It was a lazy week day in 2003 when I was at the usual hangout waiting for my soul to answer the eternal question of attending a class or not, when there sprung a debate on browsers (naturally I ended up not going). While all of us geeks at the table were about to discuss good extensions for Firefox a lone dissenter Naveen waxed eloquence about Opera. I decided to investigate and that was the beginning of my love affair with Opera.
Not everyone is blessed to meet Naveen. So here are some of the must-see features of Opera that will even get Paris Hilton hooked onto it.
Tabbed Browsing
This is how Opera kills firefox. Open 20 tabs in Firefox and 20 in Opera and see the difference in performance (Opera is better, duh!).
Speed Dial
(available in version 9) Suffering from an iGoogle overdose? Here is ur minimalist replacement. Get 9 websites to show their latest home pages as soon as you open Opera. This is how I track latest deals in budget airlines websites which do not provide RSS feeds
Opera Mail
Did you know Opera is almost the only browser that provides mail within browser (no, thunderbird is a separate app)? And it is not bad at all. It has the same set of filters and rules that you can apply to gmail. And you can use imap or pop mail servers too. It is a good way to have an offline version of your gmails. Read more about setting up IMAP enabled Gmail in Opera
Panels
Panels are sidebars. You can load the default set of panels (History, Notes, Bookmarks, Mail, Transfers, Contacts, Links) or get web panels from the Opera web panels repository.
Links
Links is a panel. It is a list of links found in a webpage. Very useful if you often find a page full of links to images you want to save, so you can just select all the links in the panel and save them all at one go. Am I the only one who does that?
Notes
Very useful if you like scribbling like me. This post started as a note there. Just remember, the first line is used to identify a note, so put in the title of your note there.
Widgets
Opera 9 has widgets like the mac dashboard - except it works for Windows too. You can even play 3-D tetris if you are bored! Here are some of the widgets I like:
- dotoo - a to-do list manager
- tinyUrl - convert any url to a tinyURL
- Twitter - the full-fledged client interface for your twitter messages.
- Images Search - search for images in all search engines (useful if you are looking for references as an illustrator)
- Ruler - measuring the pixel height and width of a webpage
- easyGRID! - gridlines for the webpage
- Torrent PowerSearch - Look for torrents in major torrent sites.
IRC
If you are an IRC addict, Opera has a built-in chat client that is as good as any IRC client gets.
Feed Reader
Opera has a decent feed reader for a casual feed reading person (< 100 feeds). When you click on any XML feed, it will automatically ask you if it should add the feed to the Opera feed reader.
That’s all folks! If you liked what you have seen so far download Opera and enjoy your Opera nirvana. Granted it might not actually make Paris Hilton switch from Internet Explorer, but you guys can switch from Firefox!
Comments
17 weeks 6 days ago, anantha wrote:
I used to be a big time Opera apologist way back in '00 and '01 - when I used to be jobless in India, burdened by a slow dialup connection.
The thing that turned me on to Opera was:
1. Needed an alternative to IE and its open backdoor :P
2. A need to use the internet effectively.
The 2nd was fulfilled by a brilliant feature. At the click of a button/keyboard shortcut, you could force the browser to load only images.
So at some point, when I was browing a bunch of image laden websites and I was only after the text, all I had to do was to hit this button and open them links in new tabs. In 10 seconds or so, even with the slow dialup, all the text will load and I could basically disconnect from the Internet and read all these pages in peace. I used to even do that for my yahoo emails and type up replies on a text file, so that later I could reconnect and send replies them all in one go, again on different tabs.
See, the thing is, I am sure the other browsers do let you load only text, but Opera's feature was right there, in front of your eyes. The rest had the feature hidden in some random menu. For ex. even after like 5 years of Firefox, I havent discovered that feature yet. But then, I don't need the feature now with my T1 :D
17 weeks 6 days ago, Ashwin wrote:
yeah, I have been trying opera. Tell me, how do I open my links by default in a background tab?
I also love the Analog Clock widget.
17 weeks 6 days ago, divya wrote:
Anantha, Opera has a lot more features too! You can go to "Author mode" and disable the CSS styles too or validate the CSS code base by uploading the current webpage (from which you invoke the command) to W3C validation page.
Oh well, I could go on and on!
17 weeks 6 days ago, divya wrote:
Press the command key+shift+link to open the link as background. In Windows (or mice with middle click) you can use the middle click option (Set it in opera->preferences->Tabs).
17 weeks 3 days ago, Vinay wrote:
I have been a crazy Opera Fan until 2006, but FireFox seemed to be robust and GMail was better in FF than Opera. GMail was one the often used website,I had to switch to FF. But some of the features you have highlighted wants me to test drive it back.
I hope they have evolved better over the times! Good post and awesome blog theme!
Cheers,
Vinay
17 weeks 2 days ago, divya wrote:
Vinay
Gmail now works in Opera, Google Docs still does not - unfortunately. But I would rather use safari than the memory hog Firefox.
There is another new feature in Opera 9.5 beta 2 which I think merits its own blog post!
Thanks for your comments!
16 weeks 5 days ago, Guest wrote:
Why don't you give Firefox 3b5 a try?
16 weeks 5 days ago, divya wrote:
I have, it crashes way too often and my favourite extensions dont seem to work with the latest update.
16 weeks 5 days ago, Guest wrote:
Pity it didn't work out for you.
Give Firefox 3 another run when it goes gold, don't think it'll disappoint though I wouldn't say Firefox 3 is better than Opera now that O9.5b2 supports full (or almost?) CSS3 selectors last I checked. Ouch, Firefox 3 is holding back the web development in term of CSS now.
Sigh, I can understand why they would not want to rush to get perfect score on Acid3, but not why they don't just implement CSS3 selectors module. ;(
15 weeks 6 days ago, Sameer wrote:
Firefox 3b5 is good enough. It crashed about 3-4 times since it was installed (About a month ago) The memory problem is OK now :) And I never felt the need to go to other browser. On an average there are about 10 tabs open in my window. And FF works perfectly fine!
And many of the features u said are not needed like the inbuilt mail you are never going to use when you have gmail :P and you get add ons for rest of the features :)
15 weeks 5 days ago, divya wrote:
Ah well. I gave up Firefox betas entirely after so many crashes! About emails, different people - different opinions. A lot of them prefer local copies of their email in some location other than gmail (in case anything goes down!). So I think Opera Mail is a good choice for that.
15 weeks 5 days ago, Sameer wrote:
This will be a never ending debate :D
By the way your blog looks cool :)
15 weeks 5 days ago, divya wrote:
Thanks! As you said, it is a never ending debate!