Yesterday, I switched from Firefox to Opera on my Kubuntu Linux install, primarily for performance reasons. I’m running Kubuntu from a USB thumb drive and in the past few weeks I’ve found that Firefox 3.0 is entirely unusable for 5-10 minutes at a time while Ubuntu reads and/or writes to the thumb drive. This seems to happen on a regular basis; perhaps once every 30 minutes. I noticed that I didn’t have the same issues when using the Konqueror browser, but I can’t say I’m a big fan of Konqueror. So I installed Opera and so far have not seen the same performance issue I did with Firefox 3.0. Granted, I haven’t quite gotten the Adobe Flash Player plugin working yet, but that’s a minor quibble; I’m okay with sacrificing the ability to view videos on YouTube if it means the browser doesn’t lock up for 20 minutes out of every hour.

I thought by now we were beyond the whole “this site best viewed in” garbage from the Great Browser War, but apparently I was mistaken. I browsed to GoodReads last night and saw this:

Now, I really like GoodReads; it feeds into my obsession for keeping track of my stuff online and allows me to see what my Interfriends have been reading. It’s part pack rat’s delight, part social network. But no “official support” for Opera (the only browser that, once upon a yesterday, I paid for)? What kind of nonsense is that?