Opera, an alternate web browser, version 9.6 was released last week and I have been checking it out for the past week. Was previously using Firefox as my mainstream browser but I have used Opera a handful of times and then decided to check this out.
The first thing you will notice is the mere ~5 MB size of Opera for all its browser capabilities, inbuilt feed reader, torrent downloader, mail checker, etc. After a neat install I fired up the browser and started using it.
The things that I absolutely loved are the speed dial (which has been shamefully copied in some other browsers too) and the synchronization feature. The speed dial provides a handful number of website thumbnails from which those sites can be directly navigated with a single click. This is like a better, refined version of bookmarks. The synchronization feature is a life saver for those who work on multiple computers and platforms. The Opera mini which I use in my mobile seamlessly integrates the bookmarks from my desktop browser.
The browser is reasonably fast in its operations and doesn’t consume much RAM even with multiple tabs open at the same time. There are various customizations and features inbuilt that were part of add-ons in Firefox.
The mail account and torrent support are worthwhile features but I prefer using traditional applications for those as particularly the torrent support is crippled. The RSS feed reader is a nice addition that i use.
There were also a few things that I felt need to be improved with one of them being the default skin which is not to my liking. With some 2% of population using this browser, I feel it is one of the highly under-rated softwares. I feel that with plug-in support like Firefox and some popularity, Opera can go a long way from here.
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