Ewald van Geffen | 0052294-11 | 2007-05-15 | English
Opera
One of my favourite applications is Opera a webbrowser, it's developed by Opera
ASA, a Norway-based company and more precisely in Oslo. Although Opera is
not known by the vast majority of surfers, it does offer a few very convenient
features . Main advantage of Opera over any other browser is it's integration of
clients. Opera has a e-mail client with spam filtering, IRC client (chat), FTP client
and Bitttorrent client. You might think Opera is bloated and thus slow cough Mozilla
you will however experience none of that, Opera is the fastest browser available.
Another practicality : Opera runs on pretty much any platform just like Open BSD:
Windows, Linux, Unix, BSD, Mac OS X, even Smart phones ... Every platform
uses the same core of Opera so rendering is everywhere the same.
The main reason why you should use Opera besides being the fastest on the net
are mouse gestures. When you perform a certain movement while clicking the
right mouse button Opera will respond with a predefined and customizable action.
Operas witty session management will dazzle you comparing to other browsers.
When closing down Opera (or when it crashes – it does very often with Flash 9
on Linux) , Opera will save and reopen the tabs from the previous session. You
can also save a session to open it later with one click or open this session at
launch.
One of the latest features is a response to Internet Explorers dashboard function.
It's called speed dial and does what the name suggests. New empty tabs have
nine big numbered blocks in which you can save websites. Opera will automagicly
fetch the websites and thumbnail them. You can automagicly reload these
thumbnails every certain period. This function can also be used on normal tabs
(very handy to stay up to date or test websites while designing).
There are also a few downsides to Opera, the most problematic is compatibility:
more precisely w3c standards, Opera adheres to them, lazy web designers don't.,
although this has improved since the rise of Firefox. Certain plug ins (like
previously mentioned Flash) don't work very well on certain platforms cough Linux
since Adobe prefers to develop and support it primarily for Firefox.