Vikki Dawson

June 5, 2000

The Opera browser is a terrific browser. The screenshot below shows the browser. You have the ability to close the "hotlist". You can open as many browse windows as you like without having to open new instances of the complete browser saving memory and resources.

The screenshot on the below shows all the options you have for setting up how Opera runs for you. 

With the Opera browser you can turn images on and off with the click of a button on the main browser window making download of pages much quicker. If you then decide you'd like to see images from a downloaded page you can simply toggle images back on.

New features in the 4.0 beta include:

• E-mail client
• 128-bit encryption
• TLS
• SSL 2
• SSL 3
• CSS1 enhanced
• CSS2 added
• XML added
• HTML 4.0 added
• HTTP 1.1 added
• WML added
• ECMAScript added
• Javascript 1.3 added
• Standards compliance enhanced
• Cross Platform Core
• Memory usage optimized
• Rendering speed enhanced
• Smaller footprint

Opera is great for disabled users allowing navigation with the keyboard.

Opera is fully customizable and easy to use. Installation is a breeze.

If you are a web developer you'll be interested to know that Opera uses the strictest HTML standards. This means that you can develop your web pages and test them with Opera. If they show well in Opera you know they should show well in all browsers.

With Opera you can import your IE Favorites and/or Netscape Bookmarks. History and cookies are stored in a .dat file that can be erased by you so that you can start fresh.

The Opera browser is not free. However, you've all heard the old addage..."you get what you pay for". Nothing could be truer here. Just one of the features of Opera is worth the $39.00 US it costs in my opinion. 

How many times have you had to search the net for some information? You head over to your favorite search engine and enter your search terms. "Holy mackeral!", there are tons of listings. Ok, you start at the top and the first site you visit has a little information you want. You back up to the search engine and hit the second site on the list and it too has a little bit of what you want and so on and so on. With the "other" browsers you either have to have your pencil handy and write it all down each page you visit or you have to bookmark each page. I do a lot of research and if I had to bookmark every page that had "a little" information I needed on it I wouldn't have disk space left to do anything.

With Opera it's different. You can have lots of browser windows open without having multiple instances of the actual software open. For instance in IE or Netscape in order to view just two pages you'll need two full instances of each browser. With Opera this is not the case. Opera uses what is referred to as a Multiple document interface allowing you to have many, many browser windows open making surfing and research so much quicker and easier. With Opera I can open new browser windows with each page of information I think I need and when I have exhausted the search engine listings I can look through all the pages I found without having to surf back and forth. I can compare information on all these pages side by side quickly and easily.

Online shopping is great with Opera. If you need to do comparison shopping it's totally easy with Opera, again without incurring the system resource and memory costs associated with opening many instances of a browser window as you do with those "other" browsers. Simply open a browse window for each online store, navigate to the product you want to price compare in each window and line them up. This is a valuable tool for the professional as well as the casual surfer and I can't stress enough it's well worth the cost.

Multiple browser windows with one instance of Opera

With the added functionality of being able to toggle images on and off making page downloads quick and the added capability to zoom in and zoom out along with being able to set CSS right in Opera so that the pages you view can be viewed the way "you" want to view them makes this a powerful browser that doesn't take a powerful lot of space on your system.

You really should run over to OperaSoft and check out the beta version of Opera.

Copyright 2000, Vikki Dawson, All Rights Reserved