Freeware

Opera: A Damn Good Browser that Nobody Uses

By EAN ⋅ August 6, 2007 ⋅  Email this Post ⋅  Print this Post ⋅ Post a Comment

Developer: Opera Software
Version: 9.22
Download it Here.

Nobody uses Opera for browsing the web - and I can’t really understand why. After all, Opera has innovated quite a few features that still are not commonplace in browsers like Firefox [review], Internet Explorer 7, and Safari. Just take a look at everything that Opera has packed into its big bag of goodies: mouse gestures, page zooming, voice control, extension support, speed dial browsing, download management, BitTorrent downloading, a bunch of security features, and newsfeed reading. And that’s just a short list of what Opera can do.

Opera is also one of the few browsers (and the only one for Windows) that actually follows all of the common web standards. The same standards that Internet Explorer scoffs at and the current version of Firefox only partially follows.

But despite all of the cool stuff that is loaded into the bits and bytes of Opera, nobody uses it. As of June 2007, only 1.8% of the browser market share belonged to Opera. Why? Do people not realize that Opera is actually pretty decent? Does Opera not advertise its cool features enough? What the hell is going on here?

Opera is, on paper at least, the best browser on the market. It’s practically exploding with functionality and a lot of the cool stuff that you and I love to add to Firefox owes its existence to the Opera development team’s ingenuity. So why is Opera not the chosen browser for the masses? The best reason I could find was because of its history.

A few years back, Opera was not the feature rich, blow your mind, read the web from top to bottom kind of browser that it is now. Far from it. When I first installed Opera in 2001, it was a buggy mess of a web browser that only displayed about half of the pages that I visited correctly. It was so bad that it actually made IE6 look good! The bugginess coupled with the lack of support by web designers who wanted to only focus on IE6 pretty much doomed Opera. And it seems as though its history is the reason why Opera is so unknown today.

If you’re looking to broaden your horizons as far as web browsers are concerned, then Opera should be your next download. It’s a damn good program that I use on a fairly regular basis and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who is looking for a new web browsing experience. I really enjoy the way it makes websites look. Crisp, clean, and clear come to mind - unlike Opera’s user interface which looks decent on Windows and Linux, but absolutely hideous on OSX.

In the end, if Firefox wasn’t so wonderfully customizable I would definitely be using Opera as my main browser.

Try it for yourself.

- Eric Norton