Initially appeared on doktorko.com 10/1/2005.
On the 20th of this month, Opera - which is regarded by some to be the best Internet browser of all turned free. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the vendor dropped all revenue-generating ads from the browser and started giving it away ad-free. Brilliant marketing strategy? Echh - beats me.
At any rate, i've always wanted to try it but was turned off by the ads and the claims of Firefox (FF) users that it was "bloated."
Apparently, the "bloatedness" of the browser has been much exaggerated. In terms of the hard drive footprint, it's very small (around 20MB) considering that it's both a browser and an email client in one. Installing Mozilla FF and Thunderbird on your CPU will take nearly twice that size. I agree can be a tad too feature-laden - if you're used to running your browser with minimal add-ons, but with half an hour's worth of customization, i had removed the unnecessary toolbars and modified the look to resemble my beloved FF. Visiting the Opera homepage, there was the noticeable absence of any pluggable (my word) third-party extensions, which is probably the reason why they tried to pack it full of features in the first place.
My impressions:
1. In terms of speed, it claims to be faster than FF. True, it did render text very quickly and arguably faster than FF in default mode. Unfortunately (or fortunately for me) i have FF Firetuned, which makes it almost impossibly fast - mas mabilis pa sa alas-quatro.
2. Email client integration is good; you don't have to bring up Outlook Express or Thunderbird when composing or receiving mail, which is extremely convenient - if you use a POP3 client. However i use Gmail myself and have an always-on cable internet connection, meaning i can pull up a tab and check my email at any time. Really no need for integrated email.
3. As mentioned, Opera is jam-packed with features; FF comes out of the box bare-boned and has to be customized to the user's taste. Two extensions i almost cannot live without are StumbleUpon and the Gmail Notifier (the browser version allows multiple users), which have no equivalent in Opera; this almost made me quit right there. I must say however that i was extremely impressed with Opera's "Wand" feature, which makes logging-in to password-protected websites as easy as waving a magic wand (ouch). Another interesting feature was Voice Control, wherein i could say into my microphone, "Hal, speak," and the computer would actually phonate the highlighted text on the screen. There was also a variety of other statements that could make the CPU compose an email, close a tab, etc. Pretty nifty, but not really practical. Half the time it could not understand my Manila accent, and honestly - i'm not that lazy that i can't point, click, or read.
4. The deal breaker was page compatibility. True, FF has always had trouble rendering some pages optimized for IE, but it's gotten better in 1.5b and has a workaround extension called IEView. Opera, on the other hand, had trouble rendering doktorko.com (intolerable!) as well as shutterfly (which my wife Gianina uses quite frequently). And there is no functionality to render with an outside browser.
And so, after nigh eight hours of intensive use, i had to give Opera the boot. I've always considered myself to be an early adopter, but in this case i guess i'm too heavily entrenched. Once you've tried Firefox, you'll be hard pressed to switch to anything else.
POSTSCRIPT: Eventually i learned that i couldn't do without the "Wand" feature. I eventually learned to make do with what was available on Firefox. For more on that, read my related article: The Firefox Wand.
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