Reach

Opera, the fastest browser on earth! Yes, it indeed is, I felt so. I was a devoted Opera user for past 2 years. Finally, my association with Opera came to an end. I switched to Maxthon.

Maxthon is based on IE engine. So whatever opens in IE, has to open in Maxthon. Well, that's what the site claims and is their USP. And the very same was Opera's biggest drawback. Some sites just did not render correctly. Nothing to blame to Opera since Opera browsers are web compliant. However, site designers tweak sites to render them perfect in IE.

So why did I switch from Opera -

• Issues with rendering few sites may be because of no fault of Opera at all.
• Memory leak in Opera. Opera keeps growing in memory and I had to restart it once after 3 days since it became unresponsive thereafter.
• Hogged a lot of CPU during data fetch.

Maxthon gives me Opera's features with IE's rendering capability. It runs smooth and takes much less memory for its operations. It has everything from Tabbed Browsing, Mouse gestures and so on.

One feature that lacks in Maxthon though and I dearly miss is the vim type search from Opera. In Opera, if I type slash (/) and search keyword, it would start looking it up in the current page. I simply loved that feature over to doing a Ctrl-F and then entering a search string. It would be great if Maxthon folks add it. Another one is partial rendering that Opera does. Opera goes on rendering the webpage as it fetches it. So you don't have to wait to view the parts of page until entire is fetched.

All in all, the memory leak issue that causes Opera becoming unresponsive was the main reason I considered to switch. I would certainly not have switched otherwise.


Cheers,
Manish.

Labels: browser, Maxthon, Opera