About a month after it’s release Opera v8 has crossed the 4 million download mark,thus prooving that it has created quite a bit of interest among netizens.Offcourse Firefox fan would perhaps grinn sarcastically at this figure as in about the same time Firefox had grossed twice the number of downloads.However that doesnt make any difference to me as download number entirely reflect quality,but what it reflects is popularity.And yes,Firefox is definitely much more popular thanks to it’s FREE and OPEN SOURCE tag.Offcourse Opera is a “Commercial software” which requires you to pay 39$.However a free ad-supported version of it is available for download free of cost.Sadly due to bad experience with other crippled sharewares people flinch to download anything which isnt absolutely free.
But TRUST ME even the add-supported version of Opera is worth it.The google ads are just like the ones you would see in websites.As you can see from the screenshot the viewing area is almost same as Firefox.
Anyway vertical scrolling isnt very concerning(as long as you mouse is equipped with a mouse wheel).However what is irritating is Horizontal scrolling,and that is where Opera does excellently.Opera can reallign and rezise the page to remove horizontal scrolling.It works very nicely in most cases.However Opera screws up when it tries to resize pages with large flash files.You can also zoom in and out of pages easily.
Opera is packed with features.It would take me pages to describe them in detail.So I am touching upon them briefly below.
It has RSS feed manger,IRC client,NNTP newsgroups and an email client(with spam filter).Opera was among the first to arrange mails according to views.Offcourse it was gmail who made this concept popular.
Another innovative feature is the ability to save notes while browsing.The magic wand manages your passwords with ease and style.
Opera was the probably the first browser with pop-up blocking and handy search bar.It is also the first browser to have voice recognition feature.Yes!YOu can fully controll opera with your voice.Not only that Opera can read out webpages and your emails aloud using high quality voice libraries from IBM.
Opera’s security track record is worth envying.It is a standard compliant browser with support for Jacascript and CSS.Features like ability to continue browsing from where you left last time to re-opening acceidentaly closed pages,searchable history,editing web pages on the fly make your life easier.
A very less known feature of Opera is Opera show.Opera Show is a presentation tool that can turn your web pages into presentations. Taking regular HTML, and adding a little magic CSS, the web page is transformed to look more like a PowerPoint document.The presentations will appear as a full presentation in Opera with a simple press of the F11 key.
For more info on Opera show and it’s advantages over Power point visit howtocreate.co.uk
And finally a fully customisable interface is the icing on the cake.Several beautifull skins are available on the net.
And all this is available in a tiny 3.6mb setup,which is much less than Firefox in spite of having lots of more features.If you feel worried that it may be bloated,well it is not!It is lighter than most browsers(Firefox included.)
Get the latest version from
URL http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/
Opera is also available for other platforms.
N.B:This was written quite a few months ago for my previous blog.I have just copied it here.
In the year of 2005, opera browser was very in demand in the people in the comparison of the fire fox but as the time goes, Mozilla Firefox became the one of the most favorite of web browser in most of the people.