Today, my copy of Opera 10 for Mac did a particular stunt for the third time I can remember. It freezes completely, uses in the neighbourhood of 50% of my CPU, and treats me to a repeat of this performance despite re-launching Opera and rebooting my Mac.
Mac programs that freeze are quite rare actually, and if it ever does happen, simply re-launching it should work basically every time. Well, it doesn’t in this case…
What I found works isn’t complicated, but there’s a lot of steps, so here we go:
- Backup then delete
~/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences/operaprefs.ini - Re-apply settings of your choice in Opera
- Re-apply skin of your choice
Oops, did I say a lot of steps? Um, sorry to disappoint :) It’s a simple fix, and I don’t know why it works, but at least it does. Next time I’m feeling bored and have no other project on the go, I’ll have a look and see what causes the bug.
Hope this helps someone!
EDIT: I think this is solely to do with Opera Link - the feature that lets you sync your bookmarks and other personal data between computers. I noticed the other day that it was disabled on my laptop, and experienced the high CPU and crashing after enabling it. The way it was acting made me doubt that it is simply doing a lot of syncing - rather I think it is actually a bug. Either way, disabling Opera Link immediately fixed the issue for me.