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Take Three: Enter Opera

Adam S — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 10:38:43 +0000

Using Flock was kind of a long shot. Flock is based on Gecko, like Firefox, which has given me a lot of problems. Flock served me well at first, but then starting gobbling up RAM. So, I’m pretty sure I’ve narrowed it down, for me, to XUL and extensions.

I’m not sure exactly what’s to blame for the specific problems I have: other programs on the computer? a single bad extension? I don’t know, but whatever it was, it was present in FF1.5, FF2, and Flock. And each had their own set of extensions installed. It’s not a core Gecko problem, because, as I showed before, Camino doesn’t have the same problem.

So, at the urging of Nate, who, I guess, also spends some time at his computer, I decided to go for a full time ride at Opera.

I don’t require THAT much from a computer: mainly, it has to be able to sustain my browser requirements. And those are tough, because I expect to be able to open 10-15 tabs and still have the browser function without (a) eating up greater than 200MB of RAM, (2) eating up > 10% of the CPU for more than a few seconds, and (third) locking up the browser or worse, the entire system. Enough use of Gmail, Flickr, or other AJAX apps and my Windows Gecko/XUL browsers toast themselves and everything around them. So I’m giving Opera a go.

The only crappy thing is that there’s no way to import form cookies, form history, cookie block list, ad-block filters, or history. And that sucks, because it’s going to take me a long time to rebuild that.

Darn it! Something Bigger May Be Wrong Here

Adam S — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 16:53:51 +0000

I switched to Flock, and you know what? I dig it! It’s really nice, and it’s got some great features to boot!

However – this is after a day’s work. Know what else slowly swallowed my RAM? Firefox.

Goodbye, Firefox. Hello Flock.

Adam S — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 08:42:36 +0000

Well, I’ve made the jump from Firefox to Flock. I’ve complained about Firefox for long enough, and a few days testing has shown that Flock will serve my needs just fine. I have a few observations though, so keep reading for the details.

First and foremost, Flock is probably not aimed at the general public. Its integration with so many services make it complex for the average user, but fantastic for someone like me. It’s integrated with Flickr (which I use), http://del.icio.us/ascheinberg”>del.icio.us (which I use), it has the blogger API built in (which I use). Also, it’s got a great default theme and, the deal sealer – it runs all of my extensions flawlessly. The only real drawback is that the most current revision is still based off of Firefox 1.5.0.8.

Yes, Flock still doesn’t respect my xml-stylesheet in my RSS feed, which — along with the developers attitudes towards users requesting a “fix” – was the biggest turn-off and ultimately, the reason I left Firefox behind (and no longer recommend it to general users), but, like IE and Safari, it aims to be a *full featured* RSS reader and therefore, is forgivable. No one is asking for RSS readers to respect styles – just the ones that offer nothing but a subscribe button and, in the meantime, make the entire thing butt ugly.

So, I’ll be reporting back over the next few days on how my Flock conversion is going.