July 21, 2003

Reason #5: No Pop-up Ads

That’s right, when you use Opera as your browser you can turn off all pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-behinds, and every other kind of pop.

To do so, all you have to do is press F12 on your keyboard, and choose “refuse pop-up windows” from the menu that is displayed. Or you can choose to have them open in another tab in the background so they don’t disrupt the web site you are actually trying to look at. Or you can tell Opera to only open the pop-up windows that you request to open. This is my setting of choice, because this way if I go to a web site that includes their entire layout in a pop-up window so that they can control the size of your browser, Opera will open this window because I have clicked a link asking it to open. However if I come to a page that wants to open its own pop-up windows just because I came along to view their site, Opera will not open them because I have not specifically asked them to open by clicking on a link.

Reason #4: Reload Every…

By right clicking anywhere on a page and choosing Reload Every, then an increment of time, Opera will automatically refresh that page every X amount of time. This can be great for stock market sites, web-based email clients (to automatically notify you when you have new mail), forums, frequently updated news sites, etc.

I recently used the feature during Steve Job’s Keynote speech when he released the PowerMac G5. I logged into a low-traffic mac forum that was covering the event, and set Opera to refresh the page every 15 seconds. This way I could keep up with the announcements in close to real time, without having to watch the choppy quicktime stream or bog down one of the major mac news sites.

July 16, 2003

Reason #3: Mouse Gestures

Mouse Gestures are pretty much the best thing since the back button. There is a full list of the mouse gestures supported in Opera at the Opera web site. Right-click and drag left has become so natural to me that when I am forced to use IE to test a site, I am constantly very frustrated at having to move the mouse all the way up to the back button just to go back a page. Sure most of the modern input devices have forward and back buttons for browsing now, but not all of them, and as long as your mouse has at least two buttons, the feature will work in Opera.

I would really like to see a small program that would allow this functionality to be in place system-wide. When browsing through files on my hard drive I still instinctively right click and drag left to go back a page in the directory structure. This could be used in the windows explorer quite easily, as well as in other applications to do things like undo, or cycle through open document windows.

And quickly going back is just the tip of the iceberg. You can also go foward, open new windows, load a duplicate copy of the page in a new tab, scroll through open tabs, etc.

My other most used mouse gesture is right-clicking on a link and dragging down, which opens the link in a new tab. This way I can always insure that the following page will be opened in a new tab instead of taking the place of the current page I’m looking at. This can be accomplished in other browser’s by holding shift and clicking, but who wants to use two hands just to do something so simple?

Note: The excellent Firebird browser also supports mouse gestures (and many other features) via an extension.

July 13, 2003

Reason #2: It’s small

As of version 7.11, Opera is only a 3.1mb download. That includes the web browser, mail client, and newsreader. If you need to download java with Opera, it is 12.5mb, but that is not a requirement. Compare that to Netscape 7.1’s 29.3mb, Safari’s 6.3mb, Camino’s 7.6mb OmniWeb 4.2.1’s 3.2mb, Mozilla’s 12mb, Internet Explorer’s 11mb to 75mb (depending on installation options), and Firebird’s 6.7mb

July 11, 2003

Reason #1: It’s fast

My main problem with other browsers like IE and Netscape is that they are terribly slow. Slow to startup, and slow to render pages. Netscape is especially slow at startup, taking over 15 seconds sometimes even on my Pentium 4 2.4ghz machine at work. IE is a little faster, but I still dread having to wait for it to open up when I test web sites with it.

Opera on the other hand takes only a few seconds to open, and that includes the time it takes to tell it whether to start with the homepage, where you were browsing the last time you used Opera, or to open one of your saved sessions (a session is a list of sites that can be opened simultaneously in different tabs).

Once the browser is open it is immediately apparent that pages render extremely fast, especially when viewing a large table of tabular data like a spec sheet or financial data.