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March 20, 2010

New day, new browser version

Stephen gave us the heads up at the forum on Opera 10.50 – I used to get my Opera portables from Kejut.com but said fellow seems to have lost interest in them. I already had an old Opera install, so just downloaded ten point five oh to see what’s new. I’ve been on Google Chrome for some time now, running Firefox whenever I feel guilty or Internet Explorer 8 when I need to.

My thoughts on the new Opera?

• It’s not “blisteringly fast”  on my system – an older AMD Athlon x2 running Windows 7 32 bit Ultimate. My impression is that the major browser producers well know how to squeeze the maximum speed out of these programs – there will be differing performances in the all-important web application running rich content and Javascript, but for general use, they are competitive to each other.
• Web content and Opera now seem to get on better together. I used to remember Opera being the odd one out – Microsoft Internet Explorer always had its own way and forced businesses to adopt non w3c compliant methods, Firefox trumpeted the opposite and Opera used not to work with Gmail, even. Over time, this is less and less an issue for Opera.
• The aesthetic (skinning, menuing system, toolbars, panels) remains uniquely Opera. Firefox stays reasonably compliant to how a Windows program looks and feels like, Chrome a little less but Opera always had a unique style from many versions earlier.
• I like how the row of browser page Tabs on the top can be switched to Tab thumbnails on the left (or right or bottom), without relying on addtional extensions. With wide screen monitors now, I don’t mind losing screen space on the size to get more vertical content space
• From several versions ago, Opera has had a magnification widget on the bottom right corner of the window. This is even more nicely presented. It appears that the magnification text persists on a website – and that’s good. I’m on my third pair of multi-focal spectacles now and the size of screen font, in the context of high res, wide screens is important for me. Opera scores very high in rendering font, enlarged to my taste, clearly. It’s better than an opera glass.
• Ad blocking is important to me. I hang out, like a moth to a flame at DPReview forums a bit and the constantly animating Adobe Flash powered advertisements drive me batty – so I rely heavily on the third party Adblock extensions in Chrome and Firefox a lot. Opera does not have the same thing, it has a Right Click – Block Content option and that seems to take wildcards – I need more experience to see whether that’s satisfactory.
• Opera continues to offer an integrated POP3 and IMAP4 email client – like Seamonkey does and the old Netscape used to do. I use Outlook for my office related email and web based email for other activities, I don’t need another email client.
• There is an Opera Turbo mode which interposes an Opera server to compress content and deliver it to you if you are on a low bandwidth connection – can’t test it much as thankfully, I am not on one.
• There is Opera Link (to synchronise bookmarks and notes), Opera Unite to turn your web browser into a peer web server – I’ m not into those features.

Current Conclusion? Well worth having on your desktop as an alternative browser.

P.S. If you are into multi-focal specs, try out Hoyalux customised lenses, they’re a whole new vista.

Posted by Anandasim at 10:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack