aurodeus can you tell me about Firefox addons on Opera?

1 Like
#7

Hi, pardon me I’m not really sure what you mean. Both Opera and Vivaldi are using the same engine as Chromium.
Opera has its own addons store, while Vivaldi simply use the same extension store page as Chrome.
Both aren’t compatible with Firefox addons.

1 Like
#8

Okey thnx I wil try to check both branches and their addons. I’ll probably stck with FF but I may be able to recommend ohers Opera if it suits better their needs.

1 Like
#9

So i’ve downloaded opera a couple of times but can’t get it to appear in "internet " under applications so as to add it to the tool bar or plank. Its simply not showing up anywhere. Any suggestions would be appreciated

#10

This has links to the Opera Blog and FTP links for Stable, Beta and Developer versions. The Linux 64-bit versions
are also there.

https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/ - Desktop Blog

http://ftp.opera.com/pub/

http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/desktop Download Stable Here

http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera-beta Download Beta Here

http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera-developer Download Developer Here

1 Like
#11

Opera I love, what I have always in my mobile Android and PC,
although not open source, it is good, safe, fast and has news,

a snapshot

Pantallazo-2016-10-17 20-46-42.jpg1919×1052 336 KB

Regards...

2 Likes
#12

Thanks for the reply. Before i could actually take action on any of it i downloaded opera again and this time it seem to load properly . I have no idea why but am happy it seem to be operating correctly , thanks again