I’ve been getting less and less impressed with Opera’s preformance on Ubuntu, and I’ve always liked the Ephiphany browser’s design – it’s been my secondary browser for as long as I’ve used Ubuntu, because it feels like “Firefox done right” for some reason.
Opera is (at least on Linux) currently loosing the battle to keep up with new GMail features. It’s far better on Windows, but Linux development seems to be lagging. There’s also Opera’s longstanding Javascript oddities, some of which impact sites I use regularly. Opera is still blazingly fast, and awesomely user-configurable, but the Linux version feels like the neglected stepchild. Moving to a Linux-native browser seems to make sense.
One thing holding me to Opera was a massive collection of bookmarks, years old – I was an Opera user long before I was a Linux user, and lots of my Opera settings followed me from Windows to Ubuntu – yet Epiphany has no “Import From Opera” feature for bookmarks. Firefox will import from Opera, however, and Epiphany will, in turn, import from Firefox. In this roundabout way I maintained my bookmarks, with all the folders and sub-folders converted nicely into Epiphany’s really, really cool tag-based indexing system.
RSS was another matter – I’ve become a great fan of Opera’s built-in RSS reader, but I don’t much like how Firefox (and Epiphany) do RSS as “Live Bookmarks”. Bloglines Beta, however, is free, quite similar to Opera’s setup, and as a bonus, web-based. (the non-beta version of Bloglines is much, much kludgier and I really can’t recommend it. The beta is slick,though…) Setting that up was as simple as exporting my RSS feed collection from Opera as an OPML file and then importing that to Bloglines.
Bookmarks moved over, RSS issues mostly solved… am I going to stick with Epiph over Opera? We’ll see – I keep tweaking Epiph to get it set up just right and so far I’m fairly impressed. I’m only three days into my attempt at an epiphany, though…
