Opera, the faster and useful browser, for free !

Opera 9.6v for Windows has landed, and is real, is faster, with a low memory footprint and it comes with useful add-ons. Nowadays, the browsers battlefield is very active, with four main players: Intenet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera. Honestly, I can say that Opera 9.6v is the best browser for general browsing;

Opera Link make mobility a breeze, you can access your history and bookmarks everywhere. It works, I’m using it in my laptop, my desktop PC (Windows and Linux) and my cell-phone. At some time, you forget that Opera is synchronizing all for you.
Opera is light in RAM, tested against IE and Firefox 3 in Windows Vista Ultimate with 2GB in RAM, the result is clear: Even doing nothing consumes resources when you use IE and Firefox, when you use Opera some chunks of RAM are used and the processor report some work, when you don’t use Opera the processor remains quiet.
Feeds are processed easily, you just subscribe (from the address bar) and read it when you have time.
The email client, supports IMAP-4 and POP-3, so you can stay informed from your Inbox. Give it a try, redirect all your email to a google account, then set up this account in Opera (with IMAP). You can still access your email in MS Outlook (and synch your calendar, notes, etc.) but you are informed of all the mail activity in Opera while you browse. When we have only one email account, things are easy, with Opera and the IMAP, we don’t loose nothing.
The zoom ability in Opera is amazing, it keeps the structure of the web page and increases the font size immediately when you press + or – on the keyboard. IE don’t wrap the text when zoom in a page, Firefox sometimes do a good zoom, but there is no guarantee. I test Opera with many pages (i use a lot the zoom +,- keys) and always does a good job.

Disadvantages: some pages don’t work because the browser checking scripts disable some buttons or forms. In many cases, setting Opera as “Identify as Firefox” do the job. However, some pages specifically banks using activeX like Santander don’t work with Opera. Other disadvantage is the incapacity to recognize (and to work) with fingerprint readers like the Microsoft Fingerprint reader (is only recognized by IE).

Desirable features: a Widget bar, so the widgets can be docked. bio-devices support (voice passwords and so on), direct writing on screen (it can be copied in OneNote and then we can write, but doing it directly on Opera will be cooler), etc.

Firefox is becoming fat and IE has a lot of bugs, Google Chrome is a light browser but his lack of options make it unsuitable for the everyday needs.

IMHO, the Opera browser with his Speed Dial, Sync, Email, Notes, History, low footprint and Widgets, is the best choice for everyday browsing. It supports Java and Flash, PDFs and streaming video like youtube, etc…

Opera

This entry was written by Marco Antonio , posted on Wednesday October 08 2008at 10:10 pm , filed under Tips and tagged browsers, Opera . Bookmark the permalink . Post a comment below or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

5 Responses to “Opera, the faster and useful browser, for free !”

Md. Helaluddin Talukder says:

October 15, 2008 at 2:53 am

Gentleman,

I am a citizen of Bangladeh. I personally like OPERA. But when I download some file then it stoped and again started and some times
it stoped! Any how I want brouse opera faster. Please help me.
Thanks

Md. Helaluddin Talukder
helaltalukder@hotmail.com
Marco Antonio says:

October 17, 2008 at 9:16 pm

Hi,

Today, there’s no perfect browser. But Opera (IMHO) can help you a lot. First, I need more information about your setting in order to provide you “effective help”. Since several “variables” modify the overall performance of a PC, perhaps the main ones are CPU features and amount of RAM.

In general, consider adjusting the following: (In Tools –> Preferences –> Advanced)
Browsing:
Loading; test a early redraw, 1-3 second are good
Page Icons; set to “show No Icons”

History: (it depend on your PC capabilities)

Addresses; 50 will be good for low performance computers
Memory cache; 60MB or more if possible
Disk cache: 400MB or more, Opera will check this to display pages faster
Check documents; set to “Never”
Check images; set to “Never”

Cookies: Set to “Accept only cookies from the site I visit”
Security: Disable “Fraund protection” (very important)

Check the security protocols you need (some web sites use 128bit ARC4, that is disabled when Opera is installed)

Network:

Max connections to a server: try four or two.
Max total connections: try 12 or eight.
— These settings must be moved together, for better performance —

Remember that these settings depends on your hardare and your Internet bandwidth. If you have a low bandwidth connection (128kbps or 56kbps), then decreasing the “number of simultaneous connections” can help, increase the disk cache to cause Opera’s engine to fetch the webpage from your disk (not from the Internet), disable the “fraud detection” because this setting is responsible of network traffic every time you try to load a web address (page).
Remember to visit: this page , to understand the effect of the cache in Opera.

If you get a faster browser or settings please drop a line again here.
If any setting do not make you faster, drop a line here in any case.
Good look!