Turned out to be a busy weekend. Sunday I went to the casino with my mom and won a hundred bucks on a slot machine, so that was good. It paid for our museum outing on Saturday, plus some future watercolor supplies. (Thanks to Duma Key, Cheryl. Dare I try my hand at oils?) Then after the casino I went to Midwest City and found a used bookstore. I need to make a list to carry with me, because inevitably when faced with a bookstore or library, my mind goes blank and I end up with nothing. I can’t even remember which authors I think I should be reading. I did buy one book, another Lois McMaster Bujold, but I only bought it because I could.
I installed a browser called Opera, which I’d used a little bit a few years ago. At the time it didn’t seem different enough from Internet Explorer to mess with, but it’s changed a lot since then. It’s like a one-stop-shopping center. Besides having the same toolbars on top like IE and Firefox, it has a left hand “panel” bar, where you have the normal bookmarks and history but also instant email access, widgets, a simple-to-use notebook, contacts, recent downloads, and whatever else you want to stick on there. It has a multitude of add-ons like Firefox, skins and games and widgets, all accessible through the panel system.
An interesting feature is the “speed dial” start page, where you can bookmark your nine favorites as thumbnails. Another is the “mouse gestures” navigation, but I haven’t figured out how to do that with the mouse pad on the laptop.
I believe you have to set up your chat clients separately, but once accessed they should be available all the time, like email, I think. Even gmail chat, which is normally integrated into the gmail page, doesn’t show up in the Opera browser, but there’s an option to set it up in the panels. I won’t test this one yet, since I downloaded Opera as a way to have chat-free access to my email.
The clincher for me was how little memory it uses. According to the Windows task manager, the new Firefox was using 100k, compared with IE’s 70-80k. I have three tabs open in Opera and the memory usage is sitting right at 46k. Can’t beat that.
I’ve found a few quirks that will take some getting used to. One is this: When I select text in my WordPress post window, it won’t let me type over, instead brings up a new window based on the text I was trying to put in. But the quirks are really low-priority ones, and over all I recommend Opera.
Filed under: Life, technology | Tagged: browsers, downloads, firefox, IE, opera 9.5, software
$100!! WOO!! Way to go! Did you get a lottery ticket, just in case that luck holds out?
I d/l Opera. I tried, but I was lost without all my add-ons. I couldn’t find any way to add the things I wanted either, the plug-ins page was just text, no links. The skin I picked was cool though. No pink, but the purple was nice.
Love and hugs!