Anyone Using Opera?
Has anyone started using Opera as an alternative to IE and Mozilla? I first saw Opera in action at the Critical Sourcing Strategies conference with Shally and Kevin. Shally was doing some live demos and I was immediately impressed with the speed at which he was able to navigate through the results using Opera.
I was also impressed with the Speed Dial function which allows you to place your top nine sites on a pseudo home page and to navigate to which ever one you choose when you open a new tab. This reduces the need for a standard home page, though that option still exists and you can navigate to it by hitting Ctrl-Space.
I also like the fact that you can render web pages after increasing the size of the text using the Fit to Width function. This is really beneficial for live demos on a projector as you can increase the size of the text without losing all the formatting.
Opera seems to have an in-built torrent app that saves the torrent and the files to a destination of your choice. I have historically used uTorrent and would have to save the torrent file and then manually choose which files I wanted to download and where I wanted them saved. With Opera you simply download the torrent and it does the rest for you.
There are shortcut mouse gestures available too, which are slightly akin to those available on a Mac. Have not checked those out yet...
The only real problem I have encountered to date is the fact that some apps (including our ATS) wont open when using Opera. In saying that however, I had the same problem when using Firefox and simply had to have IE open also...which really was not that much of a hassle.
Anyway...that's it from me. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Cheers
CLL
I was also impressed with the Speed Dial function which allows you to place your top nine sites on a pseudo home page and to navigate to which ever one you choose when you open a new tab. This reduces the need for a standard home page, though that option still exists and you can navigate to it by hitting Ctrl-Space.
I also like the fact that you can render web pages after increasing the size of the text using the Fit to Width function. This is really beneficial for live demos on a projector as you can increase the size of the text without losing all the formatting.
Opera seems to have an in-built torrent app that saves the torrent and the files to a destination of your choice. I have historically used uTorrent and would have to save the torrent file and then manually choose which files I wanted to download and where I wanted them saved. With Opera you simply download the torrent and it does the rest for you.
There are shortcut mouse gestures available too, which are slightly akin to those available on a Mac. Have not checked those out yet...
The only real problem I have encountered to date is the fact that some apps (including our ATS) wont open when using Opera. In saying that however, I had the same problem when using Firefox and simply had to have IE open also...which really was not that much of a hassle.
Anyway...that's it from me. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Cheers
CLL
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Simon Townsend on -
Opera has been working at the forefront of browser design for years now, and they have never got the recognition they deserve.
I'm a Firefox man, but recently I've been toying with Safari as it has been released for the PC.
I think it's a real shame that IE has the biggest market share as they do not enforce the standards that have been laid down. This ensures that any web developer has the choice of coding their page to standards and having to spend a lot more time adding in bug fixes and workarounds for when people using IE view them, or simply giving in to the weight of Microsoft and coding for IE. Of course this means that the pages generally do not render properly in other browsers.
I'll definitely be trying out Opera again, thanks for the tip Christian.
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Permalink Reply by Simon Townsend on
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I notice that Opera has mouse gestures activated by default. Now that's the mark of a good browser.
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Permalink Reply by Steve Griffith on -
Been using Opera at home for a few years now, way faster than IE.
Our Tech Nerd here doesn't like people installing stuff so no can do at work although the fact that there are plenty of sites that still don't view properly in Opera means it probably isn't completely practical anyway.
Along with some of the features you mention I also find the the feed viewer very useful. Although for Torrents I still use uTorrent - I like the fact that I can select which files I want to download. Just personal preference innit ? So there ;-p
I also find pdf's wont open in Opera, though (hopefully) someone will tell me what settings I need to change because I just don't believe something as basic as that doesn't work.
But my favourite feature is the fact that when I close it and reopen it will re-open to the same pages you were at when you last closed it. A huge boon if you have a dozen tabs open and the PC crashes.
I'll join the chorus of approval and recommend you give it a go
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Permalink Reply by Steve Griffith on
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And while we're on the subject has anyone tried Maxthon?
Originally started as MyIE - a customised version of IE - which means it's built on the IE engine so should suffer none of the compatibility issues Opera does, while from what I've heard has pretty much the same features as Opera plus more.
I've yet to try it - but am intrigued by what I've read, In particular the 'multisearch' and split-screen functions
Any users ?
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