Its been pretty well established recently that IE isn’t a great choice for browsing the internet.  It has security flaws, non-standard HTML decoders, various hacks, and ActiveX.  Here is one of my favorite quotes to sum this up, and its from our very own GLC: “glc says ‘Internet Exploder 4, 5, and 6 is a Virus’ © glc 1997-2005”.  Of course, this sums up my thoughts pretty well.  I recommend alternative browsers to all my customers, as well as all my readers.  In this three part series, we will take a look at three of those alternatives: two more popular ones – Opera and Firefox – and one lesser known one.

For the first part of the series, I am going to review Opera – a very cool, and my personal favorite, web browser.  Opera has tons of features built into it, and can be used for much more than simply web browsing.  It can be downloaded for all major OSes from http://www.opera.com

The first notable feature, which is growing very popular among browsers (and rumored to be included in the upcoming IE7) is tabbed browsing.  This allows you to view multiple pages in tabs in a single program – unlike the old windowed approach, this allows you to save memory, allow for easier switching between pages, and overall a much simpler user interface.

One feature that no other browser I have used has that Opera has is disk caching.  This feature allows you to store pages you visit commonly in RAM or on your hard drive for rapid retrieval of that data.  This feature saves more time than most people realize.  Its one of the main reasons I like Opera better than Firefox – although it is a huge RAM hog, a major disadvantage for someone with limited RAM.

Opera also has built in support for e-mail (pop3 or IMAP), IRC, and RSS.  These features are very nice to have, and is integrated seamlessly into the design - things such as mail and IRC use their own tabs.  You can send or receive e-mail very easily when it is set up properly, and IRC is very easy to get to work.

The user interface in Opera is another very big plus.  It is very clean, very well integrated, and very user friendly.  You can customize almost every aspect of it, everything from the layout, color scheme, zoom, even changing around many of the toolbar layouts.  One of my favorites is adding clickable icons to your favorite site right on the toolbars – I have links to both PCmech and Newegg right on my main toolbar.

Opera also has a taskbar which can be opened by clicking on the left edge of the window.  It allows easy access to mail, contacts, IRC, transfers, notes, bookmarks, etc.  I like this because you can pull it up when you need to, and take it away when you don’t need it with the click of the mouse!

Cool features that have been used on many other browsers include a pop-up blocker, Password Reminder, cookie control, and sessions.  These all work very well.

Another very slight drawback to Opera is that it is Ad-Supported freeware, meaning there is an add displayed in the top right corner of the browser.  However, it is not intrusive and isn’t a pest.  I find this a minor drawback, considering the wealth of features Opera has built in.

Overall, Opera rates very high on my scale.  Try it out and see what you think, and next week, we will look into another browser, Firefox.