Opera 8 Browser Bigger than Firefox?
I’ve been a big fan of Opera as my browser of choice since version 5.x. It’s just a great browser in so many ways, and I’ve come to love many of the features that I just can’t get anywhere else. Apparently, I’m not alone. Over 600,000 copies of the new version 8 release were grabbed in the first 48 hours. When the downloads went over 120 per second, an hour after release, the servers started bogging down. They had to bring more servers online to handle the downloads. When I went for the download, the main page had been greatly simplified, to make it easier to handle the load. By comparison, Firefox downloads reached a million in five days, a rate that was a bit slower.
Why is Opera such a great browser? I can think of a few good reasons.
- Tabbed browsing that is, in my opinion, superior to any other I’ve tried.
- Extensive capability to control the browser through the keyboard. By allowing many features to be handled with keyboard input, use of the browser can go much faster.
- Blazingly fast page loading. Opera typically has the fastest loads of any browser I’ve used. The rendering engine is really hot stuff. I always notice the slowness of Firefox when I use it, and Firefox is pretty quick.
- Personalized form-filler-outer capabilities make life much easier. In the preferences, I have my name, address, login ID, and other information I use regularly in forms. My blog name and URL are in there, along with some other info. When I need to fill out a form with anything in that list, I just right-click in the field and select the data I want to place in that field. Much less typing to fill out most forms.
- Pop-up-blocking that can be reconfigured on the fly is really nice. If I need to be able to accept a popup, I just press F12 and change the pop-up blocking behavior. Likewise, using the F12 menu, I can toggle gif animations, sounds in webpages, java, javascript, plugins, cookies, referrer logging, and proxy servers. I can also use this menu to tell Opera to identify itself as either Opera, Mozilla, or Internet Explorer for those webpages that care which browser you use.
- Opera has built-in email, IRC, download manager and note-taking. It handles RSS feeds very well (improved in v8) and lets me read USENET. None of this bogs the browser down. Unlike the full Mozilla suite or Internet Explorer, the added features aren’t allowed to get in the way of the primary use of a browser, the World Wide Web.
- Blogreading is easier in Opera. If you’re reading a blog, you might use the space-bar to page down through a page of stories. When you get to the bottom, hitting the space bar will cause Opera to attempt to go to the next page of stories. This is a feature I discovered by accident, and it ROCKS!
- Ever closed a tab and wished you could just pull it back? Opera v8 now has a trashcan in the lower-right. Click the trashcan and those pages are there. Just select the one you want, and you can go right back to it. Whoever thougt of this one needs a raise.
Opera just keeps getting better. With v8, I’m even finding that those pages I had to load Firefox to read before, I can now read just fine. If you haven’t tried it, you should take a look now. It’s great. Download it from Opera.com.
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Actually, Firefox 1.0 hit 1,000,000 downloads in less than 24 hours. CNET and others have been criticized for using stats from one of the preview releases by mistake. Techweb has corrected their article, but CNET has only changed it to “within days of its release.”
I like Opera too, but the 8.0 launch — while spectacular compared to earlier Opera launches — was still a lot smaller than Firefox’s.