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Editor's review of Opera 9.5

Opera has been among the three most popular browsers for many years already. Having a rich version history (the latest one was 9.5 at the moment when this article was written), this web browser has gained a lot of fans (and enemies) and thus proved its right to exists. Since not long ago, Opera has become a completely free browser without advertisement and any limitations.

The peculiarity of this browser is that it is ready to be used right after you install it and you do not have to download additional plug-ins.

Let us see what features Opera has besides standard bookmarks and history:

• Multi-page (tabbed) interface. Present-day standard.
• Saving sessions (opened tabs) automatically and manually allowing you to get down to work at once. You get used to this feature so quickly that you cannot even image a browser without it.
• E-mail client. Not the best one ever, but more than enough for a regular user.
• IRC (chat) client.
• RSS client. It is quite comfortable and, in fact, the only one rss client built into the three leading browsers.
• Mouse gestures. It is also quite comfortable when you neither reach for a key combination on the keyboard nor move the mouse pointer to the close button on the tab to close it, but just make a mouse gesture. Just take some learning curve and your work with the browser will become much more comfortable.
• Torrent client. A client that is actually enough, it does not have too much features, but does its job.
• Download manager that can resume downloads. It is just amazing that there are browsers that do not have this feature yet.
• Notes for all kinds of small texts. It is an unusual feature for a browser, but it is actually quite comfortable sometimes.
• Full-text indexation and history search. All pages you visit are saved in the cache, their text is indexed and you can find a visited page by just one word present in its text. In fact, this history search is similar to how Google searches sites.
• Blocking images. It makes life easier for GPRS users. The button controlling this feature is well visible so you can very easily enable and disable images.
• Password manager (wand). It is quite a convenient feature allowing you to save any number of logins and passwords for one page.
• Speed dial — previewing your favorite sites as small thumbnails refreshed automatically. Instead of a blank page, each new tab shows your 9 favorite sites as thumbnails.
• Zooming pages together with the entire content (video, images). This feature available in Opera for quite long already is only about to appear in other browsers. Zooming is controlled with a well visible item, which makes its use quite comfortable.
• Bookmark synchronization with the my.opera.com service. This new feature allows you to use the same bookmarks in office, at home or in an Internet cafe. To use it, just create an account at my.opera.com and let Opera know about it.
• Completely customizable positions for all interface items in the browser. Despite the fact that Opera uses the work space quite effectively and positions all items well, you can always customize the browser according to your needs.
• Skins.
• Viewing pages using special styles (only text, high contrast, table borders, etc.) This feature comes in handy in case of pages with poor layout or pages with bugs. But, of course, the main purpose is to help website developers see how the browser will display their sites.
• Adding a search field from a page of any site to the browser panel. It is useful if you want, for instance, to add text translation or some special search engine to Opera.

Despite all the pluses, we can also mention features that are not implemented so well in Opera.

• No full-featured plug-ins. Of course, Opera has widgets similar to MacOSX widgets, but they are no match for Firefox plug-ins. However, initially wide features will be quite enough for many users.
• No full-featured spell check.It is possible to build into Opera the free aspell dictionary, but it is not so easy and many people are not satisfied with its work.

On the whole, the developers of Opera are among the most professional teams in the field. Few bugs, the least possible number of vulnerabilities and the good use of RAM make Opera version 9 better than its competitors.

Download Opera

• Opera 9.50 Beta 2