Resurrection.
Tonight I moved from Opera to Firefox. This is a move opposite of what many do, but I have a list of reasons why Opera as a browser sucks when compared to Firefox, all in my experience of course:
1.) Buggy. Opera, no matter what version I used. The latest official release, the first Opera 9 beta, the second Opera 9 beta. All were buggy. I had a series of crashes, the saving grace being only the fact that Opera remembers what you had up when it last closed.
2.) Opera had issues with many sites. My online based SBC email login page was simply an infinite loop, so I had to open up IE (instant death) in order to check it. Why? Because the built in Opera email client developed an issue with the SMTP server.
3.) If you close Opera, or rather it crashes on you and you have to reopen it, all of the sites you are logined into are usually now logged off. Even if you had checked "remember me" or something similair it would still be logged off. This is very annoying.
4.) Blinking cursor issue. This was very bad here at B3D, it would happen on a regular basis. Annoying and the only way to solve it was by closing the browser, which lead to issue 3 all over again.
5.) "Wand" the password tool for Opera is a pain and sucks. Frankly I see no point in having such a tool if it needs you to hit ctrl+enter in order to make your password appear. Control is a annoying key to hit for me, I have to cruel my pinky up and slide it down. The 'wand" is a joke.
6.) Copy and pasting items of pages is a pain with Opera. If you want to copy the words from a hyperlink for example you have to be very careful with your highlighting and once its highlighted you have to very carefully place the cursor over it so as to not click the link, but to select copy. I cant even start to recall all the times I accidently hit the link and had to repeat the process all over again.
Opera is a very good browser when it works, which can be somewhat rare. The included applications (especially the IRC client) are very useful when you're not needing special ablities for them. But there were just to many issues to deal with for two intergrated applications.
So I find myself in Firefox again with Thunderbird for email, its not my favorite combo, but its better than Opera.