Why I've switched to Opera

[Thomas Milne]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 11:48:20AM -0500, Thomas Milne wrote
>
>> Chromium includes a lot of extras, if I'm not mistaken, including the
>> Flash player and .. a PDF viewer built in ... I think. In any case, on
>> my ancient P4 it has no problems whatsoever.
>
>  For once I agree with Steve Jobs, and I'd like to see Schlockwave
> Trash die a quick death.  I've used xpdf for quite a while, even before
> the bad guys started exploiting Adobe's reader regularly.  I got sick
> and tired of a big menu bar taking up space telling me that "There's
> more to Acrobat than blahblahblah".  And xpdf is faster and safer than
> Adobe.

Well, you'll get no argument from me there :-) I didn't mean to imply
I was a huge fan of Adobe in any way, just that Chrome's size wasn't
comparable.

Keep in mind, re Steve Jobs, he doesn't give a crap about promoting
open standards like HTML5. He just doesn't want to have anyone else
with their hands in his cookie jar. Also, Flash on Linux is not the
same experience as Flash on Windows or on Mac. Flash on Linux, for
whatever reason, is crap. It is slow, it crashes constantly, leaks
memory, etc. I don't know why this is, but it certainly colours the
perception of Flash for Linux users. I've been terribly lucky, on my
system (Debian, perhaps that explains it) Flash is eminently
tolerable.

I would love to see things like WebGL and HTML5 take off, obviously.
It will take a lot more than Steve Jobs and the iPad/iPhone ecology to
kill Flash, tho. I mean, seriously, Youtube is like the number three
site on the web, and it's totally married to Flash forever, no?

Reminds me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

>  Remember how Sun was going to make the OS irrelavant on the web, by
> making everything a Java app?  Write once, and run anywhere... anywhere
> you have Java 1.2.3.4.5 loaded... not Java 1.2.3.4.4 or 1.2.3.4.6 but
> just 1.2.3.4.5.  Oh, and lots of exploits too.
>
>  And then AOL was going to make the OS irrelevant on the web, by making
> everything a browser app?  That excercise in futility basically
> destroyed Netscape, and handed to web over to IE for years.
>
>  Here we go again...
> http://www.conceivablytech.com/5673/products/firefox-4-in-march-a-first-look-at-firefox-5/
> and http://areweprettyyet.com/5/desktopApps/
>


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