Opera will never win.

You know, after I download Opera 6.0 last night, I realized that Opera will probably never be a leading browser in your server stats, even if a lot of people use it. It is set to report itself as IE5 to the servers by default. So even if you look at a page in Opera, it will say that it is IE5. I don't know if this is because of that thing with Microsoft blocking non-IE browsers from msn.com or not... But anyway. I just thought that was interesting. You can actually choose to have Opera report itself as almost any browser. IE, NS, etc.

Of course maybe that isn't what actually gets reported to the server, but I'm pretty sure it is. Someone may correct me if I'm wrong though.

But anyway... If you haven't tried Opera yet, I highly recommend you do. 6.0 has quite a few small improvements over 5.12 including a nice pretty new interface.

It also has an integrated mail/news client that is really fast. I hate waiting for 30 seconds for outlook to get it's lazy ass around to bringing up a new message box when I click on a mailto: link. Opera is immediate because it is fully integrated into the program.

The entire Opera browser is only 2 megs... It opens almost immediately when you launch it, and it definitely renders pages the fastest of any browser I've ever used.

It also has this great feature where you can right-click the mouse and drag to the left to go back. Up is refresh I think... Right might be stop. I use Back the most. And if you drag it down it will open a new window.

New windows are launched inside of the main browser, which is nice. I didn't like it at first, but now that I'm used to it I love it. It's a lot better than having like 6 IEs open.

Not to mention Opera has the best support for Web Standards...

Anyway. I'm not a salesman... Just wanted to point out some of the features to those of you who have never used it before.

good point

opera is very good in my eyes..

too bad it isn't used that much.

i have opera 6.0 for some weeks now and i realy love it.

i like opera alot also and think it will go somewhere maybe

I've started using it instead of IE all the time now.

I was just reading through their web site and noticed the page linking feature.

You can have two windows open... one a master and one a slave the master never changes. It could be a table full of links or something like that. When you click on a link in the master window, the page is loaded into the slave window. That way if you have a large list of links, you don't have to keep pressing the back button to go back to the index! That's such a great idea... I have tons of applications for that feature....

You can also turn off images, tables, stylesheets, frames, iFrames, etc at the push of a button. That makes it really easy for web designers to see what the site will look like on cell phones/lynx/blind people's browsers, etc. Awesome.

Man... looks like i'm gonna download it...

damn... should have downloaded this browser earlier!!
its hell dope. i'm dumping Microshaft's IE and using opera from now..

One thing i can say from the features i see in it is that this browser is built for webdesigners. good for checking site, wat?? it has a zoom feature, view as a printer friendly version, without images, without css...??

IE, bite ME

Yup... It is by far the most designers friendly browser ever. I think the president of Opera or whatever the company is called that makes Opera is the one that proposed CSS1 to the W3C. So I imagine that is why it's so great...

just remember dek, I showed opera to you.

Sure you figured out the click and drag left or right thing...but im the big banana!!!

ACTUALLY I used Opera when it was in version 2.0! It sucked then though, so I stopped using it. Then you told me to try 5.12, so I did. And it's great. So technically I found it first, but you reawakened my interest in it. So you are not the banana. You are The Reawakener.

what is the difference between the pay version of Opera and the free version? i glanced at the site but it wasn't really clear. you've convinced me to try it but i'm not going to pay for it!