Over the weekend I was hanging out with a friend and for whatever reason we started discussing web browsers.  Since I’m still living in the days of RAM not being inexpensive, I always become concerned when programs use inordinate amounts of memory. For quite a while Firefox has had a pretty bad problem when it comes to memory management which can be seen by running the browser for extended periods of time. The longer you use it, the more memory it needs. For example, you might start up the browser and see that it’s only using ~24MB with one tab open, but after using it normally for a few hours and closing all but one tab it might use something more like 70-100MB. Even if this is only because of the browser’s RAM cache, Firefox clearly isn’t doing enough to free its memory for reuse. (In fact, it’s hard to even find settings for the RAM cache. You have to use about:config and while you can enable or disable the cache, you have to create a new value ‘cache.memory.capacity’ to change the cache size.)

Because I’m interested in memory usage, I decided to try out the latest version of Firefox (the 3.0 beta) and see how it compared. Unfortunately, my idea of doing a side-by-side comparison didn’t work out because even after installing the new Firefox into a new directory and trying to run each manually from the executables, the only one I could get to start was the newer version. After restarting, the only one I could use was the older version. There’s probably a work-around, but I decided not to bother, because at this point I was informed that the Opera web browser is now completely free (and not even ad supported anymore). I think I missed that memo by maybe two or three years.

Way back when, I used to really like the Opera browser. But then a bunch of stuff happened with built-in ads and some other stuff and of course Firefox was new and seemed pretty nifty, so I kinda lost track of Opera. After downloading it a few nights ago, though, I’m kinda bummed I wasn’t using it at least alongside Firefox, because it’s pretty good. I’m not sure yet how much better it is with memory, but it definitely feels faster than Firefox in just about every way. (Note: if you haven’t noticed already, this is turning into a shameless Opera plug.)

It has this cool Speed Dial thing where you can customize a list of your nine favorite sites and then every time you open a blank tab, you see this 3×3 grid and you can click on the site you want to visit. It’s faster and simpler than bookmarks or toolbar buttons for your most commonly visited sites. I also like searching from the address bar rather than the dropdown search bar in Firefox. You can just type “g search term” to search google or “w whatever” for Wikipedia or any number of other things that you can easily set up (edit: I’m now finding that Firefox has this feature too, but I sure as hell never knew about it before). Page zooming is a cool gimmick, as is easily turning images on and off for an entire page. Then there’s mouse gestures and the superior download manager (it even has a built in BitTorrent client for people too lazy to use microTorrent).

There are drawbacks of course, the biggest one being lack of tens of thousands of third-party plugins. If I were slightly more of a plugin fiend, I could see myself only wanting to use Firefox. Opera sort of makes up for not having my favorite Firefox plugin (Adblock) with a built-in “Block Content” feature, but it feels pretty clunky and doesn’t always seem to work on the things I want to block. So, I’ve switched back to the traditional and superior HOSTS-based method of blocking ads. I miss having Forecastfox to tell me the weather, but I can live without it. All in all, Opera seems pretty decent, and for someone who doesn’t use a bunch of plugins, it’s definitely worthwhile when compared to Firefox.