Tyler Brown's Blog The Adventures of a Linux User

Back on Vista…. and using Opera

Posted by Tyler Brown

Yes, you heard it correctly. I am back on Vista. So what happened? I was on Windows 7 Ultimate for nearly a year (From the RC to the RTM).

Well, as some of you may have known, I had gotten an MSDN account through another staff member when I was a staff member at McInTEC. After I had decided to leave in January, I lost my MSDN account too. No big deal, right? I saved my keys. That was all fine and dandy until just within the past week or so all my Windows 7 Ultimate Keys that I had, about 3, ended up getting blacklisted from Microsoft for no reason.

So why didn't I fight Microsoft to get my keys back? Well, for a couple reasons. First off, I got the MSDN account for free through that other staff member at McInTEC. No point in trying to get back keys that I didn't even pay for in the first part, even if they were legit in the first place. Secondly, I will be going to college this fall, and as a college student, I will either be able to get a huge discount on Windows 7, or the school that I plan on going to will offer a copy of Windows 7 Pro to their students via an MSDNAA account.

So anyway, now that I'm back on Vista, this time Vista Ultimate x64 (Thanks to a couple good friends! ),  I might as well talk about my experience a tiny bit. I will say one thing for sure, it isn't until you go back to using Windows Vista, that you start really noticing the small things in Windows 7 that you got really used to. For example, on Windows 7, I had gotten quite used to the superbar, especially how it grouped applications together, and how I could close a window just by clicking the scroll-wheel on my mouse. I had also gotten used to using Aero Peek to check my widgets, primarily using the keyboard shortcut Win+Space. Yeah, I know on Windows Vista it also brings the gadgets to the front, but it doesn't put them back in the background either. Those were just probably a few of the things I've kinda gotten used to again.

So, as usual when it comes to an OS reload, it'll probably take a couple weeks to a month to remember to reinstall everything that I use every now and then, but from the looks of it, everything is running alright, I am having no issues, etc. Enough about Vista though, I'm going to talk about Opera.

So about early March is when Opera 10.50 came out to the public as a final release, in time for the EU Mandated Browser Ballot Box Microsoft had to include in Windows 7 to be released, which is the reasoning they used as to why the Linux and OS X releases hadn't been released. Then about later that month Opera 10.51 was release, which fixed a few bugs, improved performance, etc. Anyway, when I did the reinstall of Vista, I decided that instead of installing Chrome first, I would instead give Opera a chance and use that as my primary browser for a little while.  So far its been a pretty interesting experiences, a few bumps here and there, but definitely I can say its a great browser.

To start off with, Opera 10.5x sports an amazing new UI, including support for Aero integration with Vista/7, as well as including integration into XP Luna, Zune, and Media Center themes, which is going above and beyond what Google has done for UI integration w/ Chrome on XP and what Mozilla has done with Firefox. Opera 10.5x also includes a new tab design, and has moved the entire menu bar over to one button on the top left corner, that sports a red background and a white Opera logo (you still do have the option to move the Menu bar back to normal).

Opera 10.51 UI for Vista/7

Enough about the UI, what about the speed, and its performance. Opera 10.5x is the first version of Opera that I've used that has had an amazingly fast JS rendering engine. Its about as fast as both Safari and Google Chrome's Javascript engines. Its loading of pages is also very very quick. Loading pages is also very very quick. In terms of resource usage, when using flash, it can be a bit of hog, but thats not very surprising. Flash by itself on browsers that take advantage of out of process flash is also very much a hog. Overall, performance for me has been very good, speed has been great, and most of my issues may have come from the websites themselves.

So despite the many great features I've found with Opera, it does have its own issues. Mostly with how certain websites act in it, including a few pages on Facebook, Google Reader, and including Geeks.pirillo.com. I'm not going to go more in-depth of other features, issues, etc. Because, its nearly 2 months after the original release of Opera 10.50, so theres probably already enough blog posts on it. Overall, I'm just going to say thats its been a great browser so far in the past few days, and I'm going to continue using it for a little while. Who knows, it may stay my default browser, or I might have to go back to Chrome. I'll update that for you all in a week.

Anyway, thanks for reading the first blog post in a couple months! Please subscribe to my blog by clicking the orange RSS icon if you want to see more content. I also appreciate comments, and CONSTRUCTIVE criticism on my writing.

- Tyler Brown