a shameless plug for opera

before i begin telling you how much better opera is than internet explorer, i need to confirm something i said in my last blog entry. i told you that i believed God had taken away my need for sleep so i could finish my homework and still attend the events of mission emphasis week. well, tonight i laid down on the floor on my pillow to read my prophets assignment (just as i did a few times last week) and promptly fell asleep.

now onto the topic at hand... last spring i was complaining to a fellow geek about how my laptop's screen was only 800 x 600 and i was wishing to be able to have a larger viewing area for some web pages. he told me to check out opera because it has a zooming feature. so that night i downloaded it and have been in love ever since. the only thing i have found that IE can do better than opera is viewing microsoft web sites. the majority of the sites that one would actually need to go to (which would exclude most of MS's) are well-coded and versitile enough to be viewed on any browser. the exeption to this is the site i'm using now to edit my blog. opera shows the "new post" area as a 150 x 50 pixel block of space, as opposed to the ~1/3 of the screen that IE provides. so ironically i'm forced to use IE to praise another browser. aside from the zooming feature (which i now use to zoom-in - 19" monitors with large resolutions are absolutely wonderful!!), there are many other cool features of opera...

~it's much faster. i just tried to go to MS's own www.msn.com using IE and it took 5 seconds to fully load. with opera it took 3. and that's with MS's main site!!

~all the pages you are visiting are contained within one instance of opera, so you can have a bunch of sites open without filling up your taskbar

~by default (i believe) when you close opera, it saves all the pages you were browsing until you open it again. right now i am starting to research for a presentation i have to give in a short while. a few days ago i started pulling up some websites on my topic. everytime i open opera those sites appear again, so i didn't need to remember or write down where they were. it's also nice because you don't have to browse to the sites you look at daily - email, news, weather, my blog :), etc

~the look of the browser is more customizable than other browsers. for example, there's 5 different ways the main bar (back, forward, home, etc) buttons can be customized. i'm sure there's a way to customize that a bit in IE, but i can't even find where, so i can't compare the options it provides for the main bar. if memory serves me you can only choose if you want big or small buttons.

~the status bar includes the amount of documents and images left to be downloaded, the speed at which they are coming in, and the time it has already taken.

~less pop-ups. in addition to less of them, there is an option in opera to have the popups show up behind where you're browsing or even not at all

~searching made easy. by default there is a search drop-down box next to the address bar. but if you don't feel like tabbing over, you can just type the keyboard shortcut and the search words into the address bar (to go to google and search for my blog, you type "g zippy's blog")

~keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures. for those of us who would rather just use the keyboard, you can browse free of the mouse using 1-key keystrokes. back is simply 'z,' instead of the alt-left arrow in IE. if your hand happens to be on the mouse, you don't even have to move up to the back button. for example - to open a new browsing window, just double-click in your workspace

i must add that there is a small ad in the corner (which i don't even notice anymore), but that is sure a small price to pay for all the wonderful features opera provides.