I'm not a full time web developer but have occasionally created pages. One feature I find really handy that is not on other browsers is that you can right-click on any page and choose "Validate" and then you can see if your page is valid markup or not by http://validator.w3.org.

I'm not a full time web developer but have occasionally created pages. One feature I find really handy that is not on other browsers is that you can right-click on any page and choose "Validate" and then you can see if your page is valid markup or not by http://validator.w3.org.

I think it is an excellent product to use .It gives you a new level of comfortability while using it.It has excellent features
I am enjoying this product a lot

@ file_master:

Did you try: tools->advanced->blocked content... ?
AdBlock plus is more advanced but this is a nice alternative...
for example:
*ban*.gif*
*pagead*
http://ad.*

For mouse gestures you can use 2 actions for one gesture using the \"&\".For example:
Close page & Switch to next page

I've always been a big fan of Opera, mostly for its amazing speed, low system requirements and superb integrated package.

Still, lately I've been using Firefox 3.0 more. Why ? One reason: AdBlock plus. You can't surf the net these days without a gread ad blocker and there aren't any for Opera. Sure, there are some amazing stand alone alternatives, like Ad Muncher, but still, nothing beats having such a program integrated seamlessly into your browser.

Separate ad blockers take up extra system memory and may interfere with some ad-based mmo's, of wich there are quite a few these days. Sure, you can close it when you play something, but nothing beats having it integrated into the browser.

TBH, Opera is a great package, but I see one major flaw with it. IMO, it will never get truly competitive unless the developers decide to go open source. It's ordinary people that make these packages great, since coding has become such a complex job.

BitTorrent Client is pretty useless, since most sites ban any client that doesn't have "Utorrent" or "Azureus" in its name.

Mail is very nice, but who uses POP3 and IMAP these days, when webmail dominates everything ? And even if you have a corporate account, it will most likely have some form of webmail as well. Who wants to configure mail clients when you can just enter your name and password and read your mail ?

Mouse gestures are very nice, but still not as configurable as FF's 3rd party addons.

Acid3: really, who gives a damn ? I realize it's all about web standards and all, but what good it does to respect a set of standards that nobody else seems to care about ? With all its "compatibility", you'd think it would display all the sites flawlessly, but unfortunately, that is not the case.

To be fair to this great program, the number of unsupported sites decreases every day, but IE and FF will still display flash-heavy sites faster and more fluently.

I'm not trying to crucify Opera, because it's still great, but IMO the only way to achieve mass adoption would be to allow 3rd party addons (and I don't mean the useless gimmicks known as widgets)

Compared to IE7, it still wins by a mile, but FF is a better (more configurable) overall browser.

btw anyone who sees new features on opera or any other browser and thinks it will help them catch up to firefox, needs to understand that any new feature available in other browsers will be available to firefox users as well with add-ons. firefox pretty much can have all the features of opera minus the widgets but the widgets are kinda gay in comparison to firefox's add-ons.

Opera is supposedly the only one to score 100 on the new acid3 test but that said its customizability issue will keep it from being the best.

firefox 3.0b5pre scored a 71 of 100 which is 29 less than opera yet its customizablility will keep it the best browser out there no named internet explorer. only firefox can catch ie as well, opera can claim best and such but it will never be what firefox already is and thats america's favorite browser. this is firefox's world, everyone else just lives in it.

I use Opera for 5 years , but I have also IE7 and Firefox installed on my PC, as I am a webdeveloper and I use the other two just for testing my pages in all the 3 most used browsers.I was always overwhelmed by the sheer speed of Opera, its ease of use, the straight forward and useful features. And if you think 9.26 is fast, just try the 9,5Beta because it's even faster.

The incorporated Mail client is one of the best I know, very fast and sincronizing my IMAP folders and downloading messages much faster than other dedicated Mail clients, such as Thunderbird, KomaMail, Reach-a Mail, etc. Newsfeeds are also availabe and the degree of customization is simply excelent and very easy to control

I know Opera is the fastes of them all ,has the most logical safety features that you can encounter in a web browser, a truly secuere and safe browser.

Memory wise, the new version has a smallest foot print than previous versions but bear in mind that also IE and Firefox are huge ram eaters.

I would not say only that Opera is the fastes browser on earth, I would say also that it is the Best Browser on earth

Opera is the Browsers' King. It's:
-simple
-fast
-secure.
No problem with memory uses. It's very customizable too. Simply it's the best!

No hay dudas, Opera es el mejor de los Navegadores de Internet. Sencillo y simple. Es muy configurable y no hace mucho uso de la memoria de tu ordenador.

As a longtime IE user right up to IE7 both at home and work,then more recently Firefox,which I loaded on my home system..I feel duped! never will IE Firefox be allowed on my home system ever..Opera is superb! by far faster no matter how many tabs are open..virtually instant. Fantastic features supported by tutorials,some with demos to walk you through it painlessly...in 30mins I knew more about Opera than I ever got too about IE..Superb aand countless widgets some for fun and others of real use. Opera , according to other reviews is far more secure than IE or Firefox...Opera switched the lights on as far as I'm concerned.

this is excellent product, but recently i have switched to Mozilla since it could be turned into much powerful browser than Opera. Favorite combination with mozilla:
- AdBlock plus
- DownThem All

A super browser indeed.I love this browser

Pros:
- Customizable(better than FF)
- Stable
- "Create Search" Function
- It's free
- Good content blocking and effective popup blocking

Cons:
- Some websites doesn't like Opera
- M2 needs some serious updating

I think it's the best browser so far. Doesn't hurt to have multiple browsers so go ahead and try it.

Excellent browser with many GUI customizations. All my extensions installed on Firefox are included in the box. Fantastic!

Now, Opera is my defaut browser on Windows and Linux. Firefox installed only for web testing. :)

problems with some sites: google reader, google calendar, writely, digg.com (v3), etc. (Due to small market share?)
Otherwise very good! :)

I decided to switch Firefox with Opera. After a few hours of using Opera, even with that amazing speed i had(as some one said "It smokes Firefox at starting speed and rendering pages")i decided it's not good enought.
Why?
1. I noticed that compatibility with some sites it's even worse that Firefox's. Google Pages? Nope not today. That is a big minus for me. I use that site alot (btw it works on Firefox)
2. Extensions". If Opera would EVER like to take the crown from FF it must include an addon system that would permit users make usefull utilities. I am so addicted to extensions that i see it as a standard browser feature.
3.Opera's Pop Up Blocker sucks ass as well as the integrated downloader and other "integrated" utilities (Extensions?)

Those are the reason i didn't uninstalled Firefox.

After reading the review by "Tokar" I decided to give Opera another try. I tried it a couple of times in the past but was never excited enough to keep it. Mostly due to the fact that you had to deal with the ad banners or buy it.

I have been using Firefox for what seems like a very long time now. I like the fact that my Spyware/Adware and Antivirus software doesn't pick up nearly as many items as they did when I was an Internet Explorer user. For that reason, I almost exclusively use Firefox.

Now about Opera. I won't even begin to describe all of the features. Tokar has done an outstanding job as always giving an extremely good review and I recommend that everyone who might be interested in Opera, to scroll down a bit and take some time to read it. I will point out the following...

Fast download
Easy to install
Easy to use
Easy to customize
It's FAST!

The broadband speed test shows that Firefox is faster but you could never prove it by me.... Opera simply seems faster!

I've been playing around with it for most of the day (sadly enough, I didn't have much of anything else to do). I tried it with the game sites POGO and Candystand - did some downloading, read some news, did some general browsing. Messed around with features, customizing etc., With the exception of some text formatting issues at a couple of the news sites I was browsing, It truly is an excellent browser. I plan to keep it around and who knows, I might even uninstall Firefox. I never thought I would say that but it's a possibility. Even though I like Firefox, after today, I believe that Opera does a better job and has better features to boot.

If you have used Opera in the past, give it another try, if you haven't, now is your chance. It's well worth it!!

Take care!!

Excellent browser.

If there were options for adding very valuable toolbars that I use (Yahoo, Google) this would be the ONLY browser I use. SInce they've taken a development approach that doesn't allow independanly created "Plug Ins" or, make it difficult to do so, it will remain a fring browser.

It's a BETA version with still lots of things that need fixing up ! Do not install over your current Opera !

Last official version is 8.5 !

I think I will avoid this build.

It says it has issues with flash.

Im happy with build 8238...

After using IE for 6 years...and trying out different front ends...and giving FireFox a try, I think that Opera is the best browser on Earth. I really do.

This is coming from an IE guy who has been ripping all those FireFox diehards who say the FF is the best thing since sliced bread.

Everything about this browser makes it the best. It gives you an awesome look and feel, one that somewhat mimics Internet Explorer but not exactly, whlie giving you a lot of the features IE has, IE doesn't have, and ones you would find in FireFox.

These features include:
-tabbed browsing
-show links in page
-ad removal (this is new in version 9.0 Technical Preview 2)
-ability to block certain things from showing in pages (java, flash, images, etc.)
-complete toolbar customization
-RSS
-customizable search bar
-page zooming

The interface is better than IE and better than FireFox. it feels a lot like AOL Explorer, if you use that browser. It is really pleasing to the eye.
The toolbars are highly customizable. MUCH MUCH more customizable than IE, and a lot more customizable than FireFox. I think it is on par with the customization you would come to expect in all those IE front ends like Green Browser or Maxthon or Avant.

The options are a lot like IE and FF, but Opera, as an added bonus, gives advanced users a more advanced customization window, like FireFox gives you, if you type in "opera:config" in the address bar (minus the quotes).

Overall, Opera handles most of the web standards much better than FireFox and IE. Acid2 for one.
Obviously, like FireFox, Opera doesn't have support for ActiveX. In some respects its a good thing, in others its bad.

I think the best part of it all, is that there is a whole forum set up at the Opera homepage designed to discuss Opera, problems with opera, Opera wishes and all that business. IE doesn't have one of those, and nor does FireFox...or at least its not clear to me that it does, unless you want to consider the sourceforge project page forum as their "forum"...I hate the sourceforge forums...they are so hard to navigate.
They have forums designed for Opera Windows, Opera Mac, Opera Linux and Opera Mobile...different issues for each, thus different forums for each.

I really like how they take supporting of their pages very seriously. If you visit a webpage and it renders improperly, either you can report it on the forums, OR you can click the HELP menu in the program and click "Report a site problem". A window will pop up appended with the link, at which point you can describe the problem you see and send back the problems to the server for analysis.

Just recently, the Opera team has started a blog (one of the millions of blogs available at Opera's homepage) where you can find a weekly release of Opera 9.0 builds.
IE of course doesn't do this...FireFox does this, though...through CVS or something.
What is nice about the weekly builds is that they come as installers as opposed to something where you have to manually copy files and settings over each build.

In terms of speed, Opera smokes FireFox and IE. It opens faster, it opens pages faster, and it renders pages faster. This is not JUST personal opinion. There have been a lot of published reports/tests which show this as well...even the old Opera 6 and 7 versions are faster than recent IE and FireFox builds.

The only negative with Opera is that with all the speed you enjoy comes a lot of memory hogging. I notice sometmes when I have a lot of tabs open, Opera will be using 100MB of physical RAM and 100MB of virtual RAM. I dont think its a memory leak as much as it is Opera storing information in the memory to make the program run a lot faster than its counterparts IE or FireFox.
Interestingly, whether Opera is using 40MB total physical and virtual, 80MB, 100MB or 200MB, it still runs and opens at the same speeds...indicating that the RAM usage doesn't hurt the browser performance.


So basically, its an awesome browser, which comes with everything you want in a browser and everything you expect in a browser. It does all this while being the fastest browser on earth, in a very pretty interface, and with a development team which is HIGHLY accessible on its forums, and which releases a new build every week.

I dont know what more you could ask for.

In short, the only real negatives about this program are:
1) a high memory usage
2) like FireFox, no support for ActiveX
3) the ad removal, like FireFox ad block, has nothing on programs like AdMuncher
4) like FireFox, since the web was built for IE, you will find some pages here and there which don't render 100% properly (maybe 80-90% properly or something). I find that for most sites that dont render properly, they render 99% properly and its that one little graphic somewhere that is places on screen somewhere it was not designed to be placed.


I switched from IE to Opera full-time 3 weeks ago and havent regreted it since.
Of course, though, I still require the services of IE since website through my college force me to use IE.

So I suggest you all give Opera at least a try!

now that it has bittorent client again, add searchengine wizard, widget applications support, lockable tabs and opera:config it's one of the two best browsers on earth and the only one packing so much in so little space

Very fast, bends to my will in every way possible, toolbars, adding custom search engines to the search bar.Saving my personal info and so on.

Only thing annoying is the history layout, I prefer IE's history layout, and using the third party Search.INI editor, eventhough it works fine, just seems like it should've been built in as well.

Look Maa No extensions! ;-)

Been using Opera for a long time now and I'm still as happy with it as ever. Especially once it became free and they removed the banners.
I used Firefox for a while and it's a really good browser also, but once you get hooked on Opera, there's no going back.
They also have an ingenious email client integrated in the browser, which is something quite different from the average email software, but can be quite convenient once you get used to it.

I've tried almost everything of the non IE based borwsers and Opera just rules the pack.Simple,fast,free,a must have for the serious web surfer

The last 9 version is not so good... Perhaps because is just a beta...
But the officially 8.50 it's one of the best...

Overall I think its excellent. Even though I'm a proud Firefox user. It just lacks some extension capabilities FF has. But ists great, and now its even free :)

As of today, Opera 8.5 is also free of charge.

No registration required. No ad banners displayed either.

And you forgot about " It has a price" ...in these days when most browsers are FREE.

In the past, i used to use IE.
But when i knew Opera, i am bored with IE.
IE is the bad browser ever i know.
IE is very slow.
But if you use Opera, it's the fastest browser on the world.
It loads page fastly, download and upload fastly.
And if you're using dial- up connection, Opera will useful for you because it enhace ( increase up ) your PC's speed.
You will be not bored with your browser.
Opera - easy to use, install easily.
You can change skins for Opera ( many skins )
Opera has voice.
Friendly interface.
This is Opera 8
Opera 8' s command is easiler to use than Opera 7.
It has phising killer.
And many utilities.
Download right now.
I am Opera's fan.