Quote:
Originally Posted by
Corona688
I don't really trust opera. Its a closed-source monolith that used to be for-purchase, evolved into an captive-audience ad-supported program, then finally dropped the ads to become what it is today, but there's nothing stopping them from an abrupt about-face when they start playing with revenue models again.
Yes you are right. However, to most ordinary users, unlike development tools, whether a browser is being open-sourced or closed-sourced is not an important consideration at all. What they are concerned is whether it is convenient for them, and display the sites well. Very few people would actually modify a browser engine, provided the browser has a plugin API for extending browser functionality. Today's browser rendering engine is a piece of complex mess that improper modifications may lead to subtle rendering issues.
Of course, everybody is free to decide otherwise.
If Opera charges again or put the ad banners back, people will again shy away from it and thus lose market share. The market force (and presence of more competing browsers) will likely not let them back on the old route again.
I have experienced Firefox crashes on pages without Flash for unknown reasons. At least on Windows, Opera and Google Chrome, IMO, has been more stable in this regard.
I don't open maybe 20 tabs at a time so I don't experience much performance and resource utilization issue. But one thing I know for certain - a poorly written piece of Javascript (not all AJAX scripts are as evil) will in itself be a performance hog and hence only with one tab open may suffice to cause problems. Just like a loop that is run continuously instead of one triggered on an acceptable interval. In those cases, the author of the page is to blame and not the browser engines.