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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?
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?
Why not? It could hardly be much worse ... could it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Something to do with not enough RAM installed and inability to do anything about it?
The majority of people who have 10+ tabs open don't need all of them opened at once. Close out the tabs you don't need and use bookmarks if you need a handy reference back to something.
Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.
On a side note: Opera's a great browser, however i'm skeptical of its Chinese ownership. If i'm going to have any intelligence agency know my private details in and out, I prefer it to be the NSA and CIA. /sarcasm
the downside to the built in VPN is that many sites outright block it; so while it would be 'nice' -- it's usefulness is somewhat diminished.
When I was doing my Masters dissertation I switched. A LOT of tabs meant my computer was slowing down. Opera has been a dream. In addition, Australia records net activity so the built in VPN is nice. The plugins are all available too (90%).
I use Chrome, as a rule, though I also use Firefox, IE, and Edge depending on what I'm doing. (No, I'm not a web developer.)
I do run into this issue if I have about 100 or so tabs open; however, I normally only run with 1-10 tabs split between 1-2 windows. Frankly, I shudder at the idea of having more than 15 or so tabs open on a regular basis.
TL;DR
Your mileage may vary. Chrome works for me. Figure out what works for you.
Just use The Great Suspender -- idle tab suspending service: https://chrome.google.com/webs...
Because I still use Firefox.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I use a program capable of utilizing large amounts of ram and then max out my system resources. Please help! I have no idea what I'm doing wrong...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Looks like Opera Mini is worse. It includes all the Google spyware that Chrome has plus additional third party spyware:
https://www.reddit.com/r/opera...
http://www.opera.com/privacy/m...
Even the privacy policy for the non-mini versions include pretty vague data collection:
"The information we collect may include: personal data, for example your name, email, IP-address, location; and non-personal technical data, for example who manufactured your device, your screen's resolution, your mobile operator's region and code."
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
No ads. No JS. Pure content, all the time. Open as many tabs as you want! The maximum you'll need to view every site is ~160.
I usually end up 100 tabs open throughout the days/weeks/months. Usually this is my sign that I need to start closing tabs down and save them for later.
One of the solution is to use a better tab manager: Tabs Outliner
Why?
* It lists ALL your tabs (both open and closed) VERTICALLY in its OWN window.
* You can name a tab group
* You can close all tabs in a tab group
* You can "Garbage" or "X" a tab. The former permanently removes from the tab manager, while X closes it the window but leaves the link in the tab manager.
Chrome is a memory pig -- but I've found being more pro-active with its memory usage stops it from having to restart the app all the time.
What the fuck did these guys do to this site? Been away, you know.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Just two weeks ago, I picked up a used dual-E5 at a good price, with sixteen available RAM slots (once I score the second CPU).
This, mainly to run my many web tabs, and perhaps one other heavy application at the same time.
That sounds great, but I'm so locked into my suite of Chrome extensions. It's not just the browser, it's the whole app ecosystem that's built into it. If that transfers too, then I'm on board. But I suspect that my boatload of Chrome extensions is part of the problem.
My life is boring enough that Google is welcome to my information. What are they going to find out about me? I like sex, pizza, and laziness? I freely admit those things.
I'd been using Vivaldi but ran into odd compatibility problems (unexpected as it's closely enough related to Chrome), and so went back to Chrome. Chinese-owned Opera has never been an option and unfortunately Firefox is going down the drain.
Well there's always lynx or w3m :)
Unlike some less enlightened people, I understand the advanced concept known as "bookmarks" and thus have no need for opening more than a few tabs at any given time.
What got me off Chrome is just how long it takes to load initially. It's takes about twice as long as Firefox to come up. Makes you wonder what on earth it's doing... probably phoning home to Google and checking for updates, maybe sending telemetry info, and what else?
Or if it's not doing anything special, then it must be very bloated.
For now I'm doing fine just using Firefox and uBlock Origin (ad blocker) 90% of the time.
I may try Opera again (last time was in the late 90's), but why pay for something (or put up with a stripped free version) when a FOSS that does the job is available?
For years, no one mentioned Opera except to scoff in passing, but now that it's been bought out, suddenly it's the best thing since sliced bread.
But, thankfully, Opera was forked into Vivaldi for those of us who were concerned about the direction Opera is going/went.
At one point, years ago, I paid US$35 for Opera because it completely rocked -- it was and has been, ahead of the curve for years. Now, I dropped Opera and only run Vivaldi (except I have to use Chrome for some peculiar website shit but that's it Just one site, essentially).
Did I mention this better browser, Vivaldi, by chance?
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
But you should leave Chrome for Vivaldi.
If you are using Chrome, have you tried OneTab?
Opera is a company controlled by some Chinese now. How about Vivaldi ? OneTab works on that, too.
Since Mozilla cancelled Aurora (FF Developer Edition), I've been using the "Mozilla Developer Preview", which self-identifies as Nightly, but appears to be a version behind (54). With Nightly 55, almost all extensions are listed as "Legacy" and most of their icons are removed from the interface. So things aren't looking very bright now.
Switch to Vivaldi, not Opera.
You should take a look at Sidewise, it does everything that Tabs Outliner does without the gawd-awful interface.
And unlike Tabs Outliner, you can actually select multiple tabs in Sidewise.
Giving away my secrets to those who do not know the secret handshake....
Rick B.
Pick your poison... China or Google?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
He's not using it in accordance with hardware constraints. I use the hell out of chrome all day every day but I have 64 GB of RAM and a high end Xeon.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Hardcore Firefox user since it was released first as Phoenix. I had to switch as I noticed in both my Windows box at work older i7/8GB Ram and at home A10/16gb of ram Firefox was making my systems slow as hell. It all started around the same time a few updates ago. Switched to Chromium and all slow downs went away.
Yes I'd prefer to have something not controlled by Google but the Original Opera is now gone and haven't bothered to look at alternatives.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I would use CyberDog, but it's the Apple browser that doesn't get any respect any longer.
I started using Waterfox years ago because Firefox didn't have a 64 bit browser out yet and I wanted the benefit 64 bit could bring. I keep using it because quite frankly I still need certain NPAPI plugins and as of FF 53 your SOL if you need them. Sure I can download the ES version but then I'd be stuck on an old version without access to any new updates. I like it enough that I even started using it on my Mint laptop. Waterfox strips out all of the telemetry and data collection and keeps NPAPI available should you need it. That said I have Chrome and Maxthlon browsers loaded as well and frequently pit them against each other. I like features of each but I always end up back at Waterfox. I just installed Opera to give it a try again and it loaded smooth and looked very polished. Then I tried to import my bookmarks and it crashed and now crashes when I try to launch it. Not a very good first impression.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Does anyone use Chrome? No one that I know.
Bingo!
And this is why devs and beta testers need to be forced to do all their testing on a first-generation Athlon64 with less and 1GB RAM.
Not because they expect their audience to use such a machine, but because their audience will be using their program and a dozen others at the same time.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I would use CyberDog, but it's the Apple browser that doesn't get any respect any longer.
Hahaha, wow. CyberDog! I worked for an ISP back in the day, doing telephone technical support. A customer called in one time and told me they had CyberDog on their system, so I had to download and install it on mine so I could help them use it. I remember mentioning it to my coworker/boss, the sysadmin, who cracked up about the name CyberDog. From then on it became a running joke about us needing to officially support CyberDog. Good times.
If it wants or needs to use a certain amount of memory, there is little a browser can do to help. It's like saying you want to use iOS or Android or Windows or OSX to "use less memory in Photoshop". For the most part, you need to choose websites that work well for you.
Opera is a great browser. Chrome is also wonderful as is Firefox. Frankly I prefer Firefox with one serious complaint. Right now my Firefox browser will not play sound on You Tube or video or sound on Netflix. That was not an issue until the latest update. Chrome has also gone through releases that would not run NetFlix. I am not aware of how Opera is doing with Netflix lately. I will say that Netflix is a big enough deal that any browser should be able to run it perfectly with zero tweaking.
Try The Great Suspender -- it suspends tabs that are not in use.
Yeah, I think it is pretty sad that my Ipad has 2GB of RAM, is more powerful than a frikkin Cray XMP and still useless when displaying a page with text and a few pictures
2GB is enough to save the names of all the people on earth with a bad compressor. If you have a good one you could probably fit the addresses too. It should not be so hard.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
The article being linked to freezes in Chrome. Is that his point? Internet Explorer 10 won't load it either (due to a bad certificate) but Firefox does.
PS, my CPU fan has just gone crazy with Firefox going bezerk, and now even Chrome is struggling to cope after I reloaded and managed to get the page to render. Maybe the problem is that his web site sucks and has far too much advertising and other embedded garbage on it?
Agreed. Bach is for true connoisseurs ;-)
eom
Because that page with 'text and a few pictures' actually loads 10 mb of scripts and video players and comments sections and sidebars and headers to surround the text that you actually want to see with useless garbage you don't.
This is why for any site you visit frequently you need to spend 5 minutes going apeshit on it with ublock/abp and its element hider making all the custom filters you need to so absolutely nothing loads *except* the 2kb of text you actually care about. Page download and load times fall to almost literally zero.
(Wait, can you not do all that on an iToy? Well sucks to be you then.)
Over the last few years, I have grown endlessly frustrated with Chrome's resource management,
Sorry..... SECURITY trumps resource management, and Chrome is much more secure than Opera thanks to being miles ahead in process sandboxing.
especially on MacOS. Admittedly, I open too many tabs, but I'd wager that a lot of you do, too.
So stop doing bad things. You've gotten into a lazy habit of holding too many tabs open. Yes, tabs have their place. Their place is not to have 10+ tabs open; if you find yourself opening more than 5 or 6, you need to concentrate efforts on bookmarking things to check back later and close tabs.
I thought Chrome was going to give me a better `browsing experience' than I'd been getting from Firefox which still seems to refuse to work well with the majority of the Javascript it encounters. Alas, Chrome was actually worse than Firefox. Javascript seemed to be less of a problem but memory utilization was through the roof with my 8GB desktop swapping all the time and grinding the whole system to a halt while that was happening. What has made Chrome much better is `The Great Suspender' add-on. It's nothing less than a damned Godsend. Set it up to suspend tabs after five minutes (even pinned tabs) and auto-unsuspend when you switch back to them and waiting for memory swapping is almost a think of the past. The only drawback is that the back button acts oddly when you unsuspend a tab--it'll take you back the `click to unsuspend this tab' screen.
Opera on the other hand... well I've been mainly using Opera for LinkedIn as it seemed to run that site better than most other browsers. I still find that it's a bit of memory pig though I admit that I haven't explored whether there are add-ons that can control this a bit. I haven't bothered to switch to using LI with Chrome. Yet. I might be abandoning Opera if that test goes well.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Oh yeah, le old complaint about Chrome using too much ram...
I mean, go ahead, use Opera and tell us what you think of it. I don't think people should be trapped into using certain browsers only because everyone uses it, seriously.
But the CHROME USES TOO MUCH RAM complaint is pretty stupid and it was several times explained why it behaves this way at this point.
Put simply, resources of your computer that are not used are just that... not used. Having a browser that leaves a whole metric ton of free RAM around benefits no one.
Chrome was a browser developed to take as much advantage of your machine as possible. It's definitely not lightweight, so alternative browsers can be a good thing if your computer is crappy, but how much free ram it leaves behind is a very stupid reason for switching.
Chrome uses separate processes for each and every tab to solve problems with one tab crashing the entire browser. It dynamically allocates as much ram as possible to pre-load stuff and speed up things. Just make a test yourself. Open Chrome, run as many tabs you like, saturate the ram... with a reasonable machine. Then open some other software that chews up ram... like, I dunno, something from Adobe CC. You'll see that even though Chrome was using all the ram, you are still able to open another sofware and use it without problems. That's because Chrome will set the limit of ram usage to a lower threshold.
It's by no means perfect or anything like that, but if you are gonna criticize it, it's better to look a bit more into your complaints before spouting nonsense.
I can't tell about Chrome on MacOS (because I don't have one), but maybe Chrome usage of system resources needs a bit more analyzis to be on point. I use it on both Windows and Linux-based system (Ubuntu/KDE right now) and it's working fine, even with multiple tabs in multiple windows, a situation that's very common for me (I keep things open in their own window during work).
To me this sounds like the old complains we got when people look at their free RAM, and see it's close to 0, just because of some cache. I don't know exactly what Chrome is doing because, well, I don't look at it unless the system becomes unstable, which it doesn't. But since I can happily launch some heavy stuff (mostly video transcoding and games) while keeping my tabs open, I'd say Chrome is not the magic culprit most people accuses it to be.
As much as I don't trust Google, at least Chrome is (mostly) open source.
Opera is not open source except for the third-party open source components that they used and modified.
And given that it was adware not too long ago, I simply can't trust it.
I need to trust my browser.
When IE was the standard, Chrome was blooming and Firefox was all the rage on our group (the Geek), from around 2006 through 2010, I used Opera almost exclusively. I can safely say that was the browser's best period, although I have been using Chrome and the odd Firefox the past 6 years.
I've looked at Vivaldi, but it felt crude with a UI that passes a "Windows Millennium" - it just tries too hard to be fresh, when all it needs is to be simple. After this post, I will try back Opera's latest but with the amount of extensions (especially ad-blocking and privacy ones), and the Google services I got going with Chrome integration, I feel it might be a bit too hard to switch now.
Vivaldi is more like Opera than Opera itself nowadays
>"Should You Leave Google Chrome For the Opera Browser?"
Firefox.
How does Opera offer that much less memory/CPU usage for multiple tabs? Tabs will still have Javascript (which is what sucks all the CPU time) and most of the memory. So unless Opera is suspending Javascript, the tabs will still use CPU cycles and memory.
I prefer DeBussy.
What I find shocking that even on an i7 CPU with 16GB of RAM, Chrome cannot scroll smoothly. I do not really care whether it uses 1GB or 3GB of RAM, but smooth scrolling is something I do expect.
I try them regularly, but right now Opera has a bunch of convenience features that are lacking from vivaldi and that makes them still better to use for me. For instance, I use the video pop out thing _a lot_, and vivaldi has a weird bug that if you type to fast it does not properly auto-complete (eg. if I type "re" and hit enter very fast, it will search for "re", if I wait for maybe 1/10th of a second, it will have completed to "reddit.com" and open that).
Chrome is probably not your problem.
I am on an older machine right now with an i3, 4 GB, and 30+ open tabs. Scrolling works fine on all of the sites I have open.
This is temporary setup though, so I don't have any plugins. But it does show that vanilla Chrome offers tolerable performance on old hardware.
There are a lot of things it could be---outdated video drivers, plugins, antimalware, to name a few---but your situation is very much an outlier.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
An honest question - I switched to Brave a few months ago and it's now my go-to browser on everything, from MBPs and smartphones to gaming PCs. It is also a truly FOSS browser (see https://github.com/brave) which should ring true to this crowd.
"The mind is a terrible thing to, um, uh, oh bollocks." -- Me
Then there are those of us doomed to the corporate limitation of only "authorized" software. Only two browsers are allowed, Chrome and the thing with the big blue "e" icon.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Buy a proper computer. Insert 32GB RAM. Don't look back.
Should You Leave Google Chrome For the Vivaldi Browser?
FTFY.
Curious about the compatibility issues you ran into? Have you tried running the snapshot branch? Browser is still _somewhat_ in it's infancy, and is getting updates all the time, some that fix stuff, some that break stuff and then more that fix stuff that was fixed before. It's good enough to use as my daily for the past 6 months or so, but every so often you do run into that nagging irritable bug, but no showstoppers for a good year now, I'd say.
I use Opera at work to host a Slack channel, and after being open all day mostly just in Slack, it will often crash with an Out of Memory error, so it's far from a perfect browser.
While Mozilla have taken several wrong turns with Firefox, it is still king when it comes to usability and resource usage.
If you don't like its look, then you can install Classic Theme Restorer and have it look like what you are used to.
If you are like me with lots of open tabs, then it works fine as well. My record open tabs is 1,488 (yes, not a typo). Right now it is around 492. You can do that if you install uBlock Origin and NoScript, and therefore web site would not eat your CPU and RAM by all there inefficient Javascript, or obtrusive ads.
Install the Auto Unload Tab, and memory usage will go down too. Set it to unload a tab after it was inactive for an hour or too.
To top it off, use Session Manager to be able to save sessions with all the tabs that are in it.
Yeah, despite all its drawbacks, Firefox is still the best.
Oh, and I am on Linux (XFCE4, via Xubuntu), on a 9 year old laptop that was upgraded to an SSD drive, and max RAM (8 GB).
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Just as long sites are designed to work with the actual HTML standards, and the browser supports them, why should I really care if someone is using one browser or the other. I personally like some browsers better than others, I am fine to use what I am happy with. But what gets me are sites, who limit what you can use because they use a browser non-standard thing, that forces me to use an other browser.
I have tried Opera off an on over the past decades, While I never had any problems with it, I never really though it was that great. But I am a limited Tab Person, so it never bothered me anyways.
Microsoft back in the late 1990's won the browser war, however they failed to get their objectives. So now we have a population of browsers that we are free to use based on our personal preferences. And that is a good thing.
I take the exception of "Should you leave google chrome for the opera browser" We should use what we want because they should support the actual standards, and our choice isn't on if it renders the page, but on external features that we may or may not need or want.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Without extensions you might as well use Edge.
If having too many tabs open is giving you grief install The Great Suspender. It suspends tabs, freeing up resources and memory.
At least with Tor, you can be more confident that you are not being keybridged.
It's just broken a *lot* of websites. SSL certs have a name... and a SAN, an alternate name. Chrome, instead of doing a fallback, as I understand it used to, and everyone else still does, it says "nope, nothing good here", and won't let you get to the site.
This includes a metric *ton* of US federal government websites, and it's going to take several years for the certs to expire and be replaced... and you won't be able to get to them with chrome.
You let me know when my tabs open in chroot() jails.
Surprisingly, somebody is working on this, but it certainly doesn't look like a priority.
On my old PC videos on some sites will not load or run very slowly using Chrome or Firefox, Opera runs them without complaint. I use the bult in VPN to post on forums that have blocked my computers IP. I do wish I could get it to switch to the new tab when I click on a link.
For general web surfing I use Firefox because it will open the links I click on and has a search bar. I often type a word I can't spell or a subject I want more information on into the search bar then open a new tab. The search bar information is maintained across tabs. After I complete my search I switch back to my first tab. In Chrome and Opera I can only type into the address bar and that information disappears if I open a new tab.
Whilst I do like Vivaldi's "Nisi Dominus", it's no Bach "Magnificat" ;-)
Take the "Et misericordia" movement, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Among people who claim to know about music, but are actually musical laymen. Go ask anyone with a doctorate in music who their favourites are and I bet Bach won't be among them.
And we all know that those with doctorates in music are the true arbiters of good music, ha ha! You crack me up.
my only complaint is opera 45 doesnt rememeber pinned tabs.
Ah, of course. The St. Matthew Passion, one could not forget that at all. I have 5 different recordings of it. It's definitely a desert island disc, but which one should I take with me? :-D
I just got into SMP last year and haven't been able to get enough of it. I've watched pretty much every rendition of Erbarme Dich on YouTube and watched the full SMPs they have on YouTube as well. I even got the 3 disc Richter 2 set on EBay so that I could listen to it on my hifi set.
So, what are the 5 and which one's your favorite?
More so on the subject, I do have to say that Bach is perhaps the greatest composer I have listened to and Glenn Gould's rendition of Bach's works are some of the greatest recordings of the last century. The partita in E minor is so chilling. Anyone who says Bach doesn't deserve a place in the top 3 admired classical/baroque composers of all time is at best clueless. Having said that, I do have to say that I don't care much for Mozart's works (his requiem, PC in D minor, and many arias excepted). And Beethoven and Chopin also have their special place in my collection. The only contemporary composer I cared for was Shostakovich.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
The five recordings I have are as follows:
1989. Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner
2000. Bach Collegium Japan, Masaaki Suzuki
2008. Dunedin Consort, Dunedin Players, John Butt
2009. Collegium Vocale Ghent, Philippe Herreweghe
2013. RIAS Kammerchor & Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, René Jacobs
If I use the "Erbarme Dich" movement to compare them all, I'd have to say that my favourites might have to be the Suzuki or Herreweghe recordings. The singing in the Jacobs and Butt versions is too operatic for my liking (probably because their altos use vibrato whereas the tenors don't in the Herreweghe and Suzuki discs). John Eliot Gardiner's alto (Anne Sofie von Otter) doesn't use enough vibrato to annoy me, and her singing is very good, which you'd expect from a name like that.
The orchestral playing of the Dunedin Consort is excellent, with quicker tempi, as is the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, so if you prefer that over the singing then you might like these. It's probably best if you just get them all, I think. Each has their own selling points ;-)