Stylehack

Opera 8.5 is here… and it’s FREE!

BIG NEWS: Opera has removed all banners and is offering the Opera Web Browser for desktops free of licensing fees! Get your copy now at http://opera.com/free/! Quote from Opera: ‘Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera’s growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made todays milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available.’ Note: If you purchased Opera in the last 30 days you can get a full refund! Why Opera? There are many reasons, so I’ll try to limit myself to a what I consider a few key points:

General Use

  • built-in pop-up blocker
  • excellent bookmark management features
  • store a series of web pages in sessions instead of individual bookmarks, then open them all at once
  • reopen pages you just closed with one click of a button
  • search from the address bar (ex: ‘g mysearchterm’ displays the results of a Google search)
  • change settings on-the-fly — no need to close/re-open
  • built-in note taking function
  • built-in password manager
  • built-in download manager/panel which doesn’t slow down your continued browsing
  • move menu bars, panels & buttons around at will
  • highly-configurable thru gui, not through text file hacks
  • no need to download/trust/install extensions from unknown authors
  • supports SVG
  • more standards compliant than any other browser

Accessibility

  • support for portions of Aural CSS
  • mouse gestures built-in
  • extensive keyboard control
  • extensive, easily customizable keyboard shortcuts (my favorite is using Z and X to move forward/backward thru pages I’ve visited)
  • easily disable or change page styles for improved readability (custom or use pre-defined)
  • true page zooming at the touch of a key (enlarges both text and images)

Geekier Toys

  • built-in RSS reader
  • built-in IRC chat
  • built-in bit torrent client
  • built-in searchable, email client (similar to gmail - I put that here because I use ~gasp~ Thunderbird - old dog, no new tricks scenario)
Basically, it comes “out of the box”, ready to go and requires much less fiddling around with it to make it operate the way I prefer. All in less than 4MB… and REALLY, REALLY FAST! More info from Opera on browser features is at http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/ A well-written user review can be found at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=162788&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=95&mode=thread&cid=13603510 Go get it! That’s an order. “-) http://opera.com/free/

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