Firefox is good

I have been using firefox for a while now. It is a good webbrowser. I like how one can tweak with extension. This flexibility is a big plus.

BUT! It is also teh shit

However, my laptop does not have so much ram, and FF is using quite a large chunk of it; it is using even more virtual memory.

Opera is good

So I tried opera and was quite satisfied: it used less ram and much less virtual memory; its font rendering is superb; and it displays pages very quickly.

BUT! It is also the shit

Opera thinks it is a very important program (which it is) and thereore should be in the front at all times (which it shouldn’t). I do not want programs to raise themselves over programs I am currently working with.

Every time I open an URL from another program in opera, its window raises to top and I have to lower it again. This is extremely annoying because it totally interrupts my work flow: I like to open a whole bunch of URLs in the browser and THEN I go look at them pretty pages.

Yadda yadda yadda! I tried that already

opera —help shows 2 ways of opening an URL in opera “from the outside”:

1. -newwindow, -newpage, -backgroundpage
2. -remote openURL()

The first option opens given URLs correctly but opera raises itself! URLs are opened in a new window, a new tab, or a new background tab — just as expected. Opera also then raises itself — totally unexpected.

The second option does not work correctly but opera also doesn’t raise itself. openURL() treats anything in the parenthises as URL, so adding B, P, W as second parameter does not work as expected from opera —help. OTOH using -noraise works just as expected. Too bad -noraise doesn’t apply to -newpage and the like, only to -remote...

So what can I do?

I could switch to a KDE-desktop and use konqueror, but would I replace xchat with, a gtk+-program? I could buy a computer with more ram, but who would pay the bill?

Do YOU know a reliable way to open URLs in opera without

1. it raising itself and
2. without it replacing the active tab with the given URL?

Are you SURE it’ll work?

Before you post your suggestions, make sure you read and understood everything I wrote in the paragraph “Yadda yadda yadda! I tried that already”.

Then, if you have read and have understood: try your solution on your linux machine first. Try it again, make it work from xchat or thunderbird. Make sure opera keeps from raising and won’t replace already opened pages. Repeat for pages with Macromedia Flash.

And pretty please, if you have gotten this far, please please please post your solution as a comment! I will be very grateful.