Opera + Flash = Snappy
02 Aug 2005I 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.