The Opera Browser : fly the web!

Introduction

This page is dedicated to the Opera browser, a faster, safer and fuller-featured alternative to your webbrowser!

This page contains a short overview of features I like in Opera, some tutorials I have written and a release history. As I said, I will mention some of the features I especially like, but everyone has their own reasons for liking Opera, so try it today!

Why Opera?

Aside from the emphasis on good security and fast rendering, Opera is packed with great features that make browsing faster, easier and more powerful. I can only highlight a small number of features here and the selection is based on features I enjoy most or features that really set Opera apart from other browsers. You can find a lot of information at Opera's features page.

Internet Suite vs. Browser

A major selling point of Opera for me is the fact that it is an internet suite and not merely a browser (such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox). I use Opera for browsing, e-mailing, newsfeeds and chatting: for me it is an all-in-one portal to the web!

Advanced Webstandards

Opera's rendering engine (called Presto) is possibly the most advanced in the industry. It has very good support for CSS 2.1 and supports some of CSS3; it supports (X)HTML, XSLT, XPath, WML, and is leader of the pack for SVG. It also supports several components of the upcoming HTML5 specification, including reasonably complete support for Webforms 2.

Cross-Platform

Not only is Opera available for Windows, Mac and Linux, it is also available on a large number of devices — notably on the popular Ninteno Wii — and dozens of (high-end) mobile phones. Also for low-end phones, Opera is available in the form of Opera Mini: the webpages are first loaded on special servers, and compressed before being sent to the mobile phone. This way the full internet is brought to almost every mobile phone!

Opera Link

In order to bind all these platforms together into one user experience, Opera introduced Opera Link, a service that allows you to automatically synchronize your bookmarks, notes and speeddial settings to all your Opera installations! Changes made on your desktop are immediately pushed to your Opera Mini on your phone!

Innovative User Interface

The most powerful aspect of Opera, however, is and remains its innovative UI which really streamlines my web browsing experience. The interface can be tailored to your needs, and as there is often more than one way to perform a task, there will always be a way that suits your style of working. Some user interface features particularly stand out:

Integrated Search

One of Opera's best and most copied features is the integrated search. You can search with a number of search engines by typing in the query in the addressbar or special searchboxes. Adding new searches is also very easy: you simply right-click in a searchfield on a webpage to add that search engine to your list.

Speed Dial

One of the visually most apparent features in Opera is Speed Dial: when you open a new tab you are presented with 9 thumbnails of pages you regularly visit; a simple click on the thumbnail takes you to that site. It is a lot faster than typing the address in manually, or looking through the bookmarks.

Mouse Gestures

A feature you soon won't be able to live without are the mouse gestures: with a flick of the mouse you can perform many common tasks, such as closing windows, logging in on pages, going back-/forwards in history, etc. You'll find you'll perform the gestures in other applications as well; in vain...

Keyboard shortcuts

If you look at the list of Opera's keyboard shortcuts you will notice by the shear length of the page that there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts. This means you can do almost anything in Opera without your hands ever leaving the keyboard. Editing the shortcuts is also possible, so you can completely tailor Opera's shortcuts to your needs.

Spatial Navigation

What? Spatial navigation. What? yes, you read it correctly. Never mind what they decided to call it, it is wonderful! With this feature you can select links on a page by using shift-cursor: you hands will never have to leave your keyboard again — never before was browsing so fast!

FastForward

This is another one of those Opera features that makes a great difference for me. What it does is smartly look at a page to see if there are any "next" links available. If so, you can automatically jump to the next page by using any of your favourite forward commands (shift-X, alt-arrow, mousegesture).

There is more though. Combine FFwd with Wand, Opera's password manager, and you can automatically login to your webmail and forums by just using a forward gesture: username/password are automatically filled in and form submitted! One-click login! Read more about how to configure FastForward

Trash Can

Ever closed a page by accident? Just when you realize you still needed to copy something? You could go back in your history and find the page you are looking for, but it is simpler in Opera: just go to the Trashcan on the Page Bar, or press ctrl-alt-z and the page reopens!

Advanced Tab Management

Although pioneered by Opera, tabbed browsing has become commonplace in all modern browsers. Opera still stands out however, in its ease of use: dragging dropping tabs is possible, moving tabs between different windows using the Windows panel, saving tab into special sessions, it is all possible!

User styles

In Opera you can easily change between alternative stylsheets, but also add certain user styles to the layout of a page, for instance to help you with debugging a design, or improving readability. This is done via the user styles.

Opera Tutorials

I have been using Opera for many years (roughly since early 1999) and I obtained quite a lot of experience. I like to share some of this experience with other people, and therefore wrote several tutorials and help files.

Opera 8.5 Tutorial

My latest tutorial introduces several common features in Opera 8.5, by means of a step-by-step case study. Packed with screenshots and lots of tips and tricks, it should be useful to both beginners and slightly more experienced Opera users.

M2 Tutorial

When Opera 7 was released, it included a groundbreaking e-mail client under the codename M2, presently referred to as Opera Mail. Its unique way of handling and organizing e-mail by means of accesspoints totally won me over.

In my enthusiasm I wrote the first official documentation for M2, as well as an unofficial M2 Tutorial which for a long time remained the reference for Opera's mail client. Today the M2 Tutorial is severely outdated as it has not been updated since Opera 7.23. I do not foresee enough time to update the tutorial in the future, nor do I see the need as Opera Software now provides its own M2 tutorial.

Opera Show

Opera Show is a feature that turns Opera into a presentation tool with a single keypress: F11 toggles full-screen AKA "Presentation Mode"!

Opera Show presentations are written in standard (X)HTML and layout is added with CSS. Each slide in the presentation isn't in a separate file — you put all of your content into a single file; Opera takes care of displaying the slides individually.

This is explained clearly in the official Opera Show tutorial and in Scott Nesbitt's article.

Creating presentations

Writing Opera Show presentations by hand requires a pretty decent knowledge of HTML and Stylesheets; skills which most people don't possess. With the arrival of specialized authoring tools, creating an OperaShow presentation has become easy. Currently there are two authoring tools:

QuickShow

This specialized Opera Show editor makes it really easy to create and organize slides, change styles and much more. It also allows you to show presentations without having Opera installed. The program was written by long-time Opera user and newsgroup regular Phil Burns and you can read more about the program and download the 30-day trial version at the QuickShow Homepage.

Opera Show Generator

The Opera Show Generator provides basic functionality to quickly create presentations online: just add/remove/organize slides in the provided form, select your stylesheet and the server will return an Opera Show presentation with all files embedded, including images. A great advance was made with the Generator to spice up Opera Show presentations a bit, by providing several JavaScript addons for animations/navigation menu/automated slideshows.The online Opera Show Generator has been taken offline by Opera Software, as it hadn't been updated for a long period and was therefore no longer up to standards.

Alternatives to Opera Show

Opera Show is only supported by Opera, and therefore Eric Meyer developed a more cross-browser version of an XHTML-based slideshow system, called S5, which requires quite extensive JavaScript/DOM scripting to emulate Opera's built-in feature.

Opera Release History

I maintain a brief release history of Opera on a separate page. On that page there are also links to downloads of old Opera versions, from 2.0 to the latest!

Artwork

Way before O7's release I already made some promotional banners which I think are rather good. ;-)