Opera is such a tragedy

[Xantar]

I know there was another thread about Opera somewhere in here, but the forum search engine won't find it.

Right now, I'm using Opera to visit these forums, and everything is working pretty well. Generally, stuff is aligned correctly, and the news ticker at the top is actually readable. On Internet Explorer for Mac, the news ticker has the right half chopped off so that you can't read most of what it says.

It also works decently quickly. It's a little slow with loading GT for some reason, but it works very well with other sites like IGN. Maybe it's just a server thing. At any rate, it's pretty fast and reliable as far as I can tell.

And it's very good with RAM management. Internet Explorer used to crash on me every two weeks or so because it kept eating up more and more RAM as I used it. So far, it doesn't look like Opera uses more RAM as time goes on (although I won't know until I've used it a little longer).

So why did I say that Opera is a tragedy? In short, because you have to pay for it if you want to get rid of banners. That's just absolutely ridiculous. The idea that someone can make a browser that customers have to pay for and expect it to do well is mind-numbingly stupid. How do the makers of this program expect to survive against Internet Explorer or even Netscape? I'll be surprised if more than 20 people pay for this program.

If Opera were a terrible browser, I wouldn't be writing this thread. But the fact of the matter is Opera is pretty good and in some ways superior to Internet Explorer. That's what makes the whole payment deal so painful. It's one of the stupidest business decisions I can think of. I have the feeling Opera is going to be ruined by it.