Should You Leave Google Chrome For the Opera Browser? (vice.com)

mspohr shares a report written by Jason Koebler via Motherboard who makes the case for why you should break up with Chrome and switch to the Opera browser: Over the last few years, I have grown endlessly frustrated with Chrome's resource management, especially on MacOS. Admittedly, I open too many tabs, but I'd wager that a lot of you do, too. With Chrome, my computer crawls to complete unusability multiple times a day. After one too many times of having to go into Activity Monitor to find that one single Chrome tab is using several gigs of RAM, I decided enough was enough. I switched to Opera, a browser I had previously thought was only for contrarians. This, after previous dalliances with Safari and Firefox left me frustrated. Because Opera is also based on Blink, I almost never run into a website, plugin, script, or video that doesn't work flawlessly on it. In fact, Opera works almost exactly like Chrome, except without the resource hogging that makes me want to throw my computer against a brick wall. This is exactly the point, according to Opera spokesperson Jan Standal: "What we're doing is an optimized version of Chrome," he said. "Web developers optimize most for the browser with the biggest market share, which happens to be Chrome. We benefit from the work of that optimization."

Slashdot reader mspohr adds: "I should note that this has also been my experience. I have a 2010 MacBook, which I was ready to trash since it had become essentially useless, coming to a grinding halt daily. I tried Opera and it's like I have a new computer. I never get the spinning wheel of death. (Also, the built-in ad blocker and VPN are nice.)" What has been your experience with Google Chrome and/or Opera? Do you prefer one over the other?

Comments

Is this an Apple problem?

[Zaelath]

Something to do with not enough RAM installed and inability to do anything about it?

Mu

[drinkypoo]

I use Chrome for Chromey things, like Cleanflight Configurator or CHIP Flasher. I use Firefox for everyday browsing. Opera is not even on my radar. I have enough compatibility problems with Firefox (when people expect to be developing for Chrome.) But I prefer not to run Google's browser, in addition to all the other things I do with Google services. I tried using it for Google websites, but it turned out that I actually had a superior experience with Firefox, so I stopped doing that. I haven't tried it in some few Chrome versions, so I'm not sure that's still the case, but I'm actually having few problems with Google sites in Firefox these days — for example, G+ works better than Facebook, whose video control tends to punch Firefox right in the nuts.

Sometimes, you actually need Chrome to use a website. For everything else, there's Firefox.

Re:Exception to butterage

[ArmoredDragon]

Assuming the addons you want are actually available. I use the following:

- Searchonymous
- DeGoogle
- AdBlock Plus
- Tab Cookies
- ScriptSafe
- Privacy Badger
- LastPass
- Search by Image
- Remote Torrent Adder
- Tampermonkey
- Chrometana

Why do I use all of this?

Well, I get annoyed how when I searched Amazon for an 8 port switch, I get emails from them about more switches, and other websites show me ads for switches, even though I no longer want a switch. And then there was the time I was idly curious what an ounce of gold was worth and looked it up, and then other sites (slashdot included) started showing me ads to buy gold (which is a terrible idea in general, by the way.) Searchonymous, DeGoogle, Tab Cookies, and Privacy Badger all work to avoid this.

Plus there are the news websites that will block content after so many visits (tab cookies), the anti-adblock sites (tampermonkey), and sites that show annoying javascript popups asking for your email address (scriptsafe.) And then I like to just be able to click torrent links to download them from my server (remote torrent adder) and right click on images to search using them (search by image) and redirect Windows 10's lame bing searches to Google, (chrometana) which I've fully anonymized via the first two mentioned addons (not to mention, bing sucks.)

The web truly sucks without going through all of this crap, but it just ends up being necessary.

And no, chrome doesn't go slow for me with all of this, even though I run an i7 2600k from 2012, albeit I have 16GB of RAM (I run the occasional virtual machine) which likely makes all the difference, but 8GB should be plenty to avoid problems, and IMO if you still run on 4GB of ram these days...well I just feel sorry for you.

Re:"Open too many tabs"

[Anubis IV]

Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.

I take it you're unaware that RAM prices are nearly twice what they were at this same time last year?

The fabs for two of the three major manufacturers are currently in the middle of transitioning to smaller manufacturing processes, resulting in the industry being unable to keep up with demand. The fact that the mobile market keeps asking for more and more of their attention doesn't help matters either. As such, prices are actually expected to keep going up until around the end of the year.

If you'd like to see the price tends over the last few years, PCPartPicker has some pretty good charts highlighting the issue. Suffice to say, picking up RAM is not so cheap as you suggest. Maybe next year.