@JeffHertlein

A few days ago while I was staring at Google Analytics at work I was going down the browser statistics list. A familiar name caught my eye that I hadn’t put much thought into in awhile: Opera. We’ve been hearing a lot about browser wars recently, but we never really hear much about Opera. I used to use it here and there a few years ago, but it wasn’t really all to different from any other browser I was using at the time and some new browser called Firefox was up and coming. While staring at my browser stats it dawned on me that I haven’t even taken a look to see what Opera was like or how it has changed in over two years, so I gave it a shot. Here is my review.

Interface

My first impression of the browser was the interface, and I found it to be rather enjoyable. I found it to be extremely clean and easy to use. I liked not only the tab system, which pretty much every browser now has, I really liked that the only buttons were the browsing essential buttons.

Speed Dial

This is a handy feature that is similar to Safari’s page that shows all of your most visited sites, except it shows up everytime you create a new tab and you can place whatever links you want in the available slots. I really find this to be a handy feature.

Page Preview

This is a pretty small feature but something I really like, just kind of a handy thing. It shows a preview of the page when you rollover the tab.

Pet Peeves

The only thing that really bugs me that I’ve noticed is that it doens’t seem to render round corners correctly. Not the end of the world but it does bug me.

Overall

Overall it’s  been a wonderful experience browsing on Opera the past few days, and I just find it interesting that such a nice browser gets so lost behind the big four. What do you think?