AKA Panama Jack wrote:It is smaller than Firefox and does a whole host of things you need extensions for in Firefox which bloats Firefox quite a bit when you include the size of Firefox with extensions. Opera definitely comes out smaller.
The difference is down from 8mb to 2mb in less than a year. When its flip-flopped, what then?
I'm not going down the path of beating a drum for a particular browser. I use the best tool for the job. For WhatWG implementation testing, Opera is the clear choice, so I use that. But for my day to day browsing, it doesn't hold a candle to the functionality available for Firefox.
Thankfully, it seems that the memory use in Firefox continues to decrease, the memory use in Opera continues to increase, and best of all, Firefox has extensions to keep the bloat out of the main browser code. Sure, if I enable the features I want, it grows. But thats what extensions enable. You can't really disable the BitTorrent browser in Opera to gain back the memory it takes up to bring it back to its Opera 8 size.
Perhaps soon, Opera will learn from its competition.
In the meantime, I mentioned Opera 9's on the forums because it is worthwhile. I continue to use it, because the CTO for Opera is the man behind CSS, and much of the WhatWG work.
Its important to note that in previous posts, I maintained that 8mb was trivial, and laughable, and now that its 2mb, I continue to hold that position. When Firefox is ahead, I'll still hold that position.
For me, its about functionality. Opera still rocks the cutting edge hardcore, and until that changes, it will continue to be installed on my box.