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Shockw@ve used to accuse me of Opera fanboyism. Admitly though, I’ve always loved Opera Browser, since moving over from IE/Netscape, preferring it to Firefox despite the latter’s popularity. Aptly so, I guess I’d be taking Shockw@ve’s advice on writing a review for it. Long overdue but it will suffice to introduce people who aren’t on Opera just yet (or never heard of it?). The Opera browser version I have installed on both my office laptop and home desktop is Version 9.02 Build 8585, so this review is gonna be about that (might not be the latest build but it’s the latest version). Opera 9 has two new features over Opera 8 in the form of BitTorrent and Widget support built-in. Other Regular built-in features that has been retained includes IRC client, Opera Mail, the tabbed browsing (which I love the most), Notes (which I use often) and download manager. I’ll go in the order of the most-used feature for myself.

Navigation
Nothing fancy. There’s the typical Back, Forward, Stop and Reload buttons you’d find in most browsers. In addition though, there’s a Rewind and Next button which is where Opera tries to make an educated guess on how far Backward or Forward you want to go in when browsing. I reckon it goes back to the first page of any website domain which is good if you’re multiple links down for sites like Wikipedia or news sites. Another feature is the Mouse Gesture feature, which I will explain much later.

Tabs
Tab Browsing has become de facto standard in most browser. In tab browsing, Opera gives you a quick snapshot of a page in the tab, if you hover over it. Useful if you have many tabs open and can’t see the title of the site (or recognize the site’s iconized logo) and need to find the right tab. Right click on a tab gives whole bunch of options – Lock tab, duplicate tab, tile them differently – you name it. Dragging tabs around is also no problemo. If there was only one reason to love Opera, persistent Tab browsing would be it (at least for me). Persistent tab browsing in the sense that Opera caches all the tabs you open, and even after you close it, it gives you the same open tabs when you re-launch opera. Because of this, I find that I often times, don’t need to bookmark pages. Great but sometimes I find that it make it too easy to open up too many pages and I find my self overwhelmed with stuff that I want to read. Well at least I don’t kick myself in the behind when I accidentally close a browser window and lose all my open tabs (though some browsers like Firefox do give you a warning when trying to close multiple tabs).

Zooming In and Out
Different font sizes for different sites (some too big, some too small?) no problem. Opera allows you to zoom in and out and even lets you set different zoom levels per tab and therefore per site/page. If you aren’t bothered then just hold down the control key and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. You can also zoom in on pictures without the need for an image editor.

Notes
I use the notes feature a lot to jot down ideas, pre-write online forum debate replies and also to pre-write blog post. Notes is something similar to what you find in Outlook. I also use it to store info I copy off the web before I close the page tab. Copying texts to Notes is made even easier by the right click context menu which gives you the option of “copy to notes (ctrl+shift+c)” when you highlight texts in any web pages.

The right click context menu on highlighted texts also gives you several neat options like perform a search through Google or translate the highlighted text via Bablefish as Opera has all these sites intergrated into it’s search.

Mouse Gestures
This allows you to navigate by using the mouse pointers and a sequence of movements in place of the normal back/forward/stop surfing buttons. To use a mouse gesture you simply hold the right button and drag the mouse in a certain direction. I use it a lot for back, forward and opening new tabs.

RSS Feeds
RSS in Opera uses Opera Mail and it’s a simple 2-click affair. The feed will show up under News feeds and are presented and handled in the same manner as e-mail messages and Usenet news articles. This makes it easy to forward a news feed item by e-mail to a friend, access stored items using the search and “Quick find features”, label particular items for follow-up et cetera.

IRC
Upon starting the built-in IRC, Opera prompts you with initial info to create an account in which you need to enter such as nickname, email address, etc. The IRC client fells very natural. It supports XDCC and other IRC function and I use it mail to replace MiRC for my XDCC anime downloads from fansub group channels. XDCC downloads also use the download manager’s UI and XDCC resume is supported :).

Dictionary
Highlighting text also gives you the option of Spell-checking With Opera and on Windows, Linux, and UNIX, it uses GNU Aspell which has to be installed independently along with at least one Aspell dictionary. The dictionary is also used in the Opera Mail and Notes for spell checking.

Bit Torrenting
With the built-in Bit Torrent, by simple clicking a torrent file, you will be presented with a window asking for a save location. Digging around the Bit Torrent preferences and you’d get the standard upload, download, and port options settings. The Bit Torrent function uses the same UI of the download manager with the status bar at the bottom indicating your torrent(s) vital stats. Just make sure it is configured properly for your environment (router, bridge, etc) as with all Bit Torrent clients.

The Wand – password manager
The Wand is basically a password manager with a auto-login feature. The first time you visit a website that requires you to logon with a username and password, the Wand will ask if you wish to save this information. Clicking yes, tells Wand saves this data for this specific website and when you come back the fields will be highlighted in yellow. By just clicking these highlighted boxes again Opera will sign you in and you are good to go. Doesn’t work for all but it works for most.

Widgets
Similar to Yahoo widgets which are small applications that sit on the desktop and provides easy access to frequently used functions or provides some visual information such as news aggregators, clocks, calculators, calendars and weather forecasts. Widgets are also a feature on Opera. Widgets for Opera must be approved by Opera and and to install them simply go to Widgets | Add Widgets and a new tap with a bunch that are available to you. These widgets are a very cool feature but they come at a cost of processing/RAM and despite their usefulness they actually clutter up your taskbar instead of appearing in tabs.

With all these goodies what’s not to like about Opera? :)

Download from here.