Opera 10b1 has a lot going for it and it mostly looks like a native Mac app considering the fakery involved. (If Apple changes the widgets, Opera will look wrong.) However, the one big new feature, thumbnail tabs (a feature that OmniWeb has had for many years) is poorly implemented, putting the thumbnails at the top (or bottom) of the scrollable window space. This is a horrible design because it forces the user to see less content and to scroll more. Vertical screen space is more valuable than horizontal screen space because content is made to be scrolled vertically, for pretty much the same reason that newspapers are printed in columns--it makes text easier to read. Opera has an option to put the tabs on the left or right sides of the window but then only the text of the site name is displayed--_no_ thumbnails!

There are lots of other little things that pop up with Opera 10b1 as you use it. But for OS X users, there will be some just for us--no Keychain integration, jerky scrolling, no Control-Command-D functionality, no spell checking in some text boxes (and it uses its own spell checker for what is checked, ignoring all of your customized spellings), and lost formatting of copied text. (All of these complaints and more apply equally to Firefox, BTW.)

All in all, Opera 10 is typical of past Opera browsers and, sadly, typical of cross-platform software generally. Just not up to Mac snuff in polish, and not integrated with the rest of the system.

Holy crap--this is way better than it needs to be.

Wow. This thing is an unbelievable turd. On the first launch, the wizard screen opens _behind_ a Finder window. After working my way through the wizard, the program hangs and I have to force quit it. On the second launch, I type a half dozen words then try to insert an equation and immediately the program crashes--completely disappears. I can hardly wait to see what the next five minutes brings.

I'm on a one-week old MacBook Pro, so it's hard to believe there's anything wrong with my system.

Just awful.

This is an amazing utility for connecting audio applications. I can't believe that it exists at all, let alone that it's free.

The Omni developers continue to add small touches to OmniWeb but they should be focusing on one and only one job: stop the damn memory leaks. Web browsers have a long tradition of memory leaks but OmniWeb is by far the worst of Mac browsers in this respect. I have to quit and relaunch OmniWeb at least once a day as it consumes 300 MB to 500 MB of memory after a modest amount of use! Firefox 3 has aggressively addressed its memory problems and now it is time for the others to follow suit.

OmniWeb is by far the finest browser on the Mac and possibly on any platform but for this one aspect.