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Rhymes and Ramblings

Written by Psyguy1

New Opera user works to figure everything out

Actually, I'm pretty comfortable with Opera already, but this page looks slightly intimidating. p: Ok, the "tag" panel was intimidating me; now that I actually read the text, I see how it works. Good ... I've added "easily intimidated." p:

I suppose a "Why Opera" story would make a good topic for my first journal entry.

I'd been using Firefox for a little less than a year. (IE's security holes ran me off.) Firefox worked pretty well, but I started having a couple of annoying problems when I upgraded (somewhat accidentally) to 1.5.0.4. After a couple of weeks of this, I decided I needed to give Opera a chance.

I had previously downloaded Opera, but I just wanted to use it to test something. Honestly, I never considered using it as a regular browser. The banner at the top (at the time) played a large role, but it seemed a little cluttered and slightly contrived at the time (though I don't know how I can say this since I'm admitting I never really used it p:), so I didn't use it much.

When I found out the banner didn't appear anymore and had upgraded to Opera 9, I gave it a serious chance. I was just going to give it a trial run. I spent a little time customizing the menus and panels to make it look cooler and visited the sites I frequent to make sure they all would display properly. Ironically, my own personal site represented the sole site that did not display properly. p: I just had to change a table width (I had used 100% on a second column in an attempt to say "100% of the remaining space," and while this displayed fine in Firefox it did not do so in Opera.)

I think I have too many favorite features already to list, but I'll give it a shot. I really like the thumbnail preview you see when you mouseover a tab! I also love the built-in IRC client, and the mail client works nicely too. I believe I'll be using that for my POP3 mail from now on, no doubt.

Ooh, I also like the mouse browsing shortcuts, too. (e.g., Hold right click then wheel to cycle through tabs, and hold left mouse button and right click to go forward / vice versa to go back.) I actually found these out accidentally. :smile: The entire browsing experience seems intuitive like that, though.

By the end of the first day of "experimenting" I was no longer experimenting; I was switching. :smile:
December 2009
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