It's Hard To Give Up

I have a terrible addiction that try as I hard I cannot break.

I've tried other substitutes, but I keep coming back like a homing pigeon!

Yesterday I thought I had broken the addiction, but today I'm back.

It's Opera the browser not the music form.

I've been using Opera for years, even when I was using Windows. I love it for all of its features and its speed. Some problems were there in 9.6 which drove me to distraction- some facebook apps didn't work properly and ANZ wouldn't let me log in with Opera. But these seem to be fixed with 10 Beta 2.

The other browser I love is flock which has all kinds of nice social networking features like sidebars with access to facebook and flickr, direct uploading of photos to facebook without going to the facebook site and even access to fb chat and notifications from the status bar.

But for some reason the simplicity and sheer speed of Opera keeps calling me back. And every time a new developers snapshot is released I just have to go back and give it another go. Also the amazing font rendering makes every page you look at seem so much easier to read than other browsers. The current native "skin" or button design is just nice- not that I'm into eye candy that much.

If there is one feature I would like in Opera, it would be blogging tools. Being able to just shoot off a quick blog to my.opera without actually being at the page would be great, but I guess I can live without it.

The other half of my addiction is my email program. I try to like Evolution which is roughly equivalent to Outlook, but it just seems to be a bit slow. It also seems to crash randomly while I'm not looking. So I keep coming back to claws-mail which is just a brilliant email program which doesn't try to do anything else, but also offers plugins to allow it to do calendars and other stuff.

So now I've confessed my addiction perhaps I've taken the first step to being set free!