Opera 10 is out of beta and in official release, so if you want to try it out, go for it.

Note before continuing: PCMech Premium members can see me review this browser in a 20-minute video.

1. "Windows Native" skin

Accessible by: Tools/Appearance or Shift+F12

The default look of Opera is "Opera Standard". It definitely looks better than Opera 9 did, but "Windows Native" is better. It makes the browser look much cleaner and icons are easier see because they’re color coded (in "Standard" they’re not).

This combined with the fact the tabs are above the address bar by default (Note: It can be moved easily, I’ll cover that in a moment) makes this one of the easiest browser interfaces there is.

It used to be that all browsers had different colored navigation buttons on purpose to make it easier to use. Opera is the only one left that does it right.

2. Fastest address bar search there is

Example:

Firefox’s "Awesome Bar" stutters and/or chokes when trying to search your recent history from the address bar. Opera never, repeat, never does any of that crap. Just start typing and blam, there’s your results. Instantly.

3. Sessions

The Sessions feature is when you can load up specific sets of tabs on demand at any time that you want.

Example 1 – You want to load up Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all at once.

So you do:

Then while these tabs are open you click File, Sessions, Save This Session:

Title it and click OK:

Now whenever you want to open those four sites all at once, you click File, Sessions, [title of session you saved]…

…and ta-da, the session is opened (as a new Opera window) with all four sites loaded exactly as you saved them.

You can have as many saved sessions as you want.

For those saying, "But IE 8 has that too!" No it doesn’t. It has the ability to load multiple tabs on startup, but with Opera’s Sessions feature you can actually save sets and call them up at whim whereas in IE 8 that must be done manually.

4. Just as fast as Chrome in a way better package

If you’re all about speed but Chrome is just way too watered down for your liking (a common complaint by many), Opera 10 is the best of both worlds.

Some benchmarks out there may say Opera 10 is not as fast as Chrome. I disagree because I’m talking real-world use here. And in my experience, Opera is faster than Chrome for day-to-day stuff. It loads my online banking web site faster. It resolves sites faster. It caches better. The interface allows me to find stuff quicker. It’s extensible with widgets. It has the best mouse gestures of any browser that exists.

I could go on and on about this, but you get the idea. Speed means nothing to me without features that make that speed worth it. Opera gives you the speed and the features.

5. Best smooth-scrolling there is

Most people can’t stand smooth scrolling and instantly turn it off. Opera is the only browser I use with it turned on because it’s the only one that does it right. It’s not too "stiff" or "loose". Opera has that nice happy medium when it comes to smooth scrolling, so much so you would probably leave it on as well.

In addition: The default setting for the mouse wheel concerning how much it scrolls up and down is also just right.

6. Ability to move anything just about anywhere

This has been a feature of Opera for a while, but it’s still worth mentioning.

Example:

Of all browsers I’ve ever used, Opera is the one you can customize the most. Want the tabs on the bottom? Do it. Want the address bar on the top, right, left or bottom? No problem.

Other browsers only dream of native customization like this.

7. Help documentation that’s actually (gasp!) helpful!

One thing I knock other browsers for is the seriously crappy documentation they have.

The F1 key, as most people know, is the key you press when you want help in an application in Windows.

When you do this in IE 8…

…the first thing the help section does is tell you what’s new in the browser. I don’t want to know what’s new. I want a table of contents because maybe, just maybe, I’m looking for documentation on a feature but don’t know what to call it (so I can’t search for it being I don’t know the title).

It no wonder that nobody ever uses the help section in IE – even in 8.

When you do this in Firefox…

…you are brought to support.mozilla.com where you are shown, quite loudly, to SEARCH FOR WHATEVER IT IS YOU WANT TO GET HELP WITHIN A BIG YELLOW BAR.

Once again, no table of contents. You get "featured tutorials" and "handy references" instead. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I want an itemized list. It’s not here. You’ll waste time going thru other "handy" sections just trying to find out how to do simple things.

Note to Mozilla: We as users don’t want a "knowledgebase". We want plain English documentation. And yes, there’s a difference and a big one at that.

When you do this in Opera…

Well, glory be, look at that.. a list of contents on the right showing every single feature in the browser in a nice clean categorized way. This is proper.

Do you realize how rare this is these days that a team actually took the time to document this the right way the first time?

It’s gotten so bad these days that we as browser users expect the documentation to suck. But Opera’s docs don’t suck. Not by a long shot.

Final notes

At present Opera isn’t enough to pull me away from Firefox mainly due to the way it handles bookmarks and the fact I don’t get the plugins FF has.

However I will say this browser is staying installed on my system. It gave me a solid reason to ditch Chrome and go with Opera instead. I was happy to uninstall Chrome after using Opera 10.

This browser is also going to kick serious ass on my netbook due to the native Opera Turbo feature.

A big thumbs up to Opera 10. It finally looks modern, acts modern and has the big-player features people are looking for.

And by the way, yes it’s available for Mac and Linux too.

In our last episode.. I talked about how much web browsers suck. But now it’s time to discuss how great they are.

The best way to describe the greatness of modern web browsers is to point out the features we have now that most people take for granted.

1. Tabbed Document Interface

Most people know this as simply tabs. This was one of the best improvements ever made in a web browser. And said honestly, I cannot browse without them. I first remember first using a tabbed interface with Maxthon (which used the IE engine). IE took a very long time to develop a tabbed version of their own, but finally brought one to the table with IE 7. Better late than never, I suppose.

2. Zoom

I first used a zoom feature in Opera way back at version 5 and it was great. Unfortunately Opera was a pay-browser back then so that was a no-go for me. IE always did have the ability to increase text size but not images (that wasn’t until much later). Firefox always had a zoom but it didn’t work properly until version 3. Fortunately, all browsers now have a proper zoom feature. They will even zoom Flash content now.

3. Better bookmarks

Bookmarks now not only hold information on the URL of the site you want to go to, but also the "favicon" (small image representing the site, should it have one) and can also contain keyword tags in browsers like Firefox.

4. In-browser search bar using search engine of choice

This is something a ton of people take for granted. Early browsers had absolutely no search bar whatsoever. You had the address bar and that was it. If you wanted to search Yahoo, you had to physically go to www.yahoo.com to do it.

Before the search bar there were add-on toolbars for both Netscape and IE. One of the more popular offerings was Google Toolbar (which is still available). However with any toolbar you were forced to the search engine provided and no other.. that is unless you wanted to install yet another toolbar. And of course people remember their Netscapes and IEs back then with 2 or more toolbars in it. Rather terrible. And crash-prone.

Search bars now allow any engine to be used with no additional memory munched up since it’s integrated into the browser.

5. Full screen mode.

This is yet another vastly underrated feature. It is (to the best of my knowledge) universally accessible on the Windows platform by pressing F11 in IE, Firefox or Opera. You press F11 again to go back to windowed mode.

Full screen mode is great because it dedicates your entire screen to whatever web page you’re viewing. In fact, you can make it "book like" by pressing F11, then increasing the zoom a few times (CTRL-plus or just plus in Opera) for maximum readability.

A small note for those looking to buy a netbook: Know your full-screen feature in your browser because I’ll guarantee that you will use it. A lot.

What features of modern browsers do you like?

Chime in with a comment or two.

Opera is one of those browsers that has a very dedicated community, but pales in usage compared to Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The perks of Opera have pretty much always been the same.

• Best native tab management
• Lightning fast operation in just about every way
• Low memory usage
• A user interface that just makes sense
• More options that are actually usable

I’d dare to say that other browsers "borrow" features from Opera routinely. The Opera browser always seems to come up with something really cool but people really don’t take notice of it. Then after a while, a competing browser will introduce a very similar feature and be lauded as if they invented it.

An example of this is the zoom feature. Opera was the first browser I can remember that got zoom right the first time. Firefox didn’t get that right until version 3 and IE not until 7, both several years after Opera more or less perfected it.

The only thing about Opera that was obvious is that it looked old. The current Opera 9.64 does look a bit antiquated while IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome look snazzy and modern.

Opera 10 on the other hand finally gets a freshened interface. It’s nothing particularly groundbreaking, but considering how often we all use our web browsers, this is a welcome sight to see. There is no part of this browser that says "old" anymore.

Concerning the address bar…

The AwesomeBar in Firefox sucks. Even in FF 3.5 it’s still a drag to use. You will realize why once you use Opera’s address bar. Why? Because Opera never "thinks" when trying to pull up information. The moment you start typing, wham, instant search of your bookmarks with no "thinking". It is nothing short of amazing how fast it is (even on slow PCs!)

Concerning better web integration…

From the Opera 10 page:

If you use a Web mail service as your default mail client, you can tell Opera 10 to do the same. Clicking on e-mail addresses or "Send by Mail" in Opera will open the compose page from your Web mail service provider. The same is true with the Feed reader — you can now also add any RSS/atom feed into your favorite online feed reader from within Opera 10.

This is actually really cool. But unfortunately the selections available do not include what most people use.

For example, when you click on an email address on a web page, this is what happens:

Okay, cool, I can choose a webmail service of my choice, let’s see what choices I have.

That’s it? No Hotmail? No Yahoo Mail? No Gmail? I’m hoping those services will be added in when this browser is out of beta.

Concerning the other stuff…

Opera Turbo

The Opera Turbo feature is an accelerator of sorts that is supposed to increase the speed of browsing when on a slow or choked (i.e. a slow public wi-fi) network. It is enabled by clicking the clock icon at the lower left of the browser. I can’t use it because my network is too fast (oh, darn it all). You can read more about Turbo here.

Resizable search field

At top right next to the address bar you can search Google (just like in Firefox or IE) and now you can adjust the size of it, but I bet you didn’t know that IE and FF can do the exact same thing. Opera makes it easy to spot. The other guys do that hiding-in-plain-sight thing.

Auto-update

Summed up: It’s about time Opera got this.

Would I recommend Opera now?

Opera 10 is the first version of this browser that I would actually recommend. As good as 9 and all the previous versions were, I just couldn’t recommend those. And the main reason for that is sub-par web standards support.

Version 10 on the other hand does have proper web standard support (believe me, that’s important). And as soon as the loose ends are tied up from the beta to the final release, I think this will finally be the one that will get Opera more new users.

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!

There are some web browsers that are safe in older versions and some that aren’t.

The safest (and fastest) web browser in the world is Lynx. This is because it’s 100% text-based. There is no malware, spyware or malicious code that exists for Lynx that I know of. The only drawback is that there aren’t any images in Lynx, nor can you use a mouse. But it is safe.

Older versions of the Opera web browser do quite well because they’re not a primary target to develop malicious code for. However there really isn’t any significant advantage to running an older version of this because the newer versions are better, more stable and more feature-packed.

Where you really see the difference in speed and security is when it comes to Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Firefox

The fastest and most stable version of Firefox was arguably the last release of version 1.5, that being 1.5.12 (available here). It’s really fast and the US English Windows installer is just a tick over 5MB whereas the current 3.0.7 is 7.3MB. Firefox has fattened up quite a bit since 1.5.

Is running FF 1.5 safe? No. There have been many security fixes since 1.5 and it’s worth it to run the most current version.

Fortunately if you yearn for The Firefox That Once Was, there’s Seamonkey. I recently wrote about this. This browser runs how Firefox used to run. Speedy, quick, fast, light. And you can run it alongside Firefox easily; it won’t "argue" with Firefox whatsoever so you can easily have both installed without a problem.

Internet Explorer

The IE browser is well known to the the #1 target for spyware and malicious code as far as web browsers are concerned. To run an older version of it is literally inviting trouble. And it doesn’t matter how careful of an internet user you are, because if you run an old IE, it’s just bad news.

What you can run for IE depends on what version of Windows you have.

Windows 2000 can run 5.01, 5.5 or 6.

Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 can run 6, 7 or 8.

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 can run 7 or 8.

With 2000, IE 6 is the most recent version you can run and that has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. Yes, I know there are more than a few readers out there running 2000 and IE 6. And most of you would proudly state, "I use IE 6 and have never had a problem." That may be so, but your luck will eventually run out. I strongly recommend switching to Opera, Firefox or Seamonkey for 2000 users.

With the rest of the Windows versions after that, IE 7 is still considered to be a safe browser. It is routinely updated by Microsoft and has wide adoption. IE 8 is new, it’s great and better to use, but some people have been reluctant to upgrade for compatibility reasons. For example, you may ask the question, "Will I be able to access my bank’s web site with 8 like I did with 7?" For some, yes. For others, no.

The next question after that is, "How long should I wait before upgrading to 8?"

Most web sites that require IE will deploy updated versions in around 90 days. If you want to be extra careful before upgrading, wait 6 months. During this time Microsoft will not stop supporting 7. Updates will be deployed routinely and you can continue to use it as you always have.

Some notes on IE 8

I downloaded IE 8 the first day it was released and after using it can say the following:

First, it does not require a huge learning curve. In fact it hardly requires any learning curve at all. IE 8 is not some massive departure look-and-feel wise from 7.

Second, I haven’t noticed any web site that didn’t work with 8. Some have reported some issues with some sites, but I haven’t personally.

Third, 8 did not do any weird "hey what’re you doin’, IE?" things to my XP Pro setup whatsoever. With past versions of IE, yes it did do that. But 8 did not.

Last, and most important, I recently performed and IE 8 upgrade on my father’s computer. He’s 74, very set in his ways and doesn’t like it when things change around on his computer (but then again who does). He was able to use IE 8 with no problems whatsoever. He has an older Dell box with a 2.4GHz CPU and just 512MB RAM. IE 8 runs just fine. In fact it runs better and faster than 7 did, so he was happy. If that doesn’t say 8 is better than 7 I don’t know what does.

Do you use IE 8? Did you find certain sites that didn’t work?

If the answer is yes, please comment. Users of 7 thinking of upgrading to 8 would be very interested to hear what you have to say.

As long as the Internet exists (as we know it at least), a browser is simply going to be a requirement. As you probably know, there are several major players in the browser market, each having their own “nuances”. Of course these nuances lead to myths and misconceptions as the infamous “I heard it does this” perpetuates itself across the Internet.

To hopefully bring some organization and clarification to browser myths, I found a writeup of common myths for popular browsers:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox
• Opera

I do not know whether or not everything on the site is true, but it is nice to see everything in one place.

A while back I got some questions about how to *exactly* set up e-mail with Opera so I decided to put together a video showing how it’s done. Some people aren’t aware that the e-mail client within Opera isn’t too shabby (it does OperaMail, POP and IMAP). See video below for details.