The Flying Norwegian (Opera Web Browser)

Member Name: Morgenhund

Product:	Opera Web Browser
Date:	18/01/01 (636 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A breath of fresh air.

Disadvantages: Occasionally crashes, ads, not free for ads free version.

Whilst Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.5 seems undaunted by the threat posed by the allegedly faster new Netscape Navigator 6, which has proved to have been a bit of a false dawn in the browser war, there is a new kid on the block, or rather a new player as far as most people are concerned. Opera, hitherto a non freeware browser, has gone freeware, or rather partially freeware. Opera is afterall only freeware if you agree to let it have a large advertising banner (468x60) displayed in your browser window. This sounds like a big section of browser window you are giving them, but given the compactness of the buttons for Opera, in actual fact you are merely exchange "dead space" that would be the home of buttons in other browsers. Previous versions of Opera had been free for a trial period, but then required registering.

The size of the download is something that sets it apart from the bloatware of IE5, with Opera 5.02's (released 16/1/01) most basic (non Java-enabled) version, taking up a mere 4Mb of Harddrive space, and will run on a 386. However for the Java enabled version, then the Minimum recommended specs are a P166, 32Mb RAM and 60Mb Harddrive space. The installation download is 2 or 9 Mb respectively, which is also lower than IE or Netscape.

Unlike IE, using its own proprietary JRE, Opera uses Sun's JRE, which wins it points from programmers. A non java supporting version is of course also possible, and takes up a fraction of the space.

The interface is refreshingly different from Netscape or Internet Explorer, although this doesn't not mean that functions have been compromised. Indeed Opera is the most customisable browser out, even though it might lack the eyecatching skins that transform Netscape 6 away from the staid looking tradition browser of yore. The degree of customisability is so far reaching that Opera even let's you customise the adverts you see, by choosing several parameters. By selecting
your location (country), year of birth, sex, marital status and level of education as well as preferred categories (from a list of 17), you can limit the advertising to things you at least find bearable.

One of its quirks is not being quirky, as it supports all current W3C standards, (HTML 4.01, XML, SSL2/3, CSS1/2, JavaScript 1.3, ECMA-Script as well as limited DOM support), although Opera does have problems with pages that don't adhere to these Standards, e.g. Netscape/IE optimised pages, in particular those making use of DHTML.
It also lets you decide what action to take upon encountering various filetypes. Filetypes can be customised to be opened by Opera, by a default application or by another application, making it possible to open some filetypes in certain programs, and others in others, even if your current file attribute settings indicate otherwise in Explorer. This is particularly useful for .pdf files, when you are running a version of Photoshop that includes a .pdf file distiller, as well as Acrobat Reader.

Some of the functions that are new to Opera 5.0 are obviously additions made from having seen what other browsers do, like for example the autocompletion of web addresses, dropdown history and a direct search in the address line. However Opera offers via prefixes the chance to specify the search engine e.g. "g horses" will search for info on "horses" using Google. The other supported search engines are Altavista, Hotbot and Goto.

Opera 5 offers an integrated e-mail and news program, which offers multiple POP3 mailbox support, and can also import messages from Outlook Express and Eudora, or you can set it to use your own mail-program in response to mailto: hyperlinks. The support for Eudora is unsurprising, given the fact that Opera and QUALCOMM have a strategic agreement with each other regarding distribution rights. The only problem with Opera's inbuilt mail program is that it can't sup
port IMAP mailservers.

For me one of the most useful features, although not one that is incorporated into many webpages is the ability to choose preferred languages for web pages, which is in line with CSS2. This allows you to set a hierarchy for languages displayed on multilingual pages, for example I have mine set to English, German, French, Dutch and Russian in that order.

Whilst I have yet to encounter any problems under Windows 98SE, a copy of Opera running under Windows 2000 on a friend's machine had a tendency to crash on occasions and more alarmingly to crash without any error messages being displayed. Currently Opera is only available for Windows 9x/2000/ME/NT, although versions for other OSes are due to appear shortly, including a Linux version, whereas Netscape 6 is already available for Mac OS and Linux, and IE for Mac too. There is also integrated instant messaging, and this uses Mirabilis' ICQ to do so.

I would have to recommend Opera, although I still have to go back to IE5.5 when pages throw wobblies.

Summary: