@concretable presumably he means running in a panel like WhtasApp and Messenger.

@jamesconstance I get a popup saying "opera doesn't support chromium theme format." How did you get round this?

@bkdroid13 Windows 10 and then spend some time customising it to defer feature updates for as long as you possibly can. What you can do varies depending on whether it's Home or Pro that you have.

They've generally added more user control over time so, depending on what version you have initially, you might want to update as far as you can before locking down the update options.

Once you're going generally what you need to do is allow security fixes and (if desired) defer feature updates. It's the latter that will be more problematic if you're unlucky. Waiting as long as possible means a decreased chance of problems.

Personally, I haven't done that (though I like that I have the choice) but my policy is just to wait for Microsoft to deliver me updates. They usually appear some months after availability or sometimes not at all. E.g., they never delivered Creators Update but went straight to Fall Creators both on my desktop and laptop. I also never got 1809. And so far I haven't received 1903. I'm in no hurry!

I had a reason for installing Brave just now and I always find whenever I move away from Opera and Vivaldi they're distinctly lacking in the native customisability department. It's often small things that I only notice when they're absent.

@incomingbrowserchange pretty much all modern browsers use large amounts of RAM. They're designed to grab it if it's available but otherwise not (if they're behaving properly).

I'm regularly at way higher usage than you report but I have 16Gb RAM so it's never an issue.

@concretable A lot of the time I have too many tabs open to read them anyway (69 right now). I do quite often make use of tab search, which I'd probably use. Typing just a part of the page title or site name is generally enough to find what you want. The incremental search works well.

(I customised Opera so that the instant search does tab-search by default using F2).

@seancwopera Personally I've found that no one browser is better than all others in every respect. It's one reason I have several installed.

With respect to what i choose as default it's a matter of weighing up the pluses and minuses. It was very hard to shift me from Firefox as default. But eventually the shift from Classic to Quantum had just enough annoyances to make me call it a day.

I'd had Opera installed as an alternative from even before Firefox but, for various reasons, it never made default. But I'd always kept an eye on it. When it moved to Chromium I then, after a while, noticed that its usability was superior to Chrome's from my point of view, so I started using it as a better Chrome for use cases where I needed Chrome-like behaviour. E.g., as a freelance software developer at most sites the developers are using Chrome and typically debugging through Chrome. So I would substitute Opera instead to get a similar experience. Or sometimes I would use Chrome for debugging but switch to Firefox for regular browsing.

Meanwhile at home, after a certain amount of tweaking and extension discovery, I was able to decide that the Opera experience was now better overall than my Firefox one.

I still have Firefox installed and do keep an eye on what they're up to but I'm probably unlikely to return now - especially as I now have a political beef with Mozilla. Though my switch was independent of that.

I agree. It's one of my bugbears. A simple solution would be to do as Firefox does. E.g., have a blue bar at the top of the active tab.

Windows does similar with the active applications on the task bar.

@seancwopera said in Opera for windows wish list:

I think opera is far better than default chrome from Google, but still suffers from the same usability issues as that ecosystem.

Interestingly, I switched from Firefox to Opera as default after about 14 years because of better usability (for me that is - it all depends how you browse, everyone is different).

I never tried Waterfox but I assume right now it's similar to Firefox Classic right?

@pringlescringles this used to happen to me about a year ago and then it stopped happening. I think it was on PC too, and not laptop. No idea why.