Sunday, December 2, 2007

Opera: The Best Browser for the Eee PC


One of the biggest drawbacks of the Eee PC is its screen's low resolution.  Its not much of a problem with its bundled applications but the low screen resolution becomes apparent during web surfing.  Most modern websites are now optimized for high resolution screens and most of these doesn't look right with the Eee PC.  For two days now, I had to be content with decreasing the font size in FireFox (and Flock) just to make some websites look "just right".

Just a few hours ago, I was able to download and install Opera on my Eee and its "fit to width" feature makes most of the websites look normal!  Each time I encounter a website that doesn't look exactly right while using Opera, I just hit Ctrl-F11 and everything looks normal again!

Now, my everyday surfing browser is Opera, and my blogging browser remains to be Flock.

9 comments:

Dysanovic said...

What operating system does the asus eee use for Opera desktop?

I see on the opera website that there are linux versions of this software for:

Linux Sparc
Linux PowerPC
Linux i386
FreeBSD i386
BeOS

which one did you choose?

Berniej said...

Choose the version for Xandros here: http://www.opera.com/download/

Dysanovic said...

Cheers for the advice Berniej, and keep up the good work with the blog. You've written some entries which I've found educational!

Rune said...

I tried to install Opera but run into dependency problems. I added xandros repositories, but it didn't solve the problems. What repositories do you have?

Berniej said...

Hey Rune,

I just downloaded the file from the opera site and did a 'dpkg' command. I didn't have to add any repositories to make it work.

Steven Pemberton said...

I tried to install Opera and I got repository probs too: it asked for libx6g (wich I can't find anywhere) and libqt3c102-mt which I can find but apparently a too-early release... Any advice?

Berniej said...

@Pemberton: Try downloading/installing the .deb file for "Debian Etch". Hope this helps.

Steven Pemberton said...

Yep Debian etch did it! There is a complete Opera installation tutorial at http://wiki.eeeuser.com/opera that says the same thing.

Thanks!

DannyStaple said...

How does opera play along with the SSD? My big concern with browsers is how much they can avoid disk operations - as they are fairly expensive (in terms of performance) on the SSD Eee PC's.