Zack

Sex: Male
Occupation: Network Administrator
Member since: Nov 2001
Forum posts: 10
AOL: Zaxxon41
Web site: http://zaxxon.is-a-geek.net
Login status: Offline

Why I choose the Opera browser

I've been an Operaholic since the 6.0 Beta days of 2001. I'm on the Internet the majority of my waking hours, either researching something at work, testing a new website, or surfing for my own pleasure. I need a product that allows me to do my work (and spend my leisure time) as efficiently as possible. Internet Explorer just wasn't up to the task.

I happened upon Opera's website, and downloaded a beta of Opera 6. I was nearly instantly hooked. Opera allowed me to navigate multiple pages with ease through its multiple-window support and mouse gestures. Its only drawback was a lack of compatibility with some sites (admittedly a very small minority of the Internet). Then came Opera 7. The new Presto rendering engine eliminated nearly all incompatibilities, and now just about the only time I run into problems are when a site requires ActiveX, an Internet Explorer-only technology-- and a rather insecure one that I'm not keen on using, anyway. The new M2 mail program is a quantum leap over the products I was previously using. I receive hundreds of e-mail messages each day, many of which are spam messages. Additionally, I have over 60,000 mails archived on my machine. M2 took care of spam filtering for me after a minimal amount of training, and its database- driven way of viewing messages is both more effective and less tedious to use than a folder-based system. Add to this that M2 takes care of my news and RSS reading activities, and you have a feature that is as important to me as the amazing browser portion of the product.

Toss in a healthy portion of innovative and highly-useful other features, like integrated note-taking, IRC client, download manager, spatial navigation (for easily navigating web pages without using the mouse--handy for those of us on the verge of developing carpal tunnel), standards support, cross-platform availability, near- infinite customizability, and simple yet powerful search capabilities, and Opera is my 'killer app.'

I have tried Firefox as well, and believe it to be an impressive product worthy of consideration. However for me, it simply can't compete with Opera's robust feature set. If you haven't given Opera a chance, you owe it to yourself to download a copy and give it a 7-day test drive.