Opera

These pages are no longer kept up to date as we're moving to afewbeers and want you to join us over there.

Did you know that you don't have to surf the net with microsoft's Internet Explorer (you know the blue "e" thing)?

There are stacks of other free web browsers out there but Opera is my favourite. Firefox is good but I don't like the use of extensions and it's too time consuming to set up.

Internet Explorer (IE) is the target for most things malicious because that is the browser most people use. Opera is more secure. In my experience it is way faster than Internet Explorer as well which is perhaps more important when you are still on dialup as I am. I notice the speed difference mostly when I am helping out friends on another pc with only IE installed. It's a drag.

Opera is much more flexible in how it can be setup too. It introduced tabbed browsing years ago and you can have a bar with your most frequently used favourites (bookmarks) always on display. You can also have displayed the speed at which the page is loading, open new pages in tabs in the background, get RSS feeds and it has chat and email incorporated into it AND you can import all your IE favourites.

To be honest I haven't found or understood all the features of this browser but I'd recommend it to everyone. I have tried converting friends but most don't like learning something new so don't discover what they are missing out on. You really have to try it with an open mind as it IS different to IE and some pages on the web won't display properly but that is the fault of the person who wrote the page not Opera. Opera complies to the W3C standard. There is plenty of help and forums out there if you run into problems or don't understand something and feel free to email me and see if I can be of help if you take the plunge. There is just too much to Opera for me to be able to write about it here.