Yesterday, the newest version of Opera, version 9.21 was released. This is only a couple of weeks after the beta for it was released. This is an extremely short beta cycle, but shows a difference in style from many other projects, such as those from Mozilla.

The amazing thing about Opera is that with each beta cycle I have seen since it became freeware (I used Firefox before that, so I have no idea about versions previous to 8.5) is that few changes are made per revision, and that very few, if any, mistakes in programming get through.

This makes for something that one can just count on. I regularly update to new betas of Opera, knowing that no catastrophe is going to take out my setup, or make my system difficult to use. I never run a beta in a different directory, as uninstalling the older version and installing the newer one has never failed to work.

I did, for a time, use Firefox along side Opera, just because there were a few extensions I thought I could not live without. I soon tired of the extended period of time to start Firefox took, and before taking it off my systems, I ran Firefox “bare” to see if the extensions were a major cause of sluggish behavior. Although it sped up considerably, Opera was still much faster, and an order of magnitude faster on slower machines. This was around the time of Firefox 1.5.0.7. I had also tired of finding out that the extensions I really liked were either orphaned by their author, or not updated in a timely fashion. Although workarounds are possible, I tired of having to make the changes for things I was finding I could easily live without.

Firefox has made great strides in size of user base, but this has not come without consequences. It appears that with each release some things are not quite right, although the beta cycle is long and the benefit of the long cycle should be gold status of releases in more than one sense. Such has not been the case.

Perhaps some of this has to do with the authors. When I did once have a small question regarding a problem not addressed in the Opera forums, I got six replies almost immediately. All were a ‘fix’ to a problem that was simply a matter of something Opera did differently from Firefox or Internet Exploiter. In contrast, I have looked for answers from the Mozilla community on more than one occasion, and have never gotten a response. Once I thought it was that I did not know where to look, so I penned a note saying that if it was a ‘read the flippin’ FAQ’ thing, to please respond by saying ‘read the flippin’ FAQ,’ because I had yet to get a response. I got nothing.

Just a couple of months ago, I again decided to use a Mozilla product, as I thought I could incorporate some things I did not otherwise have by using Thunderbird 2.0.0.

I wanted to take advantage of the RSS capability because I had found other readers lacking in many ways. [Apparently I am one of the few people who wish to remove the storage of feeds more than 30 days old.] I read about the features of this version of Tbird, thinking I’d have no problems, as I had happily used it up to version 1.5.0.7, changing only because the nice people at MS gave me a free copy of Outlook. I had never at all had a single problem with Tbird. There were things I knew it did not do, but then it did not try, so it was fine.

What a surprise version 2.0.0 turned out to be!

I was having small troubles with getting the mail set up properly, whereas I had had no problems setting up accounts before. I then turned my attention to the RSS portion of it. After getting 32 feeds into it I tried to remove one which showed up but was not actually a correctly formed feed. It should have been as simple as the menu selections made it out to be… highlight the name, right click, move to delete, and wham-o, gone. Such was not the case. No matter what I did there was no removing this. I then looked at the so-called help file. No luck here. How dare they call this help. I eventually had to navigate the long directory tree the program sets up and remove the entry.

Next I found after a few days, that each day when I was ‘removing’ used messages from the feed list, the trash icon would appear, and then dutifully disappear after the deletion, but when I reopened the program the trash was still there. Alright… it could be different trash, just defined as trash since I last opened the program, even if this was the same day. Nope. This was the same trash, including the same count that the program was keeping track of. Each time I opened the program, I had exactly 134 messages in the trash. After several attempts to locate anything like this in a forum, I wrote a message to which I got no answer.

After 3 weeks of this annoyance, I decided to remove Thunderbird 2.0.0.3 and look elsewhere for an RSS reader. As I removed the program I was asked to explain why I was no longer going to use it. I explained, in greater detail than what I wrote above, that the mail, after a few missteps, was fine, but that the RSS reader was a shameful excuse for a program and that if they could do no better than this on a released product, they should scrap the feed reader portion of the program so as to not tarnish its good reputation. Lest they think I was just an idle complainer, with nothing better to do, I left my full name, home and cell phone numbers and addresses, both e-mail and physical, so I could be reached for questions or further comment.

It’s now been another two weeks, I’ve heard nothing.

[tags]Opera, Firefox, alternative browser[/tags]