No introductory paragraph and no smart lines this time. Lets just cut the faff and get straight to 10 compelling reasons to Download Opera 10. Just like our very own “fastest browser in the bloody world”.
1) Speed, Stability and Security Opera is as fast, safe and stable as anything out there if not better. Its Presto engine is 40% faster than the older one. And if you think its all about a few micro seconds, we are talking visible speed my friend.
And Opera are also working on Carakan, a new JavaScript engine that will obliterate anything and everything in its path. Grrr.
2) Turbo This a right godsend for people having slow connections or limits on their data usage. Just turn on Turbo to make use of Opera’s mid servers. They’ll compress the page by a good 50% to your delight.
3) Refreshed UI
Opera have always been tinkering with their tab functionality. And rightfully so, they invented it after all. In the latest avataar, you can pull down the tab bar to view thumbnails as shown in the screenshot. Also, the speed dial is now fully customizable.
4) BitTorrent Support While I wouldn’t have recommended this a few versions back, the BitTorrent client since Opera 9.6 performs beautifully with its limited function set. Speed wise ,its as good as uTorrent or Azureus. Of course, a few more features would have been good, but it gets the job done.
5) Opera Link
This is the magical feature that makes sure your data remains synchronized on whichever device you move to. Be it your desktop, laptop, mobile etc etc. Just sign up for an account at Opera and your speed dial and bookmarks will travel with you.
Widgets are Opera’s answer to Firefox extensions. There are thousands of widgets that either entertain you or fillyou in on vital data. Plus, Opera widgets are even useable on set top boxes, game consoles, cellphones, the works.
7) Developer Tools
Opera comes with a killer debugger called Dragonfly, a full fledged editor to inspect all your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and DOM. And it even allows editing on the phone and embedded devices. Gotta love it.
8) Mail client
Who needs a seperate program to check and send mails when you can do all that and more from right inside Opera? Efficient searching and spam protection coupled with a Low Bandwidth mode make for a good experience.
9) Mouse Gestures
Opera were the first to come out with mouse gestures for quicker navigation. It really is a novel feature in the sense that a series of movements are easier to remember than complicated keyboard shortcuts. Anyone remember their Fools Day, “Face Gestures” prank? LOLworthy stuff, really. (I was almost fooled, but could be a terribly neat idea to implement?)
10) RSS Reader
When you click on an RSS link, you wont see all garbled text and a dialog box commanding your attention. Boring, when RSS is essentially XML. So, Opera presents it in a neat format wherin you can preview the feed before hitting the subscribe button. Sweet.
There are many more reasons as to why Opera makes for a better experience, but of course, I wont go on to say that Opera is perfect. Nothing is and never will be. There are a few rendering issues here and there, but this is a beta and the final version will surely have all the kinks ironed out.
Enough, now go Download Opera 10, ‘the fastest browser on earth’. The least you could do is give it a shot.
