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However, Opera does have some shortcomings. It takes forever to start up, even when you're not restoring a saved session. And worse, there is a bug in Opera 8 and up that causes the "Hide Opera" command to break after the program has been quit, especially after unexpected quits (I don't have them often and it's usually the system and not Opera's fault), and after running OS X maintenance scripts, but also often after a completely normal application quit and restart. My workaround is to make a copy of the Opera Preferences folder and compress it to a Zip archive before running system maintenance routines and then restoring ti after the fresh reboot of Tiger. Inelegant, but it seems to work, and opera is worth the trouble. On a lesser scale of aggravation, Opera's page load progress bar is lame. Another thing that bugs some users, although it's not a problem for me is that Opera only supports plain text in OS X Services.
Since I use the hide function routinely, this is a major aggravation, and the only cure that I've found is to completely trash the Opera preferences (including Bookmarks and settings) and start afresh. Even then, sometimes it takes several attempts to get the Hide command working again. It is testimony to how much I like Opera that I have put up with this behavior in order to continue enjoying Opera's many superior features. It's probably some sort of Tiger incompatibility, as I don't recall the problem manifesting when I ran Opera 8 under Panther.
But it gets old.
Consequently, when I discovered the excellent Safari enhancing add-on application SafariStand a few weeks ago, I decided to try switching to Safari, which I hadn't used much with the Tiger builds. SafariStand adds a bunch of functionality to Safari, perhaps enough to wean me off Opera, I thought, at least until the "Hide" bug is fixed. You can read my recent review of SafariStand here.
Unfortunately, while I still like SafariStand a lot, I've not warmed much to Safari. In general I find it slower than Opera, although not so much so that speed would be the deciding factor. However, stability and responsiveness are deciding factors. Safari, after it has been up and running for a day or so, becomes increasingly balky and recalcitrant, slowing down, refusing to respond after you click between tabs until after a good, long wait. Closing and restarting the program improves performance again temporarily, but it's usually a short-lived fix. At least once I get Opera working, it usually stays working until my next system reboot.
I also don't like the way text saved from Safari looks when saved as plain text, and I don't especially like its Download manager.
After three weeks, I've decided to throw in the towel and go back to Opera, rather than continue struggling with Safari's angularities.
Indeed, "relief" is not too strong a word to describe surfing with Opera again after my three-week Safari experiment. It's faster, smoother, and I can have a dozen or more tabs open at a time without the program slowing to a crawl or seizing up. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.
This week Opera released version 8.52, and it's if anything a smoother and slicker performer than version 8.51 was.
Full details on Opera 8.52 here.
Note: these experiences have been on a 700 MHz iBook G3 with 640 MB of RAM running Tiger (currently OS 10.4.4), and with a very mediocre dial-up connection to the Internet (all that's available here aside from astronomically expensive satellite). With other setups, your mileage may vary. I don't recall the Hide issue prior to upgrading to Tiger, and I would be interested to hear if others have experienced similar phenomena with either browser.
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