I tried Opera 9 today for Linux. I thought to myself, “Wow, maybe I found a Firefox replacement that fixes the areas of Firefox I don’t like”

So I installed it. Props to Opera for even making a version that works with Ubuntu Dapper Drake. The install was painless, and it put an icon in the Internet category of the menu, right where expected.

I fired up Opera for the first time and I have to admit, I was impressed with the smoothness. Tabbed browsing with the closing “X” right on the tab, built in support for RSS, the whole nine yards. So I started to try out “quirky” sites that Firefox renders differently than IE. Same results for Opera, strike one.

Then I tried out the RSS reader integrated in the browser. It imported my feed list with ease although it was rather clunky and then slowed down immensely once it updated all my feeds, strike two.

Well, it was starting to look bleak for Opera compared to Firefox so I gave it one last chance and started browsing around to some of my favorite sites and noticed that sites with a permanent redirect in place do not redirect but rather die with an “unable to connect” error, strike three.

Too bad for Opera, because I really wanted to give it a chance, but it looks like Firefox is my main browser for another day.