Let’s face it: Internet Explorer is terrible, bug-ridden software. Its security flaws are responsible for a large portion of the spyware and adware that can infest your computer and make it nearly unusable through slow-downs and an unbearable number of popups.
As these security flaws have gotten more and more media coverage, an alternative internet browser, Firefox, has become increasingly popular. Not only is Firefox more secure, but it also has more features like a built-in popup blocker, tabbed browsing, and a Google search bar built directly into the browser by default.
It’s difficult to choose a place to begin; much more could be written about Opera than I intend to in this entry. One guy even wrote a series called “Thirty Days to Becoming an Opera Lover.”
Let’s start with the sidebar; there are all kinds of neat things you can do from here. The bookmarks panel is pretty straightforward; click here for a list of all your bookmarks, which you can manage and edit without even opening the “Manage Bookmarks” window.
The transfers panel keeps track of your downloads for you, letting you know estimated times til completion, file sizes, and all that fun stuff in a convenient location.
The history panel is also pretty straightforward. Click here to see where you’ve been recently. Another neat thing about the history panel is the Quick Find box at the top. If you vaguely remember looking at something about penguins, but you can’t remember exactly when or where, just type the word Penguin in the search box. Opera will filter out all the non-matching sites in your history as you type. (I should also note that the bookmarks, mail, and notes panels also have the Quick Find box).
Another neat panel is the Notes panel. If you’re researching something and you want to keep a quote from some site you’re reading, just highlight the text and click “Copy to note.” A new entry will show up in the notes panel containing the text you copied and a link back to the site you copied it from. You can also click “new note” and just type, if that tickles your fancy.
Wordpress, Scrapbook, and WebCalc are all panels that I’ve added myself. When you save a link to your bookmarks, you can click on a check box that says “show in panel.” If you check this box, Opera will add the link to the sidebar. This can be pretty handy; for example, I can now update Blog Jones using the Wordpress panel without having to open any additional tabs or windows. There are all kinds of custom panels available via the Opera website.
The last two sidebar options are big ones: Mail and Contacts. I no longer use my old email program, Thunderbird, ever. Opera can handle all of my email accounts easily. The one exception is my official BJU email account, which is hidden behind some pretty draconian security measures. I can’t access it from off-campus via POP with any program, unless I’m mistaken. But I can access everything else, including my Gmail accounts, my Blog Jones account, and even my old-timey AOL account.
Now, I know there are a lot of options in this panel alone, but there are primarily two that I use. The first is the “unread” email option at the top, and the other is the Newsfeeds option at the bottom.
Newsfeeds are nice. Say, for example you’re interested in reading Blog Jones on a regular basis, but you don’t want to have to check my site for updates every day. Opera can handle that. It’s really easy: Just click on my RSS feed link at the bottom of my blog’s sidebar. Once you do, Opera will ask you if you want to subscribe to Blog Jones. Click Yes.
Now Opera will check Blog Jones for updates about once every three hours. Whenever there’s a new story, you can read it in the Opera’s RSS reader, without even having to click to my site or waiting for the page to load. Check out this partial screenshot for an idea of how it looks.
Afraid you’ll be annoyed by the sidebar encroaching on valuable webpage space? Don’t worry! You can always hide the sidebar by clicking the far-left edge of the window. Do the same again to make the sidebar re-appear.
All these features were just from the sidebar; there’s still tons of other features. You thought FireFox’s tabbed browsing was cool? Just wait ’til you see Opera’s. If you right-click on a tab in Firefox, you have five options: You can open a new tab, re-load the current tab, re-load all the tabs, close all the other tabs, or close this tab. Right-click on a tab in Opera, and you get all those, as well as the ability to duplicate the tab you’re looking in, tile/cascade your tabs, and “create linked” tabs. All that, and you can rearrange the order of the tabs by clicking and dragging. To do that in Firefox, you have to find and install the fairly buggy Tabbrowser extension. With Opera, you get those features out-of-the-box.
There are even more cool features which I haven’t mentioned, like sessions, mouse gestures, IRC chat, custom styles, skinnability, newsgroups, text-to-speech, the magic wand password saving tool, and more. Seriously, you need to go try it at least once.
Is it hard is it to switch to Opera? Not at hard all. Opera is capable of getting your bookmarks from your current browser.
Now, here’s the one caveat: Opera is a commercial browser, so they need to make some money. Here’s how it works: either you pay $40, or you put up with some unintrusive Google ads at the top of the browser. Or, you can do what I’m doing right now: Refer people to Opera’s website. Once you refer 250 people to Opera, you get a free license and get to get rid of the Google ads.
So please, do me a huge favor and click on the following banner ad. It’ll take you all of two seconds; even if you decide not to download the program, it’ll help me out immensely.
Try Opera for a week or two. Once you get used to its features, and you’ll never want go back to Internet Explorer again.
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