This review was really disappointing, much more because it was from a source that I used to trust almost blinded (MacWorld). I also sign up for their magazine (although for the digital version for Zinio) and that made me kinda repent the money I spent on it.

Although my favorite browser is OmniWeb (and I always visit this site using it _check your site meter for the odd combination OmniWeb 5 & Cuba, and that’s me for sure :) ), nowadays I have Opera set as my default browser mostly because it’s fast and I can navigate using only cached images (something I learned here at 30 days, thanks Timothy, and which is a money saver at my very expensive 33.6 Kbps cuban dial-up connection). I knew Opera since 2000 (I don’t which version it was, but I remember the year because I was fed up w/Netscape 6.0 and I always hated IE, so I was searching for options) but never actually took the time to learn it. It always seemed too complicated, too crowded of options and couldn’t get the benefits for it.

Last year when I made a poll for what was the browser of choice between a discussion list members, then I knew that Timothy had this web site (at the time for the 7.x series) for teaching Opera but never actually got to it until when released version 8 and I saw the difference in the UI. And then I started liking it very much to get the position of my preferred browser in all platforms I use (except for MacOS, which I wrote above).

But the thing is the guy couldn’t make a review of something he doesn’t know. It’s like if I was writing of cars and said that the Ferrari suck just because the button for opening the window is behind the hand brake but I never actually took a ride on it (and I’m accustomed that in my Geo this button is at the door, and gave it a superb rate for that).

And his mistake was not only for Opera but as for OmniWeb, as he didn’t mention features like per site preferences, changeable user agent for a variety of others built-in (or create your own string too!), rendevouz sharing of bookmarks, live checking of web sites and others.

So I’m as upset w/this bad piece of reporting as Timothy is, principally because of the source it came from and I sincerely hopes that it would never repeat again.

Ps.: And I confirm the problems of OmniWeb stated by Timothy, and that’s why it’s isn’t my nowadays default browser (although I usually use it daily alongside w/Opera).

Well, it will let me re-open pages within a window. I’d really like to be able to re-open windows as well, but they don’t appear in the trash, at least for me…

Thanks for the review of the review - it’s always nice to get a different perspective!

Yes, there are positive reviews about Opera. Especially here in Germany, where I live. It seems to me that Opera is much more liked here because it comes from Europe, in contrast to Firefox and IE.

But it also could be that we in Germany just have the better reviewers ;-)

So if you can read German, you’ll find a lot of positive reviews of Opera, especially in the “better” PC Magazines not written for the “normal people” just using their PCs for a bit of browsing.

(I hope you can understand my English a bit at least, I always say to myself “it should be better as it actually is” ;-) )

I am not surprised that nobody mentioned the kiosk feature and the ability to customise the ad banner to take information from anywhere you want, which were only available to registered users. They are pretty much directed at the serious enterprise market, although it would be possible to write some interesting little apps for the ad-source configuration.

(Yes, I do work for Opera. Not in support, although I have occasionallly handled a support request).

—chaals

((TjL writes: That’s a good question. Opera does get some good press. I recommend http://my.opera.com/djysrv/blog/ as a good place to keep up on Opera and other browser related news.))

It is really annoying to see this kind of reviews from proffesional journals like Washington Post, Cnet or Macworld.

Why all of them seemed to be biased against Opera is beyond my understanding. Perhaps becauase they treat Opera as the biggest threat to Firefox.It is high time that we realise that Firefox and Opera are not enemies.