The best web browser is now free!!! (Opera Web Browser)

Member Name: cjkace

Product:	Opera Web Browser
Date:	12/12/00 (149 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Smaller installation, fast, complies 100% with standards, view 4 sites in one window, uses less system resources, more stable, lots of little features that enhance your browsing.

Disadvantages: Supported by advertising for the free version

People believe that there are only two major web browsers, Internet Explorer (and it's clones such as Neoplanet which is based on the IE engine) and Netscape Navigator, but there has always been a third alternative, Opera.

Opera has never had the market depth of the other two, because you had to pay for it after a thirty day trial. This has now changed with the latest version, Opera 5. Finally the fastest, most stable and functional browser is now free to download and use.

Opera 5 supports all the major web standards, such as Cascading Style Sheets 1 & 2, Javascript (through Sun's Java Runtime Environment) and 128bit Secure Socket Layer encryption. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator have always suffered because they added functions to the standards with their own proprietary commands, meaning that website builders had to add special commands for each browser. Not so with Opera. It sticks to the W3C standards 100%.

When you first install and run Opera, it logs into to the Opera homepage, but you can set your own. From there it is just a matter of typing in web addresses. One of the unique features of Opera is that you can split the window into four and view four sites without having to switch between views. It also has indicators that show how fast a site is downloading, the amount of data downloaded and how much ( as a percentage) of the current site has been downloaded. Bookmarking sites is as easy as any other browser ( although you might want to trim the default bookmarks down a bit first).

An e-mail client is incorporated into the browser, so you don't have to open another application to check for mail. You can set it to check and download at specific intervals. It can't import from Outlook (but can from Eudora), so you have to manually set up each account.

The browser itself is the most stable I have ever used. In the week that I have been using it, it hasn't crashed once. I still use IE 5.
5 for some sites, mainly because of the auto complete passwords facility, but if a site crashes the browser, I just open it with Opera, and it works (mainly Tombola, as the Java games sometimes don't work).

It is difficult to judge the speed of a web browser, but I have noticed that some sites seem to appear quicker in Opera than in IE. Another useful feature of Opera is that you can switch off graphics with a click of a button, for one site, then re-activate them on another. A lot easier than IE's method, I think you will agree.

So what's the downside? Well when I said it was now free, it's because it carries an advert banner. These adverts are downloaded onto your PC every so often, then rotated. Opera, because it's a European company, isn't allowed to disclose any information it receives, to third parties, without your permission, so privacy isn't that much of an issue. You can remove the adverts, by paying a fee and in all honesty i probably will, because the browser is THAT GOOD.

Addition 13.12.2000
You can set up how Opera works by going to the File > Prefences menu. Here you can select which e-mail client to use, whether to accept third party cookies and set up your personal details for inputting into forms. Anytime you need to fill out a form, you then righ-click on the field/text box, and on the menu either insert address or contact etc.

The more I use this, and the more I delve into Opera 5, the more I like it. Ten days and no crashes (unlike IE5.5 which crashes EVERY day, causing a page fault in Kernel32, forcing a re-boot)

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