Shagz
New Member
I never really messed with Opera much until just today. Last week Opera became a free, ad-less browser, so I thought I'd check it out.
I've been very impressed so far. It definitely *feels* faster than Firefox, but I think it acheives this by not displaying the page on screen until all the images have been downloaded. Even then, things seem to render a lot faster in Opera than in Firefox.
Opera also has a lot of really neat, innovative features, like "fit to screen" - Opera will dynamically resize images and other assets on a website to force it to fit in whatever width your browser is set at; bye-bye scroll bar. You can even reduce the window size down to only a couple hundred pixels and Opera will start parsing the HTML to display on your screen like it would parse code to format a page for a mobile device.
Another really cool feature is that if you accidently close one of your browser tabs, Opera dumps the URL into a trash can, where you can easily pull it back out again. Kind of like the history palette, but better.
It also has a cool feature called "notes", where you can copy text from a site, paste it into a note, and the notes will also remember what page you copied the text from, so it's both a note and a bookmark.
Lots of innovative ideas going on here (shortcut keys for entering common passwords, etc.)...don't think it will replace Firefox for me though, I have too many extensions that I've found too useful to part with. But we'll see, it's only been a day...
I've been very impressed so far. It definitely *feels* faster than Firefox, but I think it acheives this by not displaying the page on screen until all the images have been downloaded. Even then, things seem to render a lot faster in Opera than in Firefox.
Opera also has a lot of really neat, innovative features, like "fit to screen" - Opera will dynamically resize images and other assets on a website to force it to fit in whatever width your browser is set at; bye-bye scroll bar. You can even reduce the window size down to only a couple hundred pixels and Opera will start parsing the HTML to display on your screen like it would parse code to format a page for a mobile device.
Another really cool feature is that if you accidently close one of your browser tabs, Opera dumps the URL into a trash can, where you can easily pull it back out again. Kind of like the history palette, but better.
It also has a cool feature called "notes", where you can copy text from a site, paste it into a note, and the notes will also remember what page you copied the text from, so it's both a note and a bookmark.
Lots of innovative ideas going on here (shortcut keys for entering common passwords, etc.)...don't think it will replace Firefox for me though, I have too many extensions that I've found too useful to part with. But we'll see, it's only been a day...
