When it comes to Web browsers, there’s fast and lean, and there’s slow and flashy. Combining the best of both worlds, Opera Software’s award-winning Opera 11 surfs the Web in overdrive with style to spare. The best browser on the planet keeps getting better with each new release.
Despite its steady rise in popularity — available in 56 languages and with more than 210 million users worldwide — Opera consistently ranks last among the top five Web browsers, behind Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. What many people don’t realize is that many of the browser features we take for granted today were pioneered years ago by Opera, including tabbed pages, mouse gestures, zoom control and a built-in download manager.
These days, more people might be familiar with Opera through their smartphones than their personal computers. Opera Mobile and Opera Mini have taken the lead in mobile browsing, becoming standard issue with many of the top manufacturers. It’s ultrafast and intelligently resizes Web pages to best fit small screens.
If you like Opera on a smartphone, you’re going to love it on a PC. Packed with features and the ability to customize just about everything, Opera 11 is the perfect application for people who want total control of their Web browsing experience. Advanced features include a built-in email client called Opera Mail, Web-based news feeds, instant chat, ad blocking, fraud protection, BitTorrent client, text-to-speech and more.
I particularly like Opera’s Speed Dial feature, which lets you create a visual grid of URL shortcuts identified by text and snapshots of the Web page. The grid can be resized to allow more entries, from a few dozen to more than 100. I find Speed Dial much easier to use than scrolling through a list of bookmarked names.
Opera also allows third-party plug-ins, called Opera Extensions, that integrate within the browser interface and, as the name implies, extend the functionality of the main program. Hundreds of plug-ins are available in categories ranging from weather, radio and news feeds to webcams, games and Web development tools. A new favorite is Ghostery, an add-on that displays a list of all online entities tracking you. Ghostery detects everything from invisible Web bugs to advertising reporting cookies.
As much as I love Opera, I fear for its future. It’s been recently reported that Facebook, flush with cash since going public, has been in negotiations with Norway-based Opera Software to purchase the company. The acquisition would give Facebook an instantly adaptable browser for its social networking site and raise Opera’s stakes among the top five browsers. It could either turn into a boon to Facebook, which has long been criticized for its clunky, ugly interface, or a bust for Opera fans as the publisher’s history of innovation gets neutralized by Facebook’s restrictive practices.
via http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-blog - After last weeks news, that Chrome has become the world's most popular browser, Let's take a quick look at the Opera browser....... When it comes to Web browsers, there’s fast and lean, and there’s slow and flashy. Combining the best of both worlds, Opera Software’s award-winning Opera 11 surfs th ...
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