| Published | Actual | |
| Birmingham New Street | 07:10 | 07:10 |
| Coventry | CANCELLED | |
| Coventry | 07:52 | 08:00 |
| London Euston | 08:49 | 08:58 |
Today the train broke down :(
The world of internet browsers is many and varied and the discussions of which is best has been well covered since the early days of Netscape and IE; ultimately the choice of which to use is just that, a choice, a personal preference, if one works for you over another then that’s fine, as a user you will be more productive if you are happy with your environment.
My preference is for Opera and the spark for writing this post was that I realised I have, in the last 6 months, passed the 10 year anniversary of when I first used it. Back in June 2001 I started my industrial year working at a software house as a Java developer, my development machine ran RedHat Linux and the browser installed was Netscape Navigator. Navigator was great to a point but some sites made it crash, it also hadn’t been updated for a while as Netscape were in the process of transferring to the Mozilla foundation therefore the only browser offerings they had was full fat Mozilla, a browser which I found to be equally unreliable and clunky, and a smaller beta version browser called firebird, later to be called firefox. At my wits end and wanting stability I found Opera 5.12, after a quick install all my browser crashes went away.
In 2001 Opera came in two flavours, the ‘free’ version was ad supported and had a banner at the top of the screen presenting adverts, the other version was a paid-for version, this removed the banner ads, functionally both were the same. Over the years this model has changed to a full paid-for version and then to the fully free version that we see now, over all this time I have used Opera and supported it by buying my licence key which I’m sure I still have stored away somewhere.
So, why do I prefer Opera to other browsers? The actual answer to this has changed over the years but to sum it up I find that Opera satisfies my needs at about the time that I have a need to satisfy.
For instance:
- Initially I needed stability
- Opera was rock solid on a system all other browsers crashed on
- Opera was rock solid on a system all other browsers crashed on
- Then I wanted speed
- Opera was the fastest browser on earth
- Mouse gestures and tabbed browsing made the ability to surf quicker
- Opera was the fastest browser on earth
- For JSP work I needed compliance
- Opera received highest Acid2 test score of all available browsers at the time
- Opera received highest Acid2 test score of all available browsers at the time
- Then after a few more years I wanted features
- Integrated mail and rss client
- Speed dial
- Sync bookmarks etc with all devices
- Integrated mail and rss client
- Recently I wanted ubiquity
- Opera mobile released
- Opera Wii released
- Multi platform support
- Opera mobile released
- And my most immediate future need is everything everywhere
- Opera link available
- Opera unite available
- Feature request out on syncing open tabs, connected sessions etc.
- Opera link available
As much as I like Opera, there are some improvements that could be made but I’ve tried and re-tried most of the other browsers and always found them to be lacking in some way in comparison so for now and the next few months Opera is still my browser of choice.
