15 years of Opera
Years after the first browser wars, nowadays there are lots of different browsers available either for desktop computers, smartphones and portable media devices. The internet is growing steadily, while compatibility and accesibility standards are getting more and more important to ensure an equally acceptable browsing experience on every platform.
On the Windows desktop platform there are several different choices: one of those is the Opera browser. I used it for a week or less when version 6 came out, but then switched back to explorer. Only years later I bought Opera, just weeks before version 8 finally went free (lucky me), and stuck with it till now - eagerly waiting for release 10.0!
Yesterday Opera did celebrate its "15 years of innovation" in the browser market. They changed the frontage of their website to a very funny example of how the web was 15 years ago (that is, cluttered with awful gif animations). If the page has been removed, here's a screenshot of it.
So... why use Opera? Here's a couple of reasons of why I think that Opera deserves some attention and how it can enhance your browsing experience.
Fast and lightweight
Some time ago Opera's slogan was "The fastest browser on the web". While this is no longer true in terms of pure javascript performance (Google Chrome outperforms every browser right now and the upcoming Firefox also promises incredible performance gains), the Presto renderer is still very fast and accurate: animations, fades and such are smooth and look great (while other browsers sometimes produce artifacts or mess up complex transparencies).
Opening tons of tabs is also no problem with Opera: I love to use Google Reader to read my feeds and then to open a background tab for every interesting article. One of my typical browsing sessions looks like this:
Opening new tabs in Opera is always snappy and the memory footprint stays in an acceptable range. Additionally, tabs can be dragged around and reordered, or even stripped out of the original browser window. Internally the tab interface is just a well hidden "multi document interface": therefore you can resize each tab individually, tile or cascade them against each other, and so on... Closed tabs can be restored by clicking on the "recycle bin" icon, if you ever close something by mistake (and it has been available years before other browsers "discovered" this feature).
Standards compliance
During the last year a standards compliance war has been raging on, literarily, while the Webkit renderer and Opera were chasing each other to pass the Acid3 test first. In the end, Opera won the race, followed by Webkit closely after.
Even if Opera probably isn't the most compliant browser overall, standards support and rendering are top-notch (you can check out the compatibility tables at quirksmode.org). Pages written according to the web standards are rendered with pixel perfect precision and with incredible speed. Opera also embeds one of the most advanced SVG renderers.
In fact, developing web sites in Opera can greatly improve your output in terms of correctness. A page that is crafted to be correctly displayed on Opera will work in most browsers with no changes at all, while instead writing pages for Internet Explorer might let some errors slip by (which you will not notice but visitors with other browser definitely will).
Unfortunately there still are some pages that Opera doesn't handle correctly, even if compatibility improves in each version. You'll find no problems during your daily browsing, but sometimes you still may have to switch back to Explorer.
Security
Opera has always had an excellent security history and, probably also because of its small user base, is a very safe browser.
Mouse gestures
This feature has been embedded in Opera for some time, but unfortunately is never enabled by default. If you check out the browser, try Mouse Gestures: by holding the right mouse button and performing some simple movements (a simple line to the left to "go back", for instance) you can speed through pages, close tabs, reload and open windows in no time at all. Once you get used to it, using the browser interface through the GUI buttons just feels clunky and slow, while switching to the keyboard will seem an useless additional step on your way through the web.
Opera Link
This is a recent feature that allows you to link the local data stored by your browser to your My Opera account. This means that bookmarks, history, notes and speed-dial will always be synchronized on all your computers.
Search shortcuts
This might be my most used feature: instead of using the standard "search box" on the right of your address box like in most browsers...
...Opera extends how the address box itself works. If you use the keyword of one of your search providers (you can manually add all search providers you want) Opera will immediately perform a search using the string following the keyword.
The system is very flexible and also allows to create searches for every single search box you can find on an internet page. For instance, adding the following query string to a custom provider, will let you perform a search on the Stackoverflow website using Google:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=enrls=en&hs=H1n&q=site:stackoverflow.com %s&btnG=Search
The "%s" token is the part that will be replaced by your actual string when you hit Enter.
And more...
Opera also includes Widgets, the Dragonfly developer tool, browser sessions, fast forward (an easy way to navigate through a gallery or a paged article), quick bookmark access and full history search straight from the address bar (as soon as you type, Opera will go through the content of the pages you visited and all your bookmarks to suggest a destination) and notes (simple snippets of text that are stored and synchronized via Opera Link).
Check out Opera today. 
