After trying out Safari 4 beta and not being overly impressed with it, I went ahead and downloaded the latest version of the Opera web browser, version 9.64.

The petite 5MB installer file whizzed thru its installation process. I don’t remember a browser installing itself this quickly since Firefox 1.5.

This browser is lightning quick. Pages which ordinarily take a time to load in IE or Firefox load much faster in Opera.

Many of Opera’s widgets are useful, easy to install and moreover easy to uninstall. Widget management is far and beyond better than the way Firefox handles add-ons. However this is not without a huge drawback. Opera widgets essentially run as separate apps. While this isn’t necessarily a problem, what happens is that each widget appears as a task in the Windows taskbar. So if you’re running 5 widgets, that’s 5 things cluttering up the taskbar. Widgets should have a way of running in-browser without separating themselves so much.

Skins in Opera make the browser look better and do not require a restart whenever you decide to change it around.

A knock against Opera is that it does not have a private browsing mode, nor are there any plans to have that feature. Not natively, anyway. You could enable it with the 3rd-party OperaTor app, but it would be better if the feature was native.

My single largest complaint about Opera is the same I have about other web browsers, that being horrible memory management.

When using Opera for a while the memory use will blow up like a balloon. You can watch this happen in the Windows Task Manager with the opera.exe file. A quick restart of the browser fixes the problem, but the fact I have to do that is flat out irritating.

The memory management thing is certainly not an Opera-only problem. Internet Explorer and Firefox balloon up just like Opera does.

Small side note: Google Chrome is the only browser I’m aware of that separates out tabs as sessions where the memory used by a tab is released when closed.

The interesting thing is that when Opera balloons up in memory use, you really can’t tell. But I don’t know if this is good or bad.

Really good features for power users

Cached option for image viewing

With browsers there’s show or no-show for images. But Opera has a third option, that being Cached. If you load a site, then revisit it using the cache, this speeds up load time quite a bit.

A ton of import/export options

You can import/export quite a bit more compared to other browsers. Furthermore the import/export process is easy – a huge plus.

Using Firefox 3 as a comparison:

If you want to export your Firefox bookmarks, this is the b.s. you have to go thru just to do it:

Bookmarks/Organize Bookmarks, Import and Backup button, Export HTML. And I guarantee if I didn’t tell you that, you had no idea that was the process.

Opera makes is much easier to do the same thing without hunting around menus just to figure it out.

Print options

Other browsers have one way of printing, their way. Not so with Opera. You actually get options of how you want your web page printed.

Opera Link synchronizes as little or as much as you want

Opera Link will synchronize a whole lot more than just bookmarks, and this is all native to the browser.

This is something I wish Firefox had natively.

What do you think?

Is Opera worth it and still a contender? It’s certainly got the goods. Oh, and let’s not forget it’s got a fully-enabled mail client that does IMAP/POP, newsgroups and IRC!