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The continued survival of the Opera Web browser is a bit of a mystery. Not only does it compete with a program, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, that is both pre-installed on most computers and free to download otherwise, this program also requires that you either pay up (a $39 registration fee) or put up with ads embedded in its interface.

I suppose the same could be said for the survival of Apple. Competing with Internet Explorer is like fighting a corrupt government... you may never feel like you will conquer it entirely, but every victory is worthwhile.

How much does Opera cost? If you are not a student and are not upgrading, it costs $40, or $30 if you catch it on sale, which seems to happen frequently. If you are upgrading, it's $15. Let's take $40 as the starting cost. Opera 7.0 came out in January of 2003. It is currently almost June of 2004, and Opera 7.5 has just been released. I'd say it is safe to bet that Opera 8 won't be out for at least another 6 months (maybe more). So $40 gets you 24 months of free upgrades (all 7.x upgrades are free for those who bought a 7.0 license). That's about $1.75 per month for 24 months, or a little over $0.05 per day.

Ok, now let's talk about hours of usage. How often do you use your browser? Oh, and your mail client too, because Opera has a great one that comes with it. How often do you use email? 1 hour/day? 2? 5? For the sake of discussion, let's say 2 hours a day (although for most folks that will be way underestimating). 2 hours a day for 730 days. That's $0.03/hour.... to use a program that is going to make your browsing faster and easier to control. Oh, and if you use Windows, you will no longer have to worry about spyware and viruses coming in through your browser or mail program (note: of course you can still receive infected programs, but unless you manually open them, you will be safe. Unlike Outlook Express which is just a huge gaping hole.).

Yet Opera (www.opera.com) has managed to draw a group of users who exhibit the sort of passionate loyalty not usually seen outside of Mac user groups.

Oh, by the way, I'm an Opera user and a Mac user. Beware :-}

Part of the reason may be that Opera was, for a long time, one of the only stable alternatives to IE. Part is likely due to its developers' inventive pursuit of new, more flexible browsing options. And part must be this program's speed and small size; it can be comfortably downloaded over dial-up.

Nothing to argue with here. Opera was the only good option for a long time. Now there are other options (Firefox, Safari for Mac users, etc) but Opera still remains the more innovative, and it packs a lot of features into a tight program.

Last week, Oslo-based Opera Software released version 7.5 of the browser -- now more of an Internet suite, since it also includes e-mail, address book, newsgroup, Internet Relay Chat and newsfeed-reader components -- for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.

They did? I hadn't noticed :-)

Unlike three or four years ago, however, Opera's competition isn't just IE and a sickly, aging version of Netscape. The open-source Mozilla browser (www.mozilla.org), although bulkier and slower, offers many of the same features as Opera and costs nothing. Apple's Safari and a still-in-development Mozilla offshoot called Firefox are free as well, just as quick on their feet and dramatically simpler.

Of course, Safari is not free.... it is built into the operating system made by Apple. Windows will be doing the same thing with Internet Explorer. It is my understanding that Apple issues updates for Safari that are available for older versions of the OS, but it is not (as far as I know) available as a free, standalone download anywhere.

I love the way the author says "...although bulkier and slower..." as if it was inconsequential. (I'm sure he raises the ire of many Mozilla fanatics, and Mozilla/Firefox fanatics make European football fans look like mellow retirees.) Bulky and slow will affect the usage of the program every time you use it. Even on a high speed connection I still find myself "feeling" that Opera is faster (partly because of the options that Opera gives, more on that later).

Oh, and remember that many of the features of Firefox are only available as 3rd party downloads, which may or may not work with other 3rd party extensions that you are using, and may or may not break in future versions. Remember, Firefox is still in pre-release stage.

Many of the features are not available, or are not as easily accessible. And being easier to use is a big reason to use Opera.

To its credit, Opera 7.5 offers much to like: The developers have put serious thought into the ways people browse the Web these days, and it shows in a set of features that are absent from other browsers or available only through separate add-ons.

Yup. And those separate add-ons may conflict with one another or break in the future. But hey, go nuts. Me, I value my time more than that.

For example, Opera's toolbar includes not just the canonical back and forward icons, but also rewind and fast-forward buttons. The rewind command works like Safari's snap-back function, returning you to the home page of a Web site you've waded deep into -- or to whatever page linked you to the current site -- while the fast-forward command whisks you to the next likely page, if Opera can deduce what that might be.

Here is more evidence of not doing enough research to pass high school. Yes, fast forward will take you to the next page in a series. It will also take a directory of images and turn them into a slideshow, where you can advance by simply pressing the space bar.

So the next time you get back from a holiday, put all your pictures in a folder on a website and tell all your Opera friends where it is, and you don't have to waste your time making an HTML based slideshow.

Like most non-IE browsers, Opera 7.5 supports tabbed browsing, in which multiple Web pages are displayed inside a single window.

The next time someone says Opera supports tabbed browsing, I'm going to shove my Powerbook down their throat. Anyone who says that Opera supports "tabbed browsing" clearly doesn't know enough to be writing an article about Opera, and didn't do enough research to get anything but a "C" on a high school research paper.

Tabs are nice little features that some other browsers are just starting to catch onto (a feature Opera has been able to do since 2.0 by using other free add-on apps). Since Opera 4 came out in mid 2000, it has supported something called MDI (Multiple Document Interface).

MDI lets you position two or more windows next to one another (including Linked Windows, a feature I have written about here and here, which is not available in any other browser). It also allows you to cascade windows. You can drag individual windows off from the Page Bar and have them in completely separate windows.

Opera also allows you to switch easily between Single Document Interface (SDI) and MDI. You can right click on a link and decide to open it in another page (MDI) or in another window (SDI).

Don't call them tabs. It's insulting.

But it can also be set to keep all new pages inside that one frame, even if they're formatted to open in new windows. In addition, Opera lets you drag tabs left and right to rearrange their order. (This convenience, however, is undercut by the confusing way tabs narrow or widen based on each page's title.)

Oh dear lord.... if you can't figure out how tabs work, how do you manage to sit upright in your chair? There are clear edges, and icons (favicons for those sites that have them available) at the beginning of each.

Opera enters saved site passwords with a click of a wand icon, and unlike some browsers it can store multiple log-ins for one page -- a handy option if, say, two people use Web-mail accounts at the same site.

Yeah, just another one of those little features that makes Opera easier to use in day to day living.

People bothered by hard-to-read type on Web pages should try out Opera for its zoom command alone, which smoothly scales a page's text and images from 20 to 1,000 percent of their original size.

Zoom control may still be my #1 favorite Opera feature. Zoom by +/- 10% or +/- 100%, and jump back to 100% quickly, all using the keyboard (or mouse). It rocks.

And people bothered by having to take a hand off the mouse will delight in Opera's "mouse gestures," simple combinations of clicks and cursor movements that issue common browsing commands.

Yet another pioneering Opera feature. You can get it for Mozilla, and apparently even more controls than Opera has. Still, Opera has it built in, and it created the feature in the browser world. Mozilla plugins, hrm, I think I may have addressed some of the problems with those already...

Finally, Opera's e-mail component features an uncommonly elegant method to sort through mail archives. Like Adobe's Photoshop Album, Opera employs a simple system of labels and saved searches to make sense of your inbox. For example, clicking on an address book entry shows all the mail that person has sent; clicking on an "Images" link lists messages with attached pictures.

Opera's Mail (aka M2) client makes me want to drag it off into a back corner and make out with it, it's so dang sleek and sexy. It lets me manage 7 different accounts with ease and style. Finding messages is instantaneous. Helping me manage my email better is a major feature, and Opera does it best. It automatically sorts mailing list messages, which is important for someone who is currently on some 20 mailing lists. Instead of making me create filters for each list, Opera does it for me, so I can get back to more important things. Once again: Opera makes it easier for me to do what I want to do (read/sort a large amount of email).

But this cleverness is paid for in complexity. Opera 7.5's default interface includes three different Web-search forms and four different "reload" commands -- yet its standard toolbar omits a home-page button. Right-click menus are littered with irrelevant items.

Yes, there is complexity. The default setup for 7.5 includes a Google search (no extra toolbar or plugin required) and a search for Amazon.com (not that anyone would find that useful) and Price Comparison. Actually the Google Search is really a multiple-search dropdown with quick access to many different search engines.

There is the right click context menu. Are there "irrelevant" entries there? At first it might seem like it, but I wonder. The first 6 items (Back/Forward/Rewind/Fast Forward/Stop/Home) are all basic navigation, but the key there is the keyboard shortcuts. Yes, the addressbar lacks a "Home" button, but once you right click you realize that you can easily get "home" by pressing Control+Space bar.

Reload might be considered irrelevant, but also points to the keyboard command. There is also a Reload Every menu. Now this is cool. Opera lets you set a page to automatically update every 5 seconds to 30 minutes. Ever watch an auction online, or following a sporting event? Reload Every is your friend. And what better way to show it to folks than when they right click on a page.

Oh, when Rob says there are four reload commands, does anyone know what he's talking about? I don't. Again, if this were a high school research paper, points off for ambiguity.

Perhaps the question is, "What is the user trying to do when she right clicks on a web page?" Is she trying to save the page? Reload it? Bookmark it? Copy the URL? Email the URL? Save the background image? All of those things are possible from the right click menu. Plus Opera points towards some additional features that users might not know about. Did you know you can Duplicate a page in Opera (which copies the history of the page, etc)? Did you know you can link pages in Opera?

Some might argue that the navigation items are unnecessary. I'm not sure, but I could see their point. The "Frame" sub-menu is the one which might be most open to criticism. After all, it shows up even when the page doesn't use Frames, and if you want to save the current page, you have to go to the Frame sub-menu to find the 'Save As' item, which seems overly complicated. (The same is true for "Load All Images" and View Source and Validate.) If it were up to me, the Frame sub-menu would contain only Maximize, Open in New Page, Open in Background Page, and Copy Address, which could be used for getting the actual address of a framed sub-page. The other items (Load Images, Validate, View Source, Save As) should be on the top-level of the right click menu, perhaps replacing the basic navigation items.

Still, I can see why Opera has the menu it has, and when Frames were much more popular than they are now, Opera was the only browser that made it easy to use/bookmark/maximize framed pages.

The bookmarks menu comes stuffed with Opera's collection of 266 often-obscure entries -- including 30 that, in a freakish excess of self-love, point to Opera's own products and services.

First of all, I have to say that where I'm from, "self-love" means something entirely different. That said, Opera's default collection of bookmarks looks like someone was trying to create a comprehensive list of all the sites on the Internet. The first thing I do is delete them. There may be useful stuff in there, but I have no idea where to find them under all that cruft. My recommendation would be for there to be one sub-folder called "Opera" for Opera-specific sites, one called "IE Favorites" for imported Internet Explorer Favorites and/or one for Netscape/Mozilla bookmarks, and another called "Resources" where they could put whatever else they want. That would give the default bookmarks a much cleaner look.

And pop-up ads aren't blocked unless you change a default setting.

This is a tricky one. If you block by default, then you have to tell the users how to unblock. if you don't block by default, then you have to tell users how to block. Opera ought to make this easier for folks to figure out, I guess. I mean, it is easy (press F12) but as Dr. Cupper used to say, "Everything is easy when you know what you are doing." Figuring out that you have to press F12 to get the context menu (or going into Preferences) might not be easy for some.

Opera's mail software suffers from weak support for IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) accounts and no support for the encrypted log-ins many Internet providers offer -- and which some, such as AOL, require. Its contacts manager can't import any other program's address books.

I have to say that M2's IMAP is weak. I have high hopes that it will get better soon, but right now it's not good.... however, I think Rob is wrong in what he points out as Opera's IMAP shortcomings.

It is an outright lie (or merely stupidity) to say that Opera does not support encryption. Opera supports 4 types of authentication:

• AUTH LOGIN
• CRAM-MD5
• TLS
• plaintext

In addition, Opera can auto-sense which method your server uses, and it will use that method. Opera has supported strong encryption for websites since before IE and Mozilla were out of programmatic diapers. I don't know what kind of encryption AOL uses, but one programmer familiar with Opera said, "Opera supports each and every POP and SMTP authentication method worth mentioning."

The newsgroup and newsreader parts, hidden behind the Mail toolbar button, feel like afterthoughts. Newsgroup filtering isn't available. The newsreader can't import existing subscriptions and doesn't let you add a new RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed by clicking on its icon, instead demanding a convoluted series of right-click commands.

Newsgroups (Usenet, for the old-timers) has been there for awhile and hasn't changed much in a long time. I haven't used Usenet since the late 90s so I can't say how good Opera's client is under heavy usage, but I get the feeling that it is basic enough to get the job done but lacking extra "power user" features.

Filtering is available, what I assume he meant was kill-filing and so-forth, which is common in programs which are dedicated newsreaders. That said, you can create your own filters which exclude topics/words/people as you wish. Just because Opera may not have a "Wizard Interface" doesn't mean that it doesn't have filtering.

RSS support is... well, just starting. For some sites you can click the icon and have it subscribe right away. Other times it doesn't work as well. (If you get a page which displays the RSS feed "in the raw" try refreshing [F5 under Windows] and see if it works then.) RSS is a relatively new feature and is not present in Mozilla or IE either, so we'll just cut them some slack.

Let's also remember that there are 9 incompatible versions of RSS floating around.

Finally, there are those ads. Opera allows two options: "relevant text ads," which are served up by Google based on what sites you visit on the Web or, if you don't like Google monitoring your travels, bigger, more distracting, generic banner ads. After a week, I found myself capable of ignoring each kind in practice.

Yeah, those pesky ads... they're just ruining the internet. I mean, just look at this, it's absurd:

I can see why Rob finds ads so annoying. After all, the Washington Post limits itself to three highly intrusive ads on this one page alone!

In all seriousness, the Google ads are A) really not all that scary with regard to privacy. Read Opera's page about privacy and Google Ads. B) The Google Ads are not really all that intrusive, certainly not when compared with all the other ads you'll see out there. I actually wondered how many sales Opera may have lost because the ads are so unobtrusive that folks don't mind them. I have tested Opera with the Google Ads and they actually led me to some very interesting sites with useful information. Google's text-based ads are one of the few ways that marketing is working on the 'net, so I was pleased to see that Opera had implemented them.

But when I reverted to my usual Web toolkit of Mozilla, Firefox and Safari -- something I had to do when Opera was unable to display sites such as Google's Gmail

Google's Gmail (as I understand it) uses something called XMLHTTPRequest which Opera doesn't support yet. That makes it a very special situation. There are not a lot of sites using that technology. Do I hope Opera will support it? Of course. It appears that Gmail is going to be an important site for a lot of folks, so I hope those folks can use Opera.

Setting aside that very specialized case, I find that most sites -- a great majority of them, like 99% -- that I need or want to use will work just fine in Opera. We seem to be making progress in that most major websites are starting to write more generalized markup, rather than being browser-specific. This can only help everyone, in the long run, and means that in my experience, I only have to launch another browser when I run into a site which has purposefully (and usually wrongly) excluded Opera.

I noticed how much more room the others set aside to display Web pages.

Opera can be configured to show every bit as much of a page, if not more, than Firefox. I've shown that elsewhere. Yes, the default is a bit more cluttered than I would like to see, but Opera gives unparalleled ability to customize the user interface simply and easily. Yes, with the ad banner, Opera has a bit less room, and with the default toolbar configuration it can seem a bit crowded. However, in a matter of a few mouse clicks, even an unregistered version of Opera can show almost the same amount of a website as the free version of Firefox. (Note that the original layout for Internet Explorer also has several toolbars as well, not to mention the Google Toolbar that many folks use to block popups, etc.)

I also remarked how much smoother those programs ran in Linux and Mac OS X, and how much less work they took to use.

I've run Safari and Firefox on Mac OSX and found Opera to be every bit as smooth.... plus I get an email client and RSS reader as well. All in one tight little package.

Then I realized that I didn't quite miss Opera's extra features.

If Rob had given us some indication that he was aware of what Opera's "extra features" are, we might be more impressed by his decision to forego them. However, Rob's article gives the impression that he spent a couple of hours of light surfing with Opera while trying to come up with enough fodder to fill enough words for an article.

I have been using Opera for several years, and whenever I try out another browser, I always find myself missing one of Opera's extra features.

If you haven't tried Opera, give it a whirl. Still not sure what Opera has to offer? Checkout my free series 30 Days to Becoming an Opera7 Lover.