Posted 11 years 11 months ago.

It was in 2003, that I first started using Opera. It was some 6.x or 7.x that time. Like any other Opera user, got addicted to it so much that 

If I had to use a machine for more than 15 mins, the very first thing that I would do on it is to ,. Download Opera Browser!

  • The compact look
  • Mouse gestures
  • Mainly the Ctrl+Tab to swap between tabs, instead of scrolling through all open tabs like other browsers
  • Heavy Caching: On any page, if Back Burron is clicked, Opera fetched the whole pafe from the cache including the values submitted on forms. Instead of loading the page afresh. This has been on Opera since long, but can be seen on other browsers too of late

Trouble started a couple of months back when my Opera started Crashing very frequently. More than 3-4 times in an hour! Firstly it was with pages that had heavy javascript. It later extended itself to every 10th page that I browsed.

After many Crash Report Submission to opera, I waited till a couple of minor releases to see if it gets fixed. Reinstalled Opera, Tried the portable version, but they dint seem to help much.

Finally a couple of days back, I decided to switch to Firefox. Had to customixe it to make it

  1. Looks Compact like Opera
  2. Make Ctrl+Tab to swap tabs, instead of switch between all open tabs
  3. Have the small nice side bar on the left (the F4 one)
  4. Doule Cliking on any word should pop up a context menu with options like Searching for the word etc like in Opera
  5. Password Manager (Like the Opera's one which shows the set of passwords stored for the page along with the key icon in the toolbar.
  6. A status bar showing the details of the page load.

Here is how I customised Firefox to be as close to Opera:
For the Look:  Classic Oper Theme
For the Ctrl+Tab: Ctrl-Tab
For the Double Click Context Menu: DoubleClick ContextMenu
For the sidebar: All-in-one Sidebar
For the Status bar: Extended Statusbar
For the Password Manager: Secure Login

Opera has definitely lost an addict rehabilitating with Firefox.

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Submitted by tanay on Sat, 04/21/2012 - 08:30