Why Opera? · Wed Aug 31, 02:20 AM

I use Opera. Why? Because a) it’s fast, b) it has lots of useful features (I’ll discuss the ones most useful to me below), c) I don’t have to download a bunch of extensions to get the features I need. Yes, I am lazy. But I work on a semi-regular basis on at least seven different computers, and downloading and installing a common set of Firefox extensions is just beyond my motivation. I can download and install Opera in five minutes, and have everything I want. There are several custom toolbar buttons I use mostly for doing web development, and to move those to a different machine I’d have to carry an .INI file around (or stick it on my web server, anyway), but I really only need those on my primary machine.

So, you might ask, a laundry list of features is great, everyone has one, but which features do you actually find useful? I have an answer for that!

The mouse gesture support in Opera is excellent. There are extensions to make this work for Firefox, but the one time I did hunt them down and download them, I was dissatisfied with the implementation. Don’t recall why, offhand. They work pretty well in Opera, though.

Customization is très simple: You can drag’n’drop new buttons or search engines from an external web page straight onto toolbars. You can easily share your browser layouts and configurations with other people (my toolbar INI file is at E:\Documents and Settings\dpickett\Application Data\Opera\Opera75\profile\toolbar\standard_toolbar.ini, yours may be somewhere vaguely similar).

Some of the useful buttons available from the CustomButtons page include the “Focus Info Panel” button, “Links as Management” page, “Plugins On/Off” checkbox, the “BugMeNot” button (automatically gets a login for the site you’re currently at…this is butter), and for web development the “Open Page in ___,” “Validate HTML / CSS,” “Document / Stylesheet Source” buttons. I also love MODI (Mouse-Over DOM Inspector) for eyeballing how a web page works “under the covers.” Slayeroffice has several other useful “Favelets,” like the HTTP Header Viewer, Object Dimensions, and the Hidden Field Modifier.
There’s also a pre-built Web Developer’s Toolbar available.

You can also check out PowerButtons for some nifty buttons. Nine gold stars go to the kill button.—click this button, and you enter a mode that lets you select and destroy any element on the page. Turns every web page into its own little game .

You can do IRC, RSS, and e-mail within Opera, but I already have solutions in place for these (MIRC, NewsGator, and Eudora, respectively), so I don’t. I have been known to use the IRC support, though, when I’m on a machine where I don’t have MIRC installed.

The tabbed browsing rules hardcore, and keeping the tabs on the side is best of all. User-defined panels, saving and restoring sessions (link leads to Flash demo), re-opening recently-closed pages (this eliminates about 95% of my need to use history…there are some FF extensions that do this as well, though they have poorer performance and require gasp download and installation), crazy page zoom from 20% to 1000% (including smoothing of both graphics and text), high-performance browsing, and the ability to get all these features in a single download that is smaller than the base Firefox download. Note that in Opera, when you re-open a recently-closed page, it still has its history (!).

The bookmarks implementation rules, at least for my usage of bookmarks. Basically, when I’m browsing, I bookmark a ton of stuff. Sometimes it goes into a useful bookmark folder, but often not. Later, when I want to find something…search is my only hope. The dynamic incremental bookmark search is super-speedy. Bookmarks also allow you to provide a description, by default populated from the “Description” meta tag, if present—the search feature also searches all the text in the description. I use this to add keywords that might conceivably let me find the bookmark later on.
You can also provide bookmarks with “nicknames”—this allows you to type the nickname in the address bar and go to the bookmarked location. For example, I use “gm” to go to Gmail, and “shape” to go to the SHAPE forum. You can also use the “Turbo-Nickname” recovery system—do Shift+F2 and start typing the nickname. As soon as you get far enough into the nickname for it to be unique, bam the page is loading.

Panels are an excellent feature—these allow you to keep a handy “sidebar” mini-page open while you’re browsing. The ones I find most useful are the “Bookmarks” panel, which lets you browse through a number of related sites (the dynamic search is fully functional in the bookmarks panel, as well as the full-blown bookmark management page); the “Transfers” panel, which maintains information on file transfers (name, size, progress, original source, and destination); and a couple of other occasionally-useful reference panels, mostly for web development—things like a page info panel, a CSS reference, and the CSS Design Lab panel, which lets you modify styles on various elements in the currently-viewed page.

Tabs in Opera rule Firefox tabs. They’re not just tabs in the browser; Opera is actually an MDI application, so you can cascade your windows, reorganize them, etc., within Opera itself. You can also have multiple instances of Opera open at a time, each with their own set of tabs. Sessions come in handy for this sort of thing, as well. It’s nice in that it lets you maintain various “sets” of windows, one for web development, one for various random internet browsing, and maybe one for a current work project or whatnot. Or pr0n. Whatever .
Another nifty thing this lets you do is Linked Browsing—Window | Create Linked will create a new blank window, and whatever links you click in the current window will show up in that new, linked window. This is especially handy for searches, and for sites where you may be browsing a large list of stuff that links to details (e.g., an Amazon item search).

Downloads work fine, and Opera handles resuming downloads and all that jazz. You can configure it to download files with specific extensions to specific directories (e.g., send all MP3 files to a downloads\mp3s folder), and you have a Transfers history list that maintains info on files downloaded, size, current status, and full source information (right click on a transfer, and choose the “Copy File Information” command from the context menu).

One of the most useful features for me is that you can configure Opera so that when it starts up, it will reopen the set of windows it last had open. Not only that, it saves the browse history for each of those windows. So you can have 50 tabs open (yes, heaven help me, I have that many open sometimes), each with some browse history, shut down the browser, start it up the next day, and click the “Back” button and go back in the history of the current tab. That is pwnage++, as far as I’m concerned. There are other startup options you can set as well, like always starting up blank, or always starting up with a particular set of pages loaded, but I don’t use those. Not my style!

Anyway, those are some of the things I really like about Opera. Then again, I’m probably in some top percentile of heavy-duty web browsers (people-type, not software-type), so maybe this is all overkill for you. But hey…give it a shot, and see for yourself, eh?

-- David --

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1. I hold it’s name against it. as soon as there is a browser called “Jazz Fusion” I’ll give up on Mozilla.
   — ravencha    Thursday September 1, 2005    #

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