Giving Opera in OpenBSD another chance

I took Ric Storms' suggestion to remove the Opera Flash plugin from my OpenBSD 4.4 installation to see if that will keep the Opera Web browser from crashing either itself or the whole of X and leaving between two and four errant processes running in its wake.

All I'm doing now is blogging, so that doesn't mimic my real day-to-day use, during which I use and abuse Opera, Firefox, Geany, the GIMP, OpenOffice (yep, I'm running OpenOffice on a limited basis to edit spreadsheets and text documents).

As I've written recently, it's the poor performance of my office-supplied Windows XP box — which is all but impossible to use by the middle of any given day, with the whole thing slowed to a constantly swapping crawl — that has driven me to switch as many of my computing task as possible in the office to my OpenBSD-running Toshiba laptop.

Right now, if I can get into and out of Opera cleanly, with no crashes and no errant processes, I'll be extremely happy.

That's because this more-than-six-year-old laptop runs great with 1.3 GHz of CPU under OpenBSD and runs both real and virtual rings around my 3 GHz Dell box running XP.

While I'll miss the ability to see Flash videos in Opera, there seems to be quite a bit of Flash that Opera in OpenBSD is not able to show, so that functionality isn't 100 percent by any means.

Sure I need to edit video and turn it into Flash, but since I'm even further in OpenBSD than I am in Linux from having adequate video-editing capability, but for the most part I can get my work done without Flash.

But as things stand right now, I can't get that work done without the Opera browser. And if I get it back in OpenBSD (without it or its plugins bringing X down), my work — and my mood — will improve.

Later: Opera sans Flash plugin hasn't yet crashed X, but it did hang things up for maybe 10 seconds at one point. I had a few tabs open and was switching between them rather furiously. If I can quit the app now and leave no trace in top, that will be quite the positive development.

Even later than that: Even without the Flash plugin, Opera crashed about four times in an hour, leaving a half-dozen processes running on the box. So it's not the Flash plugin; it's just Opera. Everything else in OpenBSD 4.4 runs exceedingly well; I can't remember an app ever crashing in this OS. Except for Opera. In order to get my work situation in order, I decided to roll out a Linux laptop.