Opera Browser Review
by Paul Flyer
Opera has been the “background” browser. During the browser wars, it sat in the background as IE and Netscape battled for browser dominance. It has been in the background riding the coattails of Firefox as it has surged in popularity. With a larger emphasis on alternative browsers nowadays, Opera may now indeed be getting some of the credit it has deserved. I have known about Opera for years, but never have given it a try. I felt it was time I downloaded Opera and give it a test spin.
The very first thing I noticed once I opened the browser was the clean look and feel of the interface. This was refreshing. I tend to like software that has a good interface and carries itself “lightly”. The only default toolbars are the Address and Tab bars. Using the minimum of toolbars helps create the clean interface. Other toolbars can be added of course, but I’ve found I like it with less.
I was concerned how well Opera would render web pages. Would it break sites? Does it break this site? Overall, the answer to this is no. Pages, by and large, are displayed correctly. However, I did notice one wrinkle. I tested Opera on a dial up connection. At one point I was downloading a file while browsing. When the connection is slow and/or busy, images in particular were not rendered completely. Sometimes, elements would not download at all which would affect the overall layout of the site. In order to determine whether it was a browser issue or connection issue I opened the same website in both IE and Firefox. The sites were correctly displayed in both other browsers. This is not a big concern since I only noticed Opera doing this once or twice. I have to test it out some more to figure out why it behaves this way.
There are several built-in features that I liked a lot. When a file download is initiated, Opera opens a Transfers tab. On this tab all downloads are tracked. A status light indicates the state of the download. Columns record the name, size, progress (%), Time left and speed of the download. I found that using a tab instead of a separate box like Firefox was a little more user friendly. Opera’s method reminded me a lot of the interface of the Reget download tool I had used ages ago.
Three other cool features:
-Links - this tool displays all the links that exist on a page.
-Notes - make notes and record anything you want. This can be used as a more advanced clipboard (sort of). Often repeated text strings can be recorded here and then copy and pasted when needed.
-Hover - mousing over a tab displays a mini-view of the website being shown on that tab.
Overall, I was happy with my Opera experience. I will be using it more often, especially for managing downloads. It is definitely worth downloading and trying it out. I would be curious as well if anyone has run into the rendering issue I discussed above.
[tags]opera, browsers, web+browsers[/tags]
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