By now, everyone knows that there are no longer any ads in the Opera web browser. I took this as an opportunity to try it out, and was impressed enough to start using it as my primary browser.

As you probably already know, I’ve been a happy Firefox user for a while now. Up until now, Firefox essentially had everything Opera had, except for ads, and I absolutely despise ads. However, with those ads gone, I’m going to say that the playing field is somewhat leveled. I’m not going to take a stance on whether one browser is universally better than the other. (I can, however, honestly say that both are universally better than Internet Explorer. I mean, who actually USES Internet Explorer anymore? Oh, right… all those people who make poorly-designed websites that only work in Explorer…)

What it all comes down to, therefore, is what the individual prefers in a browser. In my case, I quite enjoy how tabs are handled in Opera, as well as the fact that such lovely little trinkets as a mail program and an RSS reader are built right in (and with a smaller download size, to boot).

Speaking of mail, what put me off at first was the fact that GMail didn’t seem to be working properly. The quick reply box would, for some reason, display a garbled-up row of icons where a nice straight line was supposed to be, and the editing window (as well as various other editing windows all over the Internet that use rich text formatting) was the wrong size. This irritated me greatly, and I spent an eternity trying to find a solution to this conundrum, when finally, I stumbled upon Opera’s mail program, AKA M2.

I discovered that M2 has essentially all of the same winning features as GMail does (labels and threaded conversations and quick reply boxes, oh my!) except that, get this, M2 had them implemented a year before GMail even existed. The only logical conclusion, of course, is that the Opera team has a talented squad of time travellers on hand. I’m jealous. Very jealous. But that’s beside the point.

So, now my current setup is to have the best of both worlds; that is, I’m using my deirdrakiai.com e-mail addresses to forward to GMail, which I access through M2. That way, I get all the speed benefits of having my e-mail downloaded to my computer, while at the same time having an enormously large amount of space to back up my mail online. Only drawback is, I can’t give both the GMail messages and the M2 messages common labels. But that’s okay, because I’ve hardly been using the labels, anyway. However, that could simply be cognitive dissonance on my part.

But then, get this, after I get M2 and GMail synchronized all nicely, I discover that the display problem I was having with GMail wasn’t Opera’s fault; it was due to me not having updated to the newest version of Java. I fixed this, and now everything looks peachy keen. Except for the message windows.