Speed dial may not appeal that much to people who use lotsa bookmarks or/and keeps heaps of tabs (me), however it is interesting. Many interesting things come from Opera. Eg. Opera introduced tab browsing, maybe session-save as well.
It really baffles me why Opera is so unpopular. It is a wonderful browser. By default, it has so many features, very customizable, has an email client, torrent client, use address bar for various search engine with keywords, and it's very fast, I have over 50 tabs opened at the moment (No exaggeration, im a tab hoarder), and it's still fast.
Firefox is great because of its large library of extensions, but Opera seems to have everything I need by default so there's no need for extensions.
I say Opera is still more customizable than Firefox even with all its extensions. Almost
anything can be mapped to a keyboard shortcut!
Eg. Look at your keyboard buttons, try to map I, J, K, L, as arrow keys, Up, Left, Down, Right, respectively. No browser except Opera can do that flawlessly and easily. Firefox has this extension called 'keyconfig' which can do it, but it's limited and has flaws which makes it less responsive. I do this keymapping so that my hands will be always ready to type something, instead of lifting my right-hand to the arrow keys, then find my way back to the alphabet buttons.
In the address bar, by typing 'g raking leaves', I search in Google,
By typing 'w rake' I search in Wikipedia
'r casino royale' search in RottenTomatoes
'uw postfix email server' I search in Ubuntu Wiki
Of course I customized this myself.
So convenient.
Normally pressing 'tab' on a page, goes through all the hyperlinks. In Opera, it only jumps to 'input' fields, where you type in stuff, I find this a better approach in my opinion, I could map another keyboard shortcut to do the jumping of hyperlinks. Mine is:
shift+I - to move to link above
shift+J - to move to link to the left
shift+K - to move to link to bottom
shift+L - to move to link to right
space - enter link
Other customizability is the interface, almost any button,or input field, can be rearranged, remove or added. You can really clean(or clutter) up and personalize the look of your browser.
I use Opera extensively for RSS feeds and POP3 email. I have thousands of emails and RSS feeds (no exaggeration still), I could search through them and results return almost instantly.
There is so many other little things which makes me using Opera a very pleasant experience (yes, using a piece of software can make me feel warm and fuzzy inside) that takes too long to list. Eg. Download can properly pause/stop and resume, even after browser is closed.
A valid complaint about Opera is that, it is not open-sourced, and it's proprietary. Great softwares usually come from open-source, but if a company is making great software, although proprietary, I don't really care, if it's open-source or not. I'm a Linux (Ubuntu) user.
Oh another problem is that Opera does not let me click on hyperlinks embedded in Flash, but this is only isolated to Linux users using Opera.
Opera is the most awesomest browser ever and I bet God is using it to blog our fated lives! (exaggeration)
Hope you tolerated my long write and actually found it informative and insightful maybe.
Oh by the way, since this thread is just random, Ubuntu Linux 7.04 codename Feisty Fawn comes out in 5 days, 19-04-07.
Visit
Ubuntu Home Page | Ubuntu . Download the ISO, burn it, boot your computer with the CD, play with it, install! And burn (as in fire) your Vista copy.
Happy computing,
Robin
Speed Dial for Opera
Linear Mode
