I saw Phantom of the Opera in Vegas last week at the Venetian. It’s a shorter version of the original opera designed for Vegas audiences, running about 90 minutes with no intermission. It was very good but definitely not the best Vegas show I’ve seen. For something dramatic, I would recommend the Cirque Soleil shows instead — Ka and O are my favorites.

Similar to Vegas-style Phantom, I like my FireFox browser but don’t love it. I’ve been a happy FireFox user for years. Its much faster than Internet Explorer, I like the plugins, and they’re leading the way with new features. But today I switched to (dramatic pause)… Opera! {Cue the scary organ music. And the chandelier.}

As time has gone on, I’ve become frustrated because it seems like sites are running slower and slower in FireFox. I don’t know if FireFox updates have somehow made the browser slower or if web sites in general are getting bulkier. Plus the damn thing crashes more and more, particularly under Vista.

I figured I was imagining it until I read this:

Now I fear history may be repeating itself. Yesterday, I had Firefox 2 for linux crash 5 times, and IE7 for XP crash 7 times. The cause? Too many fat Ajax applications. Zimbra, the whole Google bestiary of applications, Yahoo Mail, etc.. These are all long running applications that I keep open for most of the day. Then all of a sudden the Browser is gone and I have to relaunch and login all over again.

I’m not alone in this. Colleagues and friends report similar problems with Safari/Mac, IE7/Vista, Firefox/Mac. I’ve even checked with a friend that runs the helpdesk for a large firm: reported problems with browsers are up. The only one who seems blissfully unaffected is the lone Opera nerd in my office. He just keeps chugging along with what seem like 200 open tabs.

The cause should be evident to everyone. We’ve taken what was first called LiveScript — a crufty embedding just good enough to validate a form or two — and we’ve abused it into being the foundation for a whole new kind of application platform. The browsers have just not kept up and the situation will only get worse with the accelerated proliferation of Web 2.0 apps.

Nice to know I’m not going crazy. Other people think the recent problems stem from all the new Web 2.0 stuff we’re using. These observations reinforce my belief that Microsoft Silverlight will be the Next Big Thing and all these Web 2.0 developers will soon be building Silverlight apps. But that’s not what this post is about.

Did you notice this line in the article:

The only [user] who seems blissfully unaffected is the lone Opera nerd in my office. He just keeps chugging along with what seem like 200 open tabs.

200 open tabs and the browser still runs fast? Is there a “Cirque Soleil of browsers” out there that I haven’t tried yet? I decided to research me some Opera.

From Wikipedia:

Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by the Opera Software company. Opera handles common Internet-related tasks such as visiting web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, IRC online chatting, downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for desktops and mobile phones, but editions of Opera for other platforms must be purchased.

Development of the Opera suite began in 1994 as a research project at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company. In 1995, the project branched out into a separate company named Opera Software ASA, with the first publicly available version released in 1996. Since that time, the Opera suite has undergone extensive changes and improvements, such as the relatively recent addition of built-in phishing protection.

Opera runs on a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. It is also used on mobile phones, smartphones, personal digital assistants, the Nintendo DS and Wii video game systems, and interactive televisions. In addition, Adobe licensed Opera technology for use in the Adobe Creative Suite.

I installed the new Opera beta.

It’s fast. Very fast. Every element of the software seems to be twice as fast as Firefox. Right-click menus come up faster. Web sites load faster. WealthFly loads at least 2x faster. Well, you say, Wealthfly only takes a couple seconds to load, so what’s the big deal when you shave off a second?

There’s a development rule of thumb that is as follows: “If a web site takes longer than 4 seconds to load, 75% of the viewers will not return to the site.” I’m a power user, so I think my load time tolerance is more like 1.5 seconds. There are many sites I won’t use because in the 4 seconds they take to load, my mind wanders, I open up another tab and lose interest.

The reason I mention this is that Opera puts the load time of most web pages within my level of tolerance. Removing that extra couple seconds makes all the difference.

Here’s a good article that quantifies the speed increases and stability:

Across the board, [the new Opera Beta] is already significantly faster than [the previous version], and generally out-performs all other browsers tested. Some results, like the full javascript raytracer show that under heavy loads, Opera Kestrel is much more stable and memory efficient. This is important, because Opera uses the same core for all devices, from mobile phones to games consoles to desktop computers. Having a highly efficient core makes for much lower resource consumption and better scaling across devices. Opera Kestrel appears to have set new benchmarks for performance in rendering speed.

There’s not too much else to say. It has a neat “Speed Dial screen that displays my top sites when I open a new tab. I guess like the look of the tabs better than FireFox. But basically it’s just a browser. No different than FireFox or Explorer. Except that its faster and doesn’t blow up every couple hours.

So presently I’m a happy Opera user. I’ll let you know if that changes.