Note:  I had originally posted this on my (short) blog on the myOpera web site last year (Jan 2013).  Unfortunately the site is going away this March 1, so I am reposting it here.

I guess I picked the wrong time to get serious using the Opera browser.

I’ve flirted with Opera for years, dating all the way back to when there was an Opera browser for BeOS R5. Never heard of BeOS? Its been resurrected as Haiku OS, but that will have to be for another blog post – maybe. I also used Opera on my Sharp Zaurus handhelds – the SL 5000D and the SL6000.

So I finally decided to give Opera a serious try. I mean I WANTED Opera to be my number one browser to use on ALL of my OSes: OSX, Linux, iOS, and Windows. There is a lot to love about it. I started by moving ALL of my old browser links and passwords from all of my past browsers (Firefox, Camino, SRware Iron, Safari) onto Operalink. Well, you might imagine that took a lot of work, but I wanted to use one browser on all of the platforms I run.

Well.. Guess which version I started doing this with? just before – 12.10. Yup. Needless to say, I wasn’t happy at all. 12.10 was SO buggy it made me RUN away from Opera – FAST – back to SRware Iron. Thats when I discovered Lastpass and Xmarks. They are sweet. I think Lastpass is better and more feature rich than Opera’s password manager via Operalink. Xmarks is quite nice too, and now that I am using both of these utilities… I will continue using Iron. I’m hoping Opera has cleaned most of its 12.1x bugs in 12.12, but until there is an Xmarks version for Opera I’ll continue using other browsers. BOTH password and bookmark syncing way more important to me than any one browser.