I wrote some time ago about Opera per­form­ing bril­liantly and how, when Fire­fox col­lapsed on me (it’s still a bit shaky — middle-click open­ing of new tabs is now rather flawed, even in the ‘fixed’ release), I fell in love with it. Well, as much as one can with a piece of soft­ware, anyway.

I also wrote briefly of how Tori told me about a very cool media ser­vice called Garage­Band, which pub­lishes music from inde­pen­dent artists free of charge, even going so far as to offer (shock, hor­ror) un–DRM–encum­bered MP3 down­loads of the vast major­ity of tracks.

So where does Flash fit into all of this?

Well. About that. Garage­Band has this nifty Flash player thing going, which is very cool, except for when you’re using Fire­fox: every time I have it run­ning whilst try­ing to do any­thing in the back­ground (that is, within Fire­fox, in another tab or some­thing), the audio buffer dies until what­ever I’m doing in the back­ground has started to ren­der (or maybe resolved a host, or some­thing… whatever).

Opera, on the other hand, han­dles this flaw­lessly. The win­dow pops open, Flash loads faster (notably, using exactly the same plu­gin as the Mozilla fam­ily, if I recall cor­rectly), and I can do what­ever I want in the back­ground with­out it skip­ping a beat. And that, ladies and gen­tle­men, is how a browser should be.