Spending half a day at the Opera - Opera 9 Released
 

Over the years, on different occasions, I have unsuccessfully tried to become an Opera user. At first I would play with Opera for three days in a row and marvel at mouse gestures or tabs or something else. But on the fourth day I would always go back to firefox or IE (this was in prehistoric Win98 times) and resume my normal browsing habits.

It wasn't that I disliked Opera for a particular reason. Well, there was one major reason – ads – but even after Opera became ad-free I still didn't warm to it. I felt that Opera was too clunky, bloated and gimmicky to be a real browser. All I wanted was speed and compatibility with my favourite websites. I didn't care for anything else.