In these days I’m evaluating some alternative browsers instead of my once beloved Firefox. The reason why I’m looking around is because of the heavyness of the Gecko browser. On my (old) 512mb of RAM powered Duron 1300Mhz machine it takes 6/8 seconds to start, other 5 seconds to be “responsive” and it’s damn slow  on the navigation process. Not to mention the 140+ mega bytes of RAM occupied by a single instance of Firefox (less than 30 mega  on Windows XP) with only GMail open

So I decided that I needed more from my browser. I started tweaking it, disabling the fast page cache but nothing really changed. I tried with Epiphany but then I realized that the real problem is Gecko not Firefox itself so I removed Epiphany. I tried the KHTML engine with Konqueror and it looked cool but I had some small problems with the rendering. Last but not least I evaluated Opera9 that I was following through the Opera Watch blog and Opera weekly builds. It’s cool, it’s not even a beta version but it’s really fast in the rendering process (stunning!), its startup time is really short, it’s very cheap in memory occupation. Opera 9 supports quite every standard out there now.

It’s a different experience. I have to get used to new shortcuts, new interface and new environment. I think I’ll miss some extensions but slowly (if Gecko doesn’t change) it will become my browser of choice.

Opera 9 is good, try it. Firefox it’s also cool (Gecko as a rendering engine rocks anyway) but weighs too much on my machine.