Archive for August 4th, 2008

In this article I’d like to encourage readers to explore Opera. Opera is a web browser which is writtien closed-source (as opposed to Firefox is written open-source). Opera is the best browser to use on mobile devices. Opera is by default on the Nintendo Wii “Internet Channel” and on the Nintendo DS “Mobile Browser”. The other versions of Opera cost money to use, but the desktop version is free to use entirely.

Opera offers:

a FTP browser
RSS Feed Reader
Mail Client
Bittorrent Client
as well as a state-of -the-art standards-focused web browser.

The Opera core “Presto” is (according to them) is “the fastest web-browser on earth”. This statement has been made by just about every browser (except for IE), but it is definitely fast, I would not however say it’s the fastest. It loads almost instantly (as seen in the below video)

Opera also has legendary web compatibility and is seemingly the most likely of all current browsers to obey all web standards (as seen in the Acid tests). Opera also has a great ststus display in the address bar that shows you how many of the page elements have loaded and how many there are in total. This is useful in that it’s easy to see if you’re on a slow connection/server or whether the server isn’t responding.

Another feature that no other browser has is widgets (not to be confused with Apple’s Widgets in Dashboard, Microsoft’s sidebar Gadgets, or widgets in manufacturing). These widgets are tiny applications you get from an Opera website which run alongside your browser and may provide you with more information (for example a clock). In the below video I demonstrate how to get and use widgets.

I have another video which shows possibly the most efficientcy draining widget.

I said earlier that Opera is known for its web standard focused design. It’s known that modern browsers score high on the CSS based Acid2 test, so I compared the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer in the Acid3 test:

It’s to note that Internet Explorer technically gets less than a 5, if not a 0 because of the time it takes.

The scores are:

Opera=83
Firefox=71
Internet Explorer=5

In conclusion, I have to mention that Opera is not the perfect browser, which is evident in that only ~1% of all internet traffic is from Opera, but Opera has been shunned from modern use for a reason which, after testing this browser for the past months (with older versions) cannot understand. This browser is far better than Internet Explorer 7, and especially 6, so I’d encourage readers to give it a try. (**It’s to note that as only ~1% of internet browsers are Opera there is a far smaller target group for malware**)

Important Related Links:

Opera is found at www.opera.com

The Acid3 test is found at acid3.acidtests.org/

Firefox is found at www.firefox.com

Safari is found at www.apple.com/safari

Wikipedia’s article about Opera