Why Opera?

A while ago I visited a web site that described the latest security flaw (long since fixed) in Internet Explorer. They even had a demonstration link I could click. When I clicked it, various windows flashed up on the screen, ending up at an open Command Prompt window which had just executed the "dir" command! That was horrifying. It could so easily have been "del /s c:\*.*" and wiped out my hard drive. Just from clicking a link on a web page!

I knew then that Internet Explorer just wasn't suitable for browsing the 'net. That particular fault may have been fixed, but I wanted a browser I could trust. For me, Opera is that browser.

Some other reasons why I use Opera:

• Small - At less than 4MB for the entire download (not counting Java), it's smaller than just about every other browser out there. It's even smaller than most of the patches for Internet Explorer!
• Fast Loading - It loads up much faster than Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox (on my machine anyway). It's almost as fast as IE, which is saying something since Windows keeps IE loaded all the time anyway.
• Fast Back - Opera keeps recently visited pages in memory. If you've got 128MB+, why not use it? Hitting the Back button gives you the previous page instantly. This frequently gives people the impression that Opera uses and therefore requires huge amounts of memory. This belief is mistaken. While Opera does use large amounts of memory, it quickly lets it go when free memory is getting low.
• Fast Downloading - When you click on a file to download, Opera starts downloading it straight away, even before the 'Save as' dialog pops up. It keeps on downloading while you're figuring out where to save it. If it's small enough, by the time you've clicked on 'Save', the download might have already finished! Sure beats IE which stalls the download while the 'Save as' dialog is up. Opera even has a 'quick download' command that automatically saves files into a configurable directory - no 'Save as dialog'!
• Tabbed Browsing - Opera was the first browser I'd ever seen that did this, and it converted me (InternetWorks was the first, apparently). I often have five or more tabs going at once. It's very useful when you're reading a page and see an interesting link. I can wheel-click on it which I've set to 'open in background'. That opens the link in a new tab and doesn't disturb my reading the current page. When I've finished with the page I can check all the tabs I've opened.
• Continue where you left - Opera can be set to automatically restart exactly as you left it. Let's say the power fails. Opera has automatically kept track of what pages you had open and when you start it next, all those pages and tabs pop up exactly as you left them. Brilliant! Works just the same when you have to rush out and quickly turn your computer off, and on those rare occasions when Opera crashes. Your web browsing is barely disturbed.
• Security - While Opera still has security problems (just like every other browser out there), the difference is that once Opera Software become aware of security issues, the fixes are typically just a few days away. Recently Opera Software became aware of a serious security hole and a fix was released one day later. IE still has security holes months old!
• Web authoring - For people doing their own web pages, Opera has easy access to HTML validators. If you need to find out what your web site looks like with JavaScript turned off, that's just F12 and two clicks away (if you're wondering why that's important, some statistics have up to 10% of web surfers with JavaScript turned off - a good reason not to rely on JavaScript).
• Disable audio - Ever been surfing and bumped into a page that played music? This is particularly annoying in a work environment! Again, F12 and unticking "Enable embedded audio" works brilliantly!
• Email security - By default Opera does not allow emails to load things from the Internet. This stops spammers from using an embedding image request to confirm your email address. Nor does Opera allow scripts in emails to run - for obvious reasons. Reading your email with Opera is extremely safe.

I haven't mentioned Opera's revolutionary email-client/newsreader. This addition has tended to polarise Opera devotees and new-comers alike! Either you like it or you hate it. I do like it. It does need some work, though. If you try Opera the browser, give the email a try, but you may prefer to stick with whatever email program you're already using.

Why Not Opera?

I can't think of anything! Seriously, there used to be two major objections to Opera: ads and money. As of 2005-09-20 Opera is ad and cost free. No ads, no need to pay a cent!

If you'd still like to contribute financially, then get yourself some Premium Support. Otherwise, just use the built-in Google search facility, as Google pay Opera a few cents every time you use it.

Cost Analysis

I paid AUD$50 in December 2002 for my copy. That's still going today (May 2005), and most likely for the next year or two until version 9. Spread that out over the likely four years that $50 is going to last. Four years = 192(4×48) working weeks = 960 working days = 7680 working hours. Opera costs me $50÷7680 = $0.0065/hr.

Here's another way of looking at it. I can earn $50 doing an hour's work. I would need to work for less than half a second ($0.0065÷$50/hr×60min×60sec) every day for four years to pay for Opera. Or, rather than working, my use of Opera simply needs to save me less than half a second of work each day to pay for itself.

That could be time not waiting for a bigger browser update to download, or not dealing with pop-ups, or not cleaning up after spyware/malware, or not searching for and installing a multitude of extensions, or not waiting for non-integrated email and newsreader applications to start, or not needing to manually categorise and manage my emails (compared to other email applications).

Web Site Problems

Objectively, this is the biggest reason to not use Opera - the web sites that fail to work correctly when viewed with Opera. As a professional programmer, and as someone who's spent ten years doing web work on-and-off, I can say that even if Opera fixed all their bugs, most sites that currently fail would continue to fail. That's because the problem with most sites is with the site itself, not Opera. I've written about this at great length on my Opera compatibility pages.

If you're considering not using Opera because of this issue, then the best thing you can do is continue to use Opera. The only thing that will make more web sites pay any attention to Opera is if they get more visitors using Opera. Using a different browser is just giving web sites the message that they can continue to ignore Opera.

Opera Software are doing what they can to alleviate the problem. The first tool is a file called "ua.ini", which provides per-site browser identification settings. Simply changing the name Opera gives to web sites to identify itself is often all that's needed to make the site work. The ua.ini files makes it automatic. See my page Faking Browser IDs for more information.

The second tool is User Javascript, which runs a set of Javascript programs on every page you visit. Scripts can be written to modify web pages to make them work as intended, all automatically. I have a few such scripts on my User Javascript page, plus some links to other script collections.