At the recommendation of Lava Croft, I have switched to opera. The switch is by no means easy, as i have gotten so used to the firefox interface, bugs, and other things. This is a review, documenting my experience switching to this browser. As such, it may have omissions, it may be wrong in some places, but for anyone looking to do a switch, it should be perfect.

First Run

On the first run of Opera, i immediately delved into the options settings. I tweaked and poked at a few things, to make them work like i want to. I removed mail, im, and news, by editing the opera.ini text file in application data, as i have no need for these features. After removing (and rebooting) these features, I set my homepage to good old google.com

Browsing

One thing i can say about Opera. Its fast. Not just fast as in firefox3 vs firefox 2, but fast, as in firefox .8 vs ie 6. For those of you who dont know what that means, it means that Opera really felt like a browser should feel. Responsive, zippy, no wait time to load google.com.

Speed Dial

Speed dial is very useful. What is speed dial, you may ask. Speed dial is an interface that comes up on all blank tabs. It lets you assign some frequently visited websites litlte icons, so you can ctrl+number to instantly load that site. While changing this is an ungainly process (you have to go through some 6 preference levels), it is not impossible, and is easier than disabling mail, im, and news.

Themes

Opera’s theme management is way better than firefox’s. Themes seem to apply and work cleanly, without clashing, unlike every firefox theme i have tried. In addition to changing the browser ui, they apply to elements of websites as well, so the overall effect is quite nice.

No Bookmarks bar

Unfortunatly, opera doesn’t have a bookmarks bar. While they do have a bookmarks panel, i dislike panels, and feel quite handicapped by the lack of a bookmarks bar.

The Missing extensions

Since Opera is not firefox (duh), the extensions will not work. I suspect that many of the tools i love to use will have opera counterparts, i have already found one for firebug, but i will have to search and find them.

Overall

Pros

• Good clean interface
• Themes work
• Speedy

Cons

• No bookmarks bar
• Mail and other such features not easy to disable
• No extensions

Rating

• Interface: Rating:
• Extendiblity Rating:
• Speed:Rating:

Overall

Overall Rating:

http://opera.com