I love Opera
Before anyone jumps to any conclusions I am not talking about the musical genre here. I am talking about the web browser. Get it?
Now we've established that we can move on.
1. Smarter tabs. Opera kicks Firefox's bottom with its tabbed browsing. Firstly and most importantly, when you go to a website that contains a hyperlink that opens in a new page, Opera is smart. It opens that link in a new tab unless you tell it not to. Clever Opera. Secondly, you can navigate through the tabs easily. All you need to do is hold shift and scroll the mouse well. Clever Opera. Thirdly, each tab has its own close button - no more accidentally closing the browser again for me.
2. Gesture browsing. Opera has done something very funky here. With a swoosh of your mouse, you can reload a page, go back or forward in your history, stop the page loading and even go up to the parent directory of the page. So much faster. So much more fun.
3. Trashcan and history. Rather than store your history in it's own special place. Opera has a trashcan that contains a drop-down list with your recently viewed sites in it. Also, when you are typing in an address into the address bar, Opera will, of course, suggest URLs for you like the other browsers but it goes one step further. Opera tells you when you last went to that page and sorts them by time, but alphabetically. Finally Opera remembers what you were doing when you last closed the browser and starts up with the pages loaded into the same tabs for you.
4. Integrated search. In the pre-Opera days, I used to do my Google searching like the rest of you. I would go to the google home page and type in my search. Now those days are behind me. All I need to is type: g followed by my search criteria and Opera sends me to my search results page. This also works with eBay and Amazon but I don't use those sites at work.
5. Speed. Opera is really quick to render pages. It's also really quick to start up. So two ticks for speed.
6. Look and feel. It looks good and it is easily customisable.
Now for things that I don't like about Opera.
1. No extensions. Yet. The new version of Opera supports widgets (Opera speak for extensions). To make the browser perfect, I'd like to see some extensions especially web development ones. Even IE has a developer tool bar.
2. Gmail. Opera and gmail don't get along perfectly.
Other than that - I love Opera.
