On the Newest Opera

Opera 9.5 released earlier this week.

I’ve been an Opera user for, umm, a really long time now. It’s the bestest, fastest, coolest web browser on the planet.

It’s more secure that Internet Explorer. It’s more complete than Firefox. It’s faster than Safari.

I’ve been running betas, dev builds, and the release candidate for a while. It’s got a slick interface, it’s easy on the eyes, and it’s solid.

It has some quirks. A couple of things in the WordPress backend aren’t rendered properly. (Or, it might be more accurate to say they are rendered properly, but what it’s rendered is coded incorrectly.)

Is that a reason not to download Opera? I don’t think so. Opera is one of the most standards-compliant browsers on the market. If you want to see how something is supposed to look online, you look at Opera.

Give Opera a try. There’s very little learning curve. There’s nothing additional you need to download. It’s an integrated Internet suite, with e-mail, RSS capabilities, newsgroup access, and chat capabilities built in, right under the hood.

Opera. I swear by it.

Give it a shot. 😉

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

3 thoughts on “On the Newest Opera

  1. You know, if Firefox 3 hadn’t been in beta / RC status, I would have tried it. The thing is, I’m loving Firefox 3. It’s not bloated like FF2 became, and the Smartbar feature is awesome. I just read on Lifehacker that there’s an Opera 9.5 portable, so I may yet give it a try.

  2. I’m installing it. Just because… well, I swear by Firefox, but I’ll try just about anything once…

  3. Julio, I understand where you’re coming from completely. After a few days of Opera 9.5 final release, I’ve come to think that this version was pushed out a little before its time, so it would be on the market before Firefox 3’s release on Tuesday. There are some major bugs — if it’s left running for a few hours, it becomes unresponsive, and the windows vanish. (Or, maybe it’s a feature Opera decided to pick up from Firefox. :lol:)

    On the other hand, I like being able to use CSS3 selectors and see what they actually do. (I like using the text-shadow selector. Used properly, it gives things a nice shine.)

    And after several years, I’m finally giving Opera’s built-in mail client a try, and it does some really interesting stuff. (For instance, if you e-mailed me, and I e-mailed you back, there would be a special folder of all of our correspondence.) It automatically groups mailing lists together, the filtering functions are intuitive. The one thing it doesn’t do is HTML. It can show it, but it doesn’t let you write it.

    Overall, I don’t think Opera 9.5 is quite ready for prime time.

    Carey, have you thought about giving Flock a try?

    Flock has a couple of really interesting features. It’s built around a social networking paradigm. If you use Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, and other social networking sites, Flock will plug into that to make it easier for you to interact with them. (For instance, it has a blog editor that allows you to post to a blog without having to log into, say, LiveJournal by taking advantage of the APIs.) It offers Gmail integration as well. And it handles RSS feeds as well. It doesn’t look like it offers dA integration, though. Despite that, Flock may fit your needs better than Opera.

    It’s built on the Firefox 2.x code. (In fact, the latest version is FF 2.0.0.14, at least according to its browser identification string.) So, if you’re familiar with FF, you’ll find Flock easy to pick up and run with. And because it’s built on the Gecko 1.8 engine, what works in Firefox will work in Flock. I guess you could say that Flock is a social networking interface built on top of Firefox, and it handles a number of Firefox extensions (but not skins, as the interface is different). And probably in the next three to four months, Flock will upgrade to the Gecko 1.9 engine used in FF3.

    This all sounds needlessly geeky, doesn’t it? :mrgreen:

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