Ennovy.org

I downloaded the Opera browser today to check it out. It’s the first time I’d ever done so. After playing with it for about an hour, here’s what I think…

Good

• It’s FAST! That was the very first thing I noticed about Opera. Firefox is starting to annoy me because it’s been quite slow lately.
• There are lots of built in features that are available in Firefox only as plugins, like mouse gestures.
• When you double click on some text with your mouse, a nifty context menu appears.
• Opera remembers what pages you were at when you close the browser, so when you open the browser again it’ll load the pages for you.
• Skins – they’re so easy to install, and there are colour schemes too!
• Menus/Toolbars – you can download other people’s setups, which is neat.
• Pages – they’re kind of like tabs in Firefox, but you can tile different pages vertically or horizonally.
• If I go to any WebmasterWorld site in Firefox, I get the following message: “status: Either we require login from users from your ISP because of abuse, or the thread is marked members only. Please login and then back up to view.” If I view the same site in Opera (or MSIE) I don’t get that message.
• My site renders fine.

Bad

• The default layout is cluttered – when I opened the browser I just had to change the configuration.
• I still can’t figure out how to change the order of the toolbars.
• Gmail doesn’t work.
• I don’t like the fact that there are dozens of bookmarks loaded already. I would delete most of them.
• There’s an option in the context menu to open a link in Firebird – but when I try to do so, I get an error.

In short, I like this browser, and I’m kind of surprised at how much I like it. I don’t think I’m going to buy the software yet, but I can see why other people would want to pay for it.