Live Connect and Opera
Live connect is a Flash technology which allows Flash to interact with the host application (the Browser in this case through JavaScript). To communicate between them, Java is used as a conduit in Opera (ActiveX is used in IE and XPConnect in Mozilla).
One problem is that many Flash plugins seem to trigger Java when they do not need such functionality. As the whole Java framework is loaded into memory, this can inflate Opera's memory use.
To test if this has happened you can use Process Explorer to see which DLLs Opera has loaded. If Java is loaded you will see something like:
Note the third DLL is jvm.dll - this means Java is loaded and you can expect Opera to consume more memory. As a precaution, if you have Flash and javascript enabled, you can turn off Java to stop this happening (remember to turn it on if a page may honestly need it).
As a test to see if Java loads, try this page (the embedded Flash uses LiveConnect):
http://www.moock.org/webdesign/flash/fscommand/
Categories
CategoryTechnical
CategoryOpera