Opera 9.5

I’ve spent about a year off of Opera, given the rocky start I had with it. I don’t remember the exact version of Opera I last used, but it had some major issues with Flash and whatnot. The thing I remembered about it was that what it did, I liked, but there were just some dealbreakers in it. I can remember enjoying the gesture-based browsing as a decent, fun feature. So, when it came down to it, I gave it a little of a time off to mature a bit. Who can blame me – Firefox has been doing some amazing stuff in the past few years, and I was having a lot of fun with it.

I recently came back to it on the recommendation of a friend who had a similar previous experience with it as I had. What an upgrade it’s made! It’s gotten all of it’s multimedia woes wrapped up and it’s actually introduced a lot of great new features to the web browsing experience. The gesture-based shortcuts are stll there, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Their speed dial feature is great – basically, it’s like visual bookmarks, and shows up on your empty tabs to allow you to quickly access them. The download manager is great, and it supports bit torrent by default – win! The design of the browser is tight – it’s cleaned and uncluttered, and it maximizes your screen real estate. It’s got a great right-click menu that has an ‘Open With’ option that can send a page to a different browser – a superb developer feature.

There are also developer tools for it in beta now – a suite called DragonFly. So, if Opera has DragonFly and FireFox has FireBug, staying on the same theme, I think IE should create developer tools called Dung Beetle :) By the way, Opera has one of the most standards-compliant DOM browsing experiences to be had. They’re right up there with Safari on that ground (but I don’t like how Safari renders fonts and a few other things – icky, nothing I’m a fan of it at all).

Seriously, if you haven’t had a chance to try Opera lately (or ever), now is as great a time as any to do so. I’m definitely going to split time between it and FireFox more – it’s a great piece of software that’s at home on any desktop.