IT Pro Verdict

Opera brings itself up to date with the rest of the pack with a solid browser release offering a good mix of unique features and reasonable performance. However, its main appeal is likely to be to advanced users who have the desire for more technical detail and access to that left-of-field feature set. For everyone else, the more mainstream browsers will do fine.

By Darien Graham-Smith

published 2 September 2009

in Reviews

These advanced features point to a fundamental difference in philosophy between Opera and other browsers: while the likes of Google Chrome and Safari try to keep life as simple as possible, Opera caters for the more engaged user. So, for example, when a page is loading, Opera shows not just a progress bar but a numeric count of loaded page elements. Right-clicking on a web page brings up a plethora of advanced settings, including automatic reloading, HTML validation and the option to view it in a different browser.

And if you dig into the "Advanced" preferences panel, you'll find all sorts of options for customising tab behaviour, notifications and security settings the sort of options that Firefox hides away in its inscrutable "about:config" panel, if indeed it offers them at all.

Best of all is Opera's handling of stored credentials. Like most browsers, when you log in to a secure site, it will offer to learn your user name and password; but it also learns how to submit them, so next time you visit that page it takes just a single clock on Opera's "log on" button to enter the site.

With so much on offer, you may be wondering why Opera hasn't been more successful. Partly it's down to a lack of user awareness: Opera Software is a small Norwegian company that simply doesn't grab mainstream attention in the way Google or Apple can.

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Darien began his IT career in the 1990s as a systems engineer, later becoming an IT project manager. His formative experiences included upgrading a major multinational from token-ring networking to Ethernet, and migrating a travelling sales force from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.

He subsequently spent some years acting as a one-man IT department for a small publishing company, before moving into journalism himself. He is now a regular contributor to IT Pro, specialising in networking and security, and serves as associate editor of PC Pro magazine with particular responsibility for business reviews and features.

You can email Darien at darien@pcpro.co.uk, or follow him on Twitter at @dariengs.