If you are tired of the usual bloated browsers that take forever to load & take even longer than that to display a single web page then it's about time you consider shifting to Opera.

How big is Opera?
The whole of Opera without the Java is about. Compare that with 160 MB for IE6 & 40 MB for Netscape.

Is Opera faster than the other browsers?
Damn straight, Opera is way faster than the other browsers. Opera has an extremely fast rendering engine that displays pages much faster than either IE or Netscape. Of course if you wanna go really fast, you can choose not to download any pictures with the single click of a button.

Does Opera support the Internet Standards?
Well, one of the reasons Opera has become so popular is because of it's support for standards. Version 5.12 of Opera has supports HTML 4.01, HTTP 1.1, Javascript 1.3, CSS1, Css2, TLS 1.0, SSL 2, SSL 3 & 128-bit encryption. It also has partial support for DOM & WAP/WML. Therefore you can rest assured that all the pages will be properly displayed in Opera. If you are a web designer then you can be sure that if your pages display properly in Opera, they will be properly displayed in other browsers too. No need for opening your pages in multiple browsers to check for compatibility.

What other goodies are bundled along with Opera?
Frankly speaking, Opera has not remained untouched by the bloatware bug. Opera comes with a fully-functional mail client, a news reader & an instant messenger capable of connecting to the ICQ network. It also has an inbuilt download manager that is capable of resuming downloads, so you no longer have to purchase a separate download manager like Getright or Gozilla. All this in a 2MB download!!

Is there anything else that stands out about Opera?
Now here's a question that could keep me going on & on for a while. Opera has excellent cookie filtering options. It also has numerous preference settings with which you can control almost all the aspects of Opera. It's search option resides at the right hand corner at the top in the form of a drop down box with which you can query various search engines like Altavista, GoTo or Hotbot. The default option however is Google. You can also zoom the pages to as much as 1000% in order to view them in more detail.

Are there any negative aspects of Opera?
Opera's interface is a bit unconventional & takes some getting used to. The download manager is a bit unreliable, whether it will resume the broken download or not depends on it's current state of mind. Apart from that I can find no other problems with Opera.

Recommended: Yes