For over 10 years now I've been a satisfied Firefox user.

Today I finally got fed up with its extreme slowness, and tried to 
install another browser.

I think the thing that really drove it home was that the other day I 
happened to fire up an old VM that's running Firefox 5. It was *so much* 
faster! I could actually look at Google Maps in *realtime*! Not with a 
30-second pause every time I scroll or zoom.

Anyway, I tried Google Chrome, but it *insists* that you have to "log 
in" to allow them to track your movements - er, I mean, synchronise your 
devices. Yeah, that. But more to the point, Hotmail became 
*catastrophically slow*. (I presume this is perfectly intentional.)

So I installed Opera, and I've just spent about an hour trying to force 
it to work the way *I* want it to work, not how it tells me I should 
work. I still haven't found a way to get rid of the annoying Speed Dial 
feature, but at least I managed to force it to give me the Home button 
back. It was trivial to import my bookmarks, but obnoxiously hard to put 
them back on the bookmarks toolbar where they belong. (Assuming you can 
get that to display in the first place.)

I couldn't help noticing how the Opera settings pane looks almost 
pixel-for-pixel *identical* to the Chrome settings window. That seems 
highly suspicious. I also couldn't help noticing that, like Chrome, it's 
extremely anaemic in terms of options and settings. (Indeed, I tried 
Chrome several years ago, and promptly uninstalled it due to the 
complete lack of configurability and features.)

This seems to be a worrying trend. GNOME 2.x had a sea of configuration 
options. GNOME 3.x has almost *nothing*. In order to change anything, 
you have to install user-supplied "extensions". (Oh, did I mention? 
There's no documentation for how to write these extensions. You just 
have to read the source code. Because that's trivial...) It seems 
software producers have somehow got the idea that it's OK to produce a 
product with no configurability, and let a dozen different 3rd parties 
write a dozen mutually-incompatible "extensions" each of which solves a 
different 30% of the problem.

Seriously, you managed to implement a standards-compliant rendering 
engine! That's nearly impossible!! How hard can it be to add a trivial 
GUI for editing the frigging settings?!

(Indeed, judging my various Internet searches, it seems Opera used to 
have a magic URL that leads to a low-level settings dialog, similar to 
what Firefox has. So they removed it. Now the URL just redirects to 
their dumbed-down configuration GUI that won't let you configure 
anything. Good work, guys.)

Having said all that, browsing the Internet is now *drastically faster*! 
Like, I clicked the satellite view on Google Maps and *didn't* have to 
wait 5 minutes for all the bitmaps to load. You can literally scroll 
around the entire planet, zooming in and out, in actual *realtime*. Even 
in satellite view!! And don't get me started on how much faster 
scrolling is in Facebook...

The first time I logged into Hotmail, it was spectacularly broken. (As 
in, none of the CSS loaded, rendering [hah!] the page almost unusable.) 
I have no idea why. It seems to work fine now.

Not completely sure how I'm still logged in to Stack Exchange, even 
though I'm using a completely unrelated web browser...

Who knows? Maybe with another week or so of tinkering, I can force Opera 
to work *almost* the way I want it to...

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