NeoDyne Posted September 3, 2005 Share Posted September 3, 2005 Hello Neowin, I am very tempted to switch from Firefox to Opera, and I am almost there. I run a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop, and I have to put up with the sound of the tiny fan whining away whenever I do a cpu-hungry task. When I installed Firefox, I heard less of the noise; but I am sick of Firefox not unloading properly, and sick of it using a large portion of my memory. I tried Opera, and all seems well. However, when it comes to CPU usage, both browsers seem the same. Can you tell me which one uses less? I also read somewhere that Opera lacks functionality- but the Opera UI feels much snappier than Firefox. If Opera DOES lack some functionality, can you tell me where it stumbles? Thanks alot, NeoDyne Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jp10558 Posted September 4, 2005 Share Posted September 4, 2005 Hello Neowin,I am very tempted to switch from Firefox to Opera, and I am almost there. I run a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop, and I have to put up with the sound of the tiny fan whining away whenever I do a cpu-hungry task. When I installed Firefox, I heard less of the noise; but I am sick of Firefox not unloading properly, and sick of it using a large portion of my memory. I tried Opera, and all seems well. However, when it comes to CPU usage, both browsers seem the same. Can you tell me which one uses less? I also read somewhere that Opera lacks functionality- but the Opera UI feels much snappier than Firefox. If Opera DOES lack some functionality, can you tell me where it stumbles? Thanks alot, NeoDyne 586473640[/snapback] Wow, I'm an Opera fan, but let me indicate the failings as I understand them, although I don't ever use FireFox so I might miss some. 1) Menus don't support Middle Click or Right click, you have to left click and use keyboard modifiers. Not an issue if you use panels for bookmarks or nicknames. 2) No extensions. AdBlocking is slightly more difficult, requireing separate programs or the use of say hosts files. 3) Toolbars cannot be rearranged, instead you can move objects to other toolbars. Slightly less convienient, but only an issue if you frequently change your UI setup. 4) Tabbed browsing is different, using an MDI model vs tabs - even when in basic tabbed mode, pages are arranged like programs in Windows. So if you close a page, the page under it, rather than the tab next to it is displayed. There are some workarounds, but nothing built in yet. That's about it. There are further implications of the above, but I won't spell out pages here. As to using more or less CPU, there are some bugs in each that can cause a race condition (cpu spikes to 100%, sometimes staying there) but I don't know that either one consistently uses less CPU. Opera's usage for me is usually around 2-5%. I have heard that it tends to use less RAM than FireFox, but be aware that the Auto Ram Cache setting *will* eat unused ram depending on how much you have in the system. For instance, Opera often will use 120MB of ram on my PC with a GB, but if I minimize Opera, it will page out to ~10MB, so not an issue as it's only using RAM when you're using it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abc@home Posted September 4, 2005 Share Posted September 4, 2005 Opera seems to use noticeably less cpu for flash, eg in home page of nba.com http://www.nba.com/ opera is around 10% less than FF in my case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abc@home Posted September 4, 2005 Share Posted September 4, 2005 double post Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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