Kiss My Arias (Opera Web Browser)

Member Name: jillmurphy

Product:	Opera Web Browser
Date:	08/07/02 (1138 review reads)
Rating:

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Bill Gates reminds me of the National Lottery. How nice of him to leave the vast bulk of his fortune to a charitable foundation. That means he'll still be bossing a portion of my money from the grave! If he has so much then I wonder why his products are still so expensive and why his company still feels the need to force a gargantuan market share by bully boy means. I also wonder why he doesn't trust me to make my own charitable contributions. Likewise the National Lottery, that profit-making yet charitable endeavour that to me seems like nothing more than a gambling tax on those who can least afford it. Bah. Anyway, I suppose I went and downloaded Opera for those sorts of agit prop reasons and you might be a nice, peaceful person, not interested in such things. I think you should go and download Opera too though, even if you don't feel the need to thumb an impotent, singular nose at Bill Gates and the things he represents.

Alert! Alert! Technophobe opinion at six o'clock! You may wish to call it hostile and bail out now. Alternatively, you may be a technical dunce, like me, in which case let's parley.

Opera is a web browser, like Netscape or (hiss boo) the Gatesian Internet Explorer. You can download the advert-supported version for free from www.opera.com and there are versions available for whatever operating system you run: Mac, PC or Linux. I've seen the Linux one, used the Mac one from work for a short period of time, but I run a laptop PC at home so I'll be telling you about that. Firstly, you need to download and here you have a choice to take either the version including Java at 11mb or the version without at 3.4mb. Don't be tempted by the little version. I have no idea at all at all at all how Java works (neither do I want to) but I gather it's a different Java to other Javas and well, you just need to bite the bullet and download 11mb. Sorry if you haven't got a cable modem yet. It's all e
asy peasy to install, just do the "yes" "agree" "yes" "yes" buttons like you always do and don't worry when the Java installation pokes its nose in because the Opera one just carries on after that. When it starts up for the first time you'll be asked to choose how you'd like your windows displayed. Choose "windows inside Opera" and I'll explain later on.

So you've got it. Really, now, you can just carry on playing and surfing just like you did with Internet Explorer. The top tool bar is pretty much the same, although much thicker, partly because it has an advert in the top left hand corner. The default display has two or three toolbars but if you don't like toolbars (I don't) you can turn them all off bar the navigation bar by right clicking or by looking under the View menu at the top. Anything new takes a while to get used to so do bear with Opera for a few surfing sessions because I think if you do you'll grow to love it. There are so many bells and whistles it's just super. And superest of all, the bells and whistles are easy to find if you're like me and have a brain that takes in technical information, scrambles it immediately and allows it to fall straight out of the handy sieve at the back. I can't explain how it works so well or why it works so well so I think what I'll do is simply give you some lists of what's hot and what's not in the land of Opera:

* * THINGS I LIKE AND USE * *

* SPEED

Opera is fast; noticeably faster than IE on a dial-up connection and even via my super new cable modem. It fairly zips along. And probably, I'd use it for that reason alone. When connecting to a page the progress bar is also actually of some use, unlike that aggravating Microsoft thing which doesn't impart a bean of information except that you're not yet where you want to go. The Opera bar gives a rundown of what's h
appening, so, for example, if a particular advert on a particular page is slowing things down you'll see a few words saying something like "sending request to..*". After a little while you get the idea and start to make use of another handy, speed-enhancing feature of this browser: the ability to toggle graphics on, off, or load only from cache (that is, ones you've already seen). The nice little camera icon at the top on the left does that for you, or you can just press "G". On opinion site pages, such as this one you're at now, there are often a lot of adverts and sometimes getting rid of them will speed up your surfing, although it will skew the design of the page a bit. Have a try and see what I mean.

* VIEWING PAGES WITH A SMALL MONITOR

I have a nice, shiny new laptop now, but Opera used to be super with my old one which had a small screen capable only of viewing at 800 x 600 pixels. Lots of naughty website designers forget that some of us aren't rich with those enormous, posh, flat screens, and we end up with awful horizontal scrollbars making surfing a pain in the neck. On the top, at the right on the Opera toolbar you'll see a little drop down box with percentages in it. This will reduce the size of the page you're viewing so that you can zoom in, or out thus banishing the nasty horizontal scrollbar. You can also press F11 and get a full screen view, press it again and your toolbars come straight back. Easy, eh?

* MULTIPLE PAGES

Ooh. Now this one I really like. Remember we chose to display windows inside Opera right back at the beginning there? That's what this is all about. If you're anything like me you rush about the internet with several more programs than just your web browser open: email; chatrooms; instant messenger windows; games; Word; the list goes on and on. This feature of Opera really does tidy up what you're doing. The taskbar at the bottom will show onl
y Opera, not a button for each Opera window you have open and within Opera you get another taskbar showing you all the websites you have currently open. It's neater, tidier, better. And to open a new window there's a lovely handy button on your toolbar. It's all much nicer than IE once you get used to the new layout, it really is.

* POP UP WINDOWS

Ah, no longer need you be bothered by websites that allow pop up windows to intrude upon your browsing not once, not twice but with every link you click (dooyoo seem regularly to put up adverts that says hi when you open an opinion, hi again when you rate it, hi yet again if you nominate and eeeeeeven again when you go to comment. That's just ridiculous in my opinion). Via the preferences you can set up Opera to allow pop up windows, open them in the background, or suppress them altogether. Still better, you can toggle between these options during a browsing session simply by pressing F12. Some pop ups aren't adverts and are good pop ups and so this is just a super idea. I have mine set to open in the background and turn them off altogether if I head anywhere near an ezboard, for example. So if you use Opera, you don't need to download a pop up suppressing program and you keep an awful lot of flexibility.

* RIGHT CLICK CLEVERNESS

There are lots of super right clicks in Opera. Right clicking on a link gives you the option to open it in the background. I use this all the time when reading opinions. I go down the new-in lists, opening up all those I think I'd like to read and once they're all there I'm as happy as Larry (who actually is Larry, anyway?) reading away. Right click highlighted words or text and you can search in all the major search engines, look up in a dictionary or thesaurus, send via email and even translate into five different languages. There are loads more quick and easy toys like this: your best bet is just to right click around and s
ee what happens, it's fun!

* SAVED WINDOWS SET UP

Oh, this is super. You can set Opera to start up where it left off when you last used it. So if you had your favourite three sites open when you went off to eat then you can close Opera safe in the knowledge that when you start it again those same three sites will open on the very page you left them once you're fully stuffed and returning to a bit of surfing. That's particularly handy if you're often interrupted like me (darn children, darn husband, darn cooking, darn washing, darn telephone) or if, like me, you regularly mess up something and crash your computer.

* * OTHER GOODIES * *

Those are my favourite things about Opera. I know I keep telling you I'm not bright about technical things, but it's true, I'm not. So I like and use the easy peasy things and they making my surfing sessions easier and more intuitive. However, Opera isn't just for dunces like me, and you'll find all sorts of other, clever things to do with it. The mouse gestures are something everyone talks about (although I have a laptop and a touchpad so I don't use them). If you train yourself to make various gestures with your mouse you can do all sorts of things without having to click: open windows, close windows, go forwards, go backwards. It will resume an interrupted download right where you left off. You can assign nicknames to your favourites and Opera will recognize these making it quicker to get there when you want to, for example, I can type "am" in the address bar and get straight to Amazon. Oh, you know, the list is endless. Opera is endlessly customizable (is that a word?) and if you're cleverer than me, and also braver than me then you can simply edit the preference file in any old text editor and make it do just about anything you want it to. I'm far too scared to do anything complicated like that though, so I just get my pal Alkaliguru to d
o it all for me, email me the files and put them where he tells me to put them. I can now search ebay, or amazon, or several other sites from wherever I am on the internet, and that's all I need to know! If you're bright though, take a look at the following page which tells you all about it:

http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/operain i/

Opera doesn't have much internal help but there's a veritable treasure trove of information on its website and there's an awful lot of nice, democratic user input that even a fool like me can understand, so do take a good look around. Also, if you'd like Alkaliguru's lovely search.ini file he shared with me (replacing the default search with amazon.co.uk instead of amazon.com and a few extra choices) you can have it too. Once he found I was writing this review he put it up for you all here:

http://home.graffiti.net/weirdlist/search.ini

All you do is save it to C:\Program Files\Opera\search.ini (or wherever you've downloaded Opera to). What a nice person he is!

* * LESS GOOD THINGS * *

Well, there were bound to be some, weren't there? Nothing's perfect. There are a couple of minor niggles with Opera: one is that the tool bars ARE big, much deeper than they are in IE and that does, annoyingly sometimes, take up space that would be better used if it were by the webpage you're looking at. I'd advise you to turn them all off except the navigation one. I think you can customize them and change the size of the buttons, but that's way over my head, and so a drawback in my opinion. The advert can be a little bit annoying although, sitting in the top right hand corner, I suppose it's as unobtrusive as it could be. Also, organizing your favourites is a little bit cumbersome with a lot of buggering about in a separate pane that annoyingly appears. But the major problem with Opera is not Opera's fault. We're back to Billy Chari
ty Gates again I'm afraid. Most webpages are optimized for use with nine out of ten of the world's computers; those that use IE as their browser. Consequently, you may find that some sites don't work properly and some don't even work at all. It's possible that pressing F12 and choosing "Identify as MSIE" might help, it does sometimes, but I still can't buy my groceries at Tesco or my cinema tickets at Odeon without swapping to Internet Explorer which is most annoying. It's very often the commerce sites that don't work. But, as drawbacks go, they are about all there are.

There is an awful, awful lot I've still not told you but this is running on. You should really download Opera and see for yourself, if you're still awake that is. With a few drawbacks it's still far supererererer (and more ers ad infinitum) than Internet Explorer. See if the integrated, less memory-hungry but fairly basic email client would suit you. See if you like the way an ICQ client is also included. But best of all see how much quicker, easier and more personal browsing can be away from the Microsoft empire. Whether you're an advanced user, or a beginner you will find all these things with Opera, I promise. I like it so much that I've decided to banish the advert forever and do the decent thing by a set of people brave enough to challenge Bill Gates and clever enough to come up with something better than he has, and to send off my $39 paying for the registered version. It doesn't give you anything extra, it just frees up a few millimetres of space for browsing, but it does seem like the right thing to do after a few months of happier surfing.

Wouldn't it be nice if all the world was as super as Opera?

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