Having been a staunch Linux user for nearly 8 years now, one of my most used programs was the Firefox webbrowser, when it first came out it was amazing. It was fast, simple, clean, and they had stripped out the email client and html editor so it was lean as well. However with the recent arrival of Firefox 3, it has become obvious that Firefox is now bloatware, it’s getting slower and its becoming more of a pig on system resources than it has ever been. Enter Opera webbrowser. I tried Opera a few years ago and was not impressed, but they have come a long way since then. i recently tried Opera 9 (10 will be coming out soon) and I was blown away, it’s like how Firefox was in the old days. Opera is clean, simple and fast, with many neat features, let me tell you about some of them;
- Speed Dial - This is a very cool new feature, similar to bookmarks, but somehow it seems to keep and updated and current version of the webpage in cache for you, so when you click the speed dial button of you favorite website, it opens virtually instantly.
- Seemless Email Integration - Many browsers have an email button, that opens a seperate program in a seperate window, but with Opera, the email clint IS your browser, its just another tabbed window with your inbox in it, it's not a seperate program window.
- Notes - This feature has a cut and paste board open on the left side of your screen, so that you can highlight and literally take notes from each website you visit, very cool for research
- Bittorrent Integration - in normal browser you click a torrent file and a file transfer dialogue opens asking you where you want to save your torrent file, then you open your torrent download program and feed it the torrent you just downloaded, in Opera, you click a torrent file and it asks you where you want to download the actual file (eg movie, mp3, etc) that you would get when your torrent downloader finishes, it then manages and downloads the actual content of the torrent for you, it IS your new bittorrent client.
once I saw all these features in action, and saw that Opera handles java and Flash a little bit smoother than Firefox does, I immediately switched my system default browser to Opera. I also downloaded a template that basically behaves like firefox’s Flashblock, which I find a vital necesity on the modern internet. Try out the new Opera, you’ll love it.
