Simon Willison’s Weblog

I keep on coming back to Opera for general browsing (on Windows at least). It's just so very snappy, in a way Gecko-based browsers have never managed. It's often ahead of the curve on features, too - things like mouse gestures and page zoom have been in there forever, and Speed Dial is one of those simple additions that seems so obvious that you can't believe nobody did it before.

The UI isn't great, though, and makes Opera difficult to switch to. There are about 4 major versions' worth of inconsistent UI features layered on top of one another, and there's way too much fiddly customisation possible. You can even still use it in MDI mode, a throwback to Opera's pre-millenial editions (context-click a tab and go to Arrange/Cascade). I think they need the courage to throw away the obscure cruft that bloats the interface, and go in a stripped-down direction like Chrome. Really I'd like them to jettison the mail and chat and widgets and feed reader too, like the Seamonkey-to-Firefox transition.

Look forward to seeing where Hicks takes them, anyway.

phl - 10th October 2008 12:19 - #