Opera 10 Review

I like it.  I upgraded Opera to Ten on all of my linux boxes.  XP will follow. I have always liked Opera.  I refer to it as fast and efficient.  It seems to have only gotten better with the official release ten.

Much like my Lockergnome blogging colleague The Oracle, I have been an Opera cheerleader for a long time.

Some people talk about the user interface as if it were the only thing that was important.  These people usually use Firefox. :)   (so do I) The Opera interface is… well.. it’s the most recent Opera interface ever.   Since I don’t care, I won’t discuss it any further. The latest release seems to be stable and a real barn burner in terms of speed.

BOOKMARKS

There are all sorts of little niceities, such as the ability to import bookmarks from other browsers (provided you know where they are stored).  The current way of doing it is easier than in the past.  I pointed it at my collected bookmarks.html file and POOF - I had completely populated the heretofore empty bookmarks file. By the way, don’t cut and paste bookmarks from one folder to another.  It doesn’t work correctly.   Drag instead. Previous versions of Opera didn’t play well with WordPress either.  If I remember correctly, it had something to do with a control. There are more bookmarking options but nothing that knocks me out.

WIDGETS

I find them borderline useless and under-implemented in linux, so I don’t use them.

MAIL

There is a low bandwidth mode, at least on the menu.  I have no idea what it does.  The reader can make use of IMAP and I set up a gmail account in no time.  I don’t like browsers as email clients, preferring Thunderbird on all platforms, but there’s nothing quite as handy as sending a quickie email in the browser.  Firefox requires a plugin so Opera wins here too.

CONTENT BLOCKING

The great benefit of content blocking in Opera 10 is that it works.  This is much more handy than previous versions, where it didn’t or required a lot of jiggering to achieve functionality. But I find myself spoiled by Firefox.

Until I stopped using Firefox almost exclusively, I forgot what ad-bloat was like.  While the Firefox extension AdBlock takes care of me on that platform, Opera requires manual blocking.  In fact, I can recommend the concept of plugins highly for every browser.  I do recognize that it may slow things down and can’t be implemented on all browsers.

DELETE PRIVATE DATA

This is extremely handy.  But take a word of advice from me: don’t use it while you’re typing.  It will blow out everything you’re working on.  How do I know?  Because I just `tested it out’. Also be careful when setting up your options.  Sometimes browsers assume you want to save all passwords by default.  Please don’t be a newbie and allow your browser to save passwords.  You’re asking for problems, as anyone who can open your browser can make use of your passwords.

I’m one of those loons who turns off javascript and cookies (and Flash) by default.  This is no problem in Opera, not that it ever was.  Firefox has an addon called NoScript that makes the javascript process easier.  It takes more steps on Opera and you have to watch out because Opera doesn’t concern itself with subdomains or third party domains that might be on a page you’re attempting to view.  The information isn’t there.

NOTES

I have no idea why.  I don’t even have a sarcastic comment.

TURBO MODE

I haven’t played with this yet but I can’t imagine it being a drastic improvement.  One could assume it’s a cache of some sort.  I know that it offered to enable itself on one of the other machines.  Doesn’t seem to do much for me but your mileage may vary.

You can save and manage sessions, which is new, along with synchronizing Opera.

It is absolutely worth the download, Windows or linux.