Saturday, July 26, 2008

Opera 9.5 Review: It is More Than Just a Beautiful Browser

opera-browser

While the Techmeme crowd is busy talking about the upcoming Firefox 3 release, one cannot ignore Opera (version 9.50) web browser that has just left the building.

Opera 9.5 sports a sleek metallic interface and I find it very stable when compared with Firefox 3 RC2 which crashes so often on Windows Vista - let’s hope Mozilla fixes that in the final release.

If you compare the layout of Opera 9.5 with IE or Firefox, you’ll notice a small difference – Opera places browser tabs above the address bar while the other browser do the reverse. This is a minor change but good nevertheless.

web-page-loading

There’s another very useful feature of Opera 9.5 that you should not miss. Go to Tools –> Appearance –> Toolbars and select the “Show Inside Address Bar” option under Progress Bar.

Now as you open websites, the address bar gets replaced by a progress bar and you can know the exact reasons why some page may be loading slow on your machine.

There’s another unique feature in Opera 9.5 – if you have multiple websites open inside the browser, you can arrange them as tiles or cascade them just like the Windows Desktop.

arrange-windows

And the best part is the intelligent address bar of Opera 9.5. It suggests websites as you type looking into your browser history – and Opera doesn’t just look into the page titles or the URL, it looks into the actual content of the web page as well while giving you suggestions. Brilliant.


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