Siu Lun

While I’m on the topic of Opera web browser. I’d like to mention a service that they just launched for their browser called Opera Unite.

Opera Unite is a new technology platform allowing you to share content directly with friends without having to upload anything to a Web site. You can stream music, show photo galleries, share files and folders or even host your own Web pages directly from your browser.

I think this is the direction browsers vendors should go and develop and it is a smart move. However when I see the need to sign up onto YET another account. I’ve lost of sense of curiosity.

Come on Opera, bring in the “web 2.5/3.0″ or whatever people want to coin it as. Put in some Facebook Connect or Open Social APIs at least! jeez.

Lately, there seems to be a lot of browser choices to make. I find myself struggling to go away from Firefox (due to the development plugins across platforms) to trying to decide between Chrome/Opera as my browser of choice for general browsing.

Firefox for me is over, I’ll only be using it for development purposes as once I install development plugins, the speed reduction is noticeable.

Here I present two choices for you common folks and present to you an easy to understand breakdown:

1) Google Chrome http://www.google.com/chrome

In use by Google as the ‘future’ of web browsing experience. It consist of many technical enhancements and UI enhancement. I won’t bore you with the technical details, however I’ll make a mention of the UI enhancement Google has brought to the world. The most important UI enhancement for Google Chrome is the maximised area in which websites can flaunt their eye candies.

2) Opera http://www.opera.com/

This little known browser has been around for a long time. It dates back to the days of Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer. Over the years this little guy has actually been the revolutionary party to implement a lot of new ideas first, after which are copied by the bigger players.

As of writing, Opera 10.10 is out and it is a browser that is FAST at loading websites.

When compared to Chrome, on a Windows 7 Ultimate setup, Opera loads sites faster than Chrome.

That’s it for my review. Can’t decide which one to use for your normal day browsing? Nor can I.

Take it as it comes, Opera does usually gets left behind in the browser testing arena on a lot of websites and so it tends to be a little less compatible than Chrome and other major browsers on the market today. Right now, I’m using Opera.

Aftermath:
Interestingly, I decided to go dig for some test results on the net. I’ve found this article that seems to have done some test on Opera 10 and Chrome and Chrome’s javascript performance seems to be much higher. But on my Windows 7 PC, Opera 10′s website rendering speed is much quicker than Chrome’s.

I guess for your ‘everyday’ non-’web 2.0′ heavy sites, Opera is still better. Interestingly though, I found Google Finance’s site loads better on Opera.

Ok, time to say it. I’ve got a google wave invite recently and jumped on and see what’s up….

then…. 5 seconds, that’s all I need…

it’s a dud.
I’m not alone in that thinking

It’s another Google Gears.

I don’t see the point or what’s even remotely good about it. Particularly I’m the sort that needs to rewrite posts at least 20 times before I post because at I’m often gun-ho about everything I encounter. This can just lead to disasters.

Time to wave bye bye.