Opera!

Been looking at the stats of my websites and I've been wondering why so few use Opera as their browser of choice! This is honestly the best browser that's available on the planet right out of the box! Why? 1. Speed - Time is money, so why not choose a browser that'll save you time! Here are some comparisons made on the same computer with no tweaks made on both browsers: A Javascript test from 24fun: Opera: 5.77 seconds Firefox: 9.95 seconds ~1.7x faster than Firefox on the same computer! Next, Opera has a smart rendering system (a combination of deliberate FOUC rendering) which gives higher priority to the loading of text and hence readable content will appear faster. See the next set of pictures to see how big the difference is: 15ms on Opera vs 5782ms on Firefox! 384.5 x faster! You can test your browser here. 2. Mouse Gestures - the feature that convinced me that Opera's the one for me. This feature has been available on Opera browsers since 2001 in version 5 and furthermore it's configurable! What this does is it allows you to 'draw' an imaginary diagram on the screen using the mouse while holding down the right mouse button and it activates a command: Frequently used Mouse Gestures by me:

• If you do an L on the screen, it'll close the tab.
• Move it to the right & it'll go forward/fast forward (e.g. in Google Search result you can just move your mouse instead of scrolling down and then press next)
• Move it to the left & it'll go back to the previous page
• Move it downwards on a link and it opens on a new tab
• Move it downwards & then upwards again, and it opens the same content on a new tab
• Move it upwards & then downwards again, and it reloads the page.

So effectively this means you'll never need buttons anymore (you can remove/add them very easily in Opera) and you can surf Full-Screen! *I understand that this feature is available on Firefox which some programmer has copied but only through an extension which means you have to go search for it and then download to your computer and there's no guarantee that it'll not cause bugs/problems. 3. Configurable Bookmarks - what this means is that you can give a nickname to the bookmark group. E.g. You have multiple email accounts on Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, etc and you group them under 'Emails' in your Bookmarks. Give them a nickname, say 'Email'. So, the next time you wanna open up your emails, you don't have to manually open them up 1 by 1, but just type in 'Email' in your address bar and voila! - all the websites that are within the group will open up in separate tabs! 4. Embeded Mail and RSS program - no need to download additional programs/extensions, once you see an orange XML/RSS button, just click on it, a textbox will appear to confirm if you want to subscribe to the feed and there you go once you press Yes. The email program is also integrated and it fully supports IMAP, POP, etc. 5. Tiny program - space efficient! Only 5.2MB total when installed and it includes an integrated RSS/Email reader! (+Bittorrent for the latest version) 6. Undo - ever experienced accidentaly closing a window, but want it back on again? You can undo this just by pressing Ctrl-Z and the previously visited website opens in a new tab. A history for the session is also available, so let's say you have visited 100 pages and you wanna go back to page 1 you visited an hour ago, you still can by clicking the 'Trashcan' icon. 7. Page-Zoom - this allows you to zoom the whole page - not just the text and the graphics are smoothed while zooming which makes it great for pictures which are too small to be seen. For advanced users: 8. UserJS - what this does is that you can customise the use of Javascript on a website to customise to your needs e.g. removing the Google Image frame when loading a picture, highlighting the words that you searched for in Google in the destination webpage, add Google Suggest to your address bar or even to allow the use of Greasemonkey scripts from Firefox! 9. UserCSS - some websites are still designed for IE so it'll appear different in Firefox/Opera which can make it unreadable sometimes. This allows you to change the website according to what you like everytime you visit the page. 10. Ultimate Customising options - almost everything can be changed on Opera, from adding new panels to adding new buttons - it all can be done on Opera! So are you convinced yet? Why not try it out yourself and decide for yourself: