I’ve been using Opera since version 3 and have been very impressed with it’s speed, small size, and ability to rigidly stick to HTML standards.
For those interested in downloading it:
Thank you, Opera. You have really made my day.
I can’t believe they waited until now to get rid of the ad. There’s been the great free Mozilla alternatives for a while now.
I love Opera, but can someone educate me and explain how this business model works?
I’ll go ahead and ask the burning euestion:
What does Opera do better than Firefox and/or Safari?
Not much, honestly. Opera’s native tabbed browsing is a little better than Firefox’s, IMHO, but extensions take care of that. I suppose that’s the main thing: Opera has some handy native features that you have to get from extensions with Firefox. That makes it a touch friendlier to users who might be intimidated by the Firefox approach…and, conversely, severely limits the power and flexibility of the browser.
I occasionally find it convenient to have a choice of browsers for a particular task, however, and Opera is my choice for a backup browser to Firefox.
They make money licensing their browser to embedded devices manufacturers. Opera is small, fast, and has good small-screen rendering, so it’s ideal for PDAs and other small devices. Once you have that, it’s really not much trouble to make it work on desktops, so they give that part away (because, as they’ve found out, few are willing to pay for it).
I agree that there isn’t much that other alternative browsers can do that is not covered by Opera. Firefox has grown into a good alternative for quite a lot of people. The thing is Opera has been around since 1995 and as far as I can remember, was the first to have tabbed browsing. There are various other features that Opera pioneered that other browsers have now adopted in one fashion or another. Does that make Opera any less of an option? IMHO, absolutely not.
Thank you iamthewalrus(:3= that makes sense
Especially since I can get all sorts of extentions for Firefox, that’s what I use. But the thing that really bugs me about Opera is that it defaults to the last tab used when you close a tab. Firefox goes to the next one to the right, or the if you closed the one on the end, the one on the left.
This lets me open a bunch of SDMB threads and have another one automatically showing when I close one. Opera keeps taking me back to the forum page. Oh, and the last time I used Opera, it made me use two hands to open new tabs (shift-click).
Does Opera do well with blocking pop-ups & other nasties? That’s the reason I dumped Explorer and kept Firefox, very little crap gets through.
I’d like to give Opera a try if it’s as secure as FF.
Here’s one thing: I just downloaded Opera (I’m using it right now, which is why you hear the fat lady singing), and boy, is it fast. It almost feels twice as fast. It’s like the hamsters are on crystal meth.
Is there a flash plugin for it, or would that be contrary to its concept as a lightweight browser?
I’ve actually had the opposite experience. I regularly get pop-ups from Snopes and SF Gate in Firefox. Safari is the only pop-up-proof browser I’ve used, in my admittedly limited experience.
I agree that Opera has been largely met or surpassed by the free Mozilla and clones (of which Firefox is the only one that really matters) and Konqueror and clones (Safari leads this pack). It is still a very nice browser, and it has by default some very nice features that you get only, if at all, through extensions if you use Mozilla or Firefox. Here are some of my favorites, from playing with Opera 8.5 on x86 Linux for a bit over a day now:
[ul]
[li]Opera does RSS well. It’s easily on a par with the Sage extension to Firefox, and I happen to like Sage very well. Unlike Sage, it will unobtrusively notify me when there are new articles in any of my subscribed feeds, and as an RSS junkie this pleases me to no end.[/li][li]Opera does user-controlled website rendering well. With Greasemonkey and Platypus Firefox can easily outdo Opera on features, but Opera wins on user-friendliness and the ease of switching between different versions.[/li][li]Opera does tabs very well. Opera does little things right, such as changing the color to indicate when a tab is loading, has stopped loading and hasn’t been selected, and has already been selected. Its focus model takes you back to the last tab you were looking at when you close a tab, which isn’t to everyone’s liking but is a good way of doing things. Opera has a tab trashcan, which is a very discoverable and user-friendly way to re-open a tab. Firefox can re-open tabs only if you install the undoclosetab extension, and that extension doesn’t add anything as nice as the Opera trashcan.[/li][li]Opera does theming well. In Opera, when you download a theme it is immediately available. You have to restart Firefox to use a new theme.[/li][li]Opera spoofs its useragent string by default. This is good or bad, depending on the websites you visit and how you feel about browser advocacy. Spoofing the useragent string means a browser identifies as a browser other than the one it actually is, usually MSIE or Netscape. This is useful if a website won’t allow certain browsers access, or if it deliberately feeds certain browsers a broken version of the webpage (as MS once did to Opera). This is bad if webmasters don’t review their logs very well and use spoofed useragents as an excuse to continue excluding certain browsers. (It is possible for a human to tell MSIE from Opera masquerading as MSIE, but scripts generally don’t notice.) Firefox is very much capable of spoofing its useragent, but you (again) need to download an extension.[/li][/ul]
Dragwyr
Thanks for this posting. Just downloaded the free one.
My experience has been that Opea seems to do as good a job as Firefox at preventing pop-ups, but there are some times that an occasional page will get through (There always seems to be someone out there that will find a way. 
)