MY THOUGHTS

Image via CrunchBase

Back on June 19th, I tried out a new browser – Opera 10.0 Beta and wrote a review about it discussing my thoughts on Opera 10.0 Is Very Impressive.  Its been over two weeks since I first started using it and I still am very, very impressed with it.  It isn’t perfect, but it is it is still in beta, which means as a user you have to be ready for some glitches here or there.

There have been a couple minor bugs, (I had some problems with rendering small images and another one – that was so minor I can’t remember what it was) but they seem to get fixed fairly quickly in the next build; the only long-standing one is that I have difficulty deleting a panel that I no longer want but even that is not a big deal. 

Otherwise Opera 10.0 Beta has been very stable, quick and intuitive.   Enough so that I deleted Flock, Safari, Firefox and Thunderbird, from my system and am probably going to delete Chrome very soon.  IE8 doesn’t do anything for me and I would get rid it if I could, but stuck with it since I have Microsoft Vista.  Which believe it or not, I do like and will probably upgrade to Windows 7 in a little while, so I will have Internet Explorer on my machine as part of that.

But back to Opera 10.0.  The Opera email client is simply what I have been looking for in an email aggregator for several years and it is in my browser, but I can still access offline.  I have all of my email from a bunch of different accounts coming into this and it works FANTASTIC!  Not having to hunt over many different sites to get my email which is such a time saver. 

The other big thing that I like is that the Opera community is so helpful, in my last blog on Opera I asked (”whined”) about not being able to put Twitter in the sidebar and several people gave me information on “panels” and I have twitter/facebook and some other Google gadgets in my sidebar.  Their help was spot on.  Even when I asked an absolutely dumb question, I wasn’t treated, as I have been in some other forums (like I was stooopid), someone quickly and nicely gave me the answer, even though there was an obvious answer.  I noticed was the same for others when I read through a lot of the other forum questions and answers.  The answers aren’t judgmental and are actually helpful, which is a nice change of pace.

The Opera community seems a bit different than others I have “lurked” about on, who knows maybe I will even start to participate in this one.

Opera synch seems to work flawlessly so far with my wife’s laptop  and I have started using Opera as my primary browser at work also.  So it is important to me to keep as much data as I can identical between the computers. So far so good, no complaints on synch, I just have to do some more reading on what is and what is not synched. I am on vacation this week, so hopefully, I will have a chance to do some of this reading to learn more about some applications that I am using instead of just using them by the seat of my pants

Overall, after using Opera 10.0 Beta is it simply the best browser I have ever used period.  The only thing I miss from Firefox or any of the other browsers is the ability to have a in-browser blog editor like Scribefire or Flock’s Blogwriter, but LiveWriter works well as long as I have my main computer available.

I plan to keep using Opera as my browser of choice, it just does things that I want it to without being bloated, I guess if they started adding calendars, blog writers and all those other “nice” to have things that people might want, it would become bloated, so on second thought, keep it as “thin” as possible to keep it fast.  I will live with using other applications for those things.  But I am going to see if I can add Opera to G.ho.st and see how that works, it might be an interesting experiment.

The only other negative is that some online applications or websites recommend to use something other than Opera saying
 
but when I have used Opera there, I haven’t had any issues.

Opera is definitely worth taking a long look at, it is a step ahead of the rest in the browser wars in my opinion.  It definitely deserves to be more than a niche browser, because it is so much more than that.  The true confessions of another Opera convert.

Those are my thoughts, what are yours? Please leave a comment below, so I will know your thoughts.


This work by Harold L. Shaw, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.