About Opera
Tired of 10MB+ downloads, megabytes of updates, sluggish performance, HTML standard violations, desktop domination, instability, the seductive word 'free', and a browser war that left you as the only casualty? Then welcome to Opera!
Pros
- Opera has a Multi Document Interface (MDI, like opening multiple documents in Word and Excel) instead of opening a separate application window for each document. This way, you can browse dozens of documents simultaneously, without losing all your system resources. You can start new downloads in the background and continue browsing in your current document window.
- In Opera, the user controls what the document can do with his browser:
- Disable JavaScript, animated gifs, background music, frames, automatic document loading or plug-ins
- Show images: yes/no/only loaded (single click or key)
- Ignore document layout, very useful when the page is made unreadable by FONT-tags or wrongly nested TABLEs
- Opera has a powerful multilevel Hot List (with an import function)
- Opera is committed to stick to the Web Standards
- Opera has the best CSS1 stylesheet support of all browsers
- Opera has a handy 'Transfer window', giving you easy access to the progress status (and the files themselves when they've finished downloading) of all your downloads
- Opera can be operated with the keyboard only
- Opera works on older PC's, even on a 386
- And there's much more - check out Opera's website
Cons
- Opera is pickier on HTML syntax mistakes in web pages, while it doesn't emulate all the Netscape bugs some authors rely on. This makes some pages harder to read.
- Opera's JavaScript support is far from perfect. Opera doesn't support DHTML, the mixing of stylesheets and scripting, at all.
- Some secure sites don't allow access to Opera users, even while Opera offers better security for non-US users.
- Some people don't like the MDI. You can't easily switch between opened windows when there are a lot of them. Version 4 (the first beta is out now) will solve this!
Useful links