The browser war is a relentless tireless battle between Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and a bunch of others who might be alright by pretty no one uses (ps please link me if you find an awesome browser). So lets take a look at the current stats.
W3 Schools Browser Stats
From this chart (I love charts, especially this one), we can see that Firefox has become more popular than the combined versions of IE put together (33%), and Firefox is way way out there with 46.4% Usage. Although these stats show Firefox is winning the browser war, these stats are specific to this website. I would consider your visitor demographics and own statistics before ruling that Firefox is our new supreme browser ruler. But anyway, as you can see, the new comer ‘Chrome’ by Google, is rising quickly due to the might and marketing campaign of the search engine giant themselves. With a market share of browser which as far exceeded that of its close cousin Safari by Apple, achieving a massive 13.6% market share. Safari has been very slowly increasing its share, by with some months according to these stats, showing a more 2 steps forward and 1 step back approach – after using Safari myself for a while, I can see why. It starts off nicely, then you get annoyed – I don’t even think Mac users even like the browser, often favoring Firefox.
So then the dark horse, Opera recently came into my life.
Opera Review
Firstly, I need to explain why. I change my software preference like I change clothes – mainly because I have unreasonably high expectations in my software choice, and I have the attention span of a deranged goldfish (very short indeed).
I was using Google Chrome on Mac OSX, and for a time, it was great, speedy, useful and lightweight. I actually switched from Firefox to use it (and Safari before it), but over time Chrome steadily has become more and more unstable with the last few updates for the Mac Beta. With various crashes, usually involving flash based pages if I’m honest (not always, often just random pages), and even though it would crash just one tab, the other tabs would then become unstable often crashing afterwards, or resulting in unexpected behavior – which meant I usually either had to reboot, or at least restart the browser – which defeats the whole point of having stand alone tabs for sure.
So I started to look for alternatives – with the most likely outcome being that I would return to using Firefox. But at this time Opera had recently become approved on the iPhone app store after it’s pending acceptance being fiercely debated by almost everyone – seeing as Apple are very picky about what they approve, sighting ‘duplicating functionality’ in many instances. But I think the pressure was on Opera’s side, and they got in (much to the surprise of a lot of people). It quickly became one of the Top 10 apps on the app store, and I have to say I was extremely impressed with its speed and functionality in comparison to safari on the iPhone. So when I was looking for browser alternatives, Opera did come to mind – it’s been years since I last sampled it (and it was pretty rubbish then). This kind of marketing is probably what Opera had hoped, and I think their market share in the browser world could increase by a few points over the coming months, I hope so, because it’s awesome.
Opera Features
Theres tons, so I wont be able to get them all, so I will put my favorite in.
Large Tab Previews
Large Tab Previews
You can make the tabs at the top of the page, smaller or larger (sizable to what you want), but if you don’t want them at all you can just size it to normal tabs like so:
Normal Tabs
But also can mouse over the tabs at any time to reveal a larger preview image of whats happening in that tab, I would have taken a screen-shot, but unfortunately the screen-shot keyboard combo made to the preview go away, but go try it out for yourself, its very handy.
Now I don’t think any of the other browsers offer this much functionality with their tabs, other features include ‘follower tabs’ (not sure what they do yet), ‘pin tab’, ‘clone tab’ (obvious meaning) and private tabs which don’t collect any history.
Speed Dial
I like the speed dial, it was a feature that I loved in Safari (Safari sucks), it was also in chrome, but I feel that its done much better in Opera than the both of them, it feels much more custom.
Opera Speed Dial
One noticeable difference is that you can have a nice background, and as you will most likely be seeing this screen a lot, its not a half bad idea to at least make it look nice! So you can change what site is in which speed dial number by clicking it and adding the URL (which it will helpfully use your history to help you pick), and you can have up to 25 speed dials in a 5×5 configuration as well as many other different layouts to choose form.
As I do visit the same sites on a frequent day to day basis, the speed dial is a welcome feature.
Opera Unite
Opera Unite was something I read about late last year but didn’t fully understand – my first initial instinct was “why the hell would anyone need it?” but after using it and understanding it fully, it’s totally awesome. Opera Unite is a series of different services hosted by the browser itself – all can be protected by a password or made public so don’t worry. Including:
- File Sharing (share files of a selected folder or folders with other people)
- Media Player (stream your music collection wherever you are)
- File Inbox (you or someone else can upload files to your inbox)
- Stream Media (stream video, audio, anything from your pc / mac to anywhere)
- Fridge (allow you or your friends to drop notes on to a virtual fridge)
- Many others, due to a developer community there are tons of other apps which I’ve installed a few of, totally awesome stuff
Media Player
Opera Unite Media Player - Steams Media
You get a URL you can share with your friends if you want them to play your music.
Obviously unite services do rely you having a good Internet upstream, but with connections getting better and better, now couldn’t be a better time to introduce such services.
Opera Speed
Crucially one of the most important factors of a web browser today.Opera does not use webkit it’s always used its own from the Opera site Why is Opera the fastest browser?
Opera is the fastest browser on earth, due to its lightning-fast Carakan JavaScript engine, its Vega rendering technology and its small, efficient code base. and its lightning fast, when I compared it to chrome, it was just as fast if not faster than chrome. It also offers server side compression and returns compressed images if you want even more speed. Although this does work very well, it does some what lower the browsing experience due to the crude looking images – however if I was on a 3g or mobile connection its something I would absolutely consider. At the moment its configured to be automatic. If it detects m connection is slow, it will compress images. So now I get the best of both worlds.
Opera Sidebar
I like the way this is all layed out, it has my bookmarks, easily search-able, email (just testing that out as it has a built in mail client), contacts, unite services, widgets, notes (yes you can add notes), downloads (opera can also download torrents, it has a built in bit torrent client), history and the ability to add more.
Opera Sidebar
There are just so many features of Opera, I would go mad writing them all, so these are just my favorite ones. So I think its best if I just write the negative side of Opera
Opera Negatives
There has only been one main one so far – and that’s RAM usage. I often end up with a lot of tabs open, sometimes a good 30. When I checked to see what RAM I was using it was 1.2GB. Now to me that seems like a lot. But when I reviewed what the browser was offering you have to have some expense somewhere. You can’t unfortunately have something for nothing. So for all the extra functionality offered, RAM was something thats not been sacrificed, but used. Its also a price that I’m willing to pay for this extra functionality too.
I think that concludes my review, there is sooooo much more to it, but I think you are probably asleep now.
Thanks!
