Most of you must be using either Firefox or Chrome; very few IE and Opera. Today, I am going to brag about some features of Opera browser which may tempt you to give it a try. Of course, it has some limitations and we'll try to discuss them as well.
Let us start with the newest feature that has been introduced in Opera 11.50 -- Speed dial extensions (Don't miss the "extension" word in that). With Speed dial extensions, you can get you Gmail Inbox within a Speed dial. And yes, there is a plethora of such extensions ranging from Weather News to silly but addictive games -- all within your Speed dial. What's the big deal, you say? Well, you get to do lots of stuff in a single tab and don't get confused with your lame experience of what a speed dial is after using the horrible Chrome speed dial. Opera's Speed-dials are extremely awesome, highly customizable -- their size, their population, what they hold -- Heck!! Even the background is customizable. In front of them, Chrome speed dials are just... well, lame.
Other features of Opera as just as mind-boggling. If you haven't used Visual Mouse Gestures, you haven't surfed the net, buddy! If you are a guy who says, "I don't want to move my hand from the keyboard," sorry man, you are losing a lot in life! I am not going to describe Mouse Gestures -- it will take lot of space and time. I'll leave it up to you to check them out.
Other than that, the in-built Drop-box like feature, Opera Turbo to speed up the slow internet connection, the great Opera community, the far-far-far-better-than-gmail Opera mail client (this is what inspired Evolution and Thunderbird!!)*, superb widgets, cool extensions (which can work on your comp as well, independent of the browser), tab-grouping (which Opera introduced before Firefox), etc. will simply overwhelm you. Apart from that, it gives so many options to customize your browser, that you never get tired of playing around!
3 features in this long list are close to my heart -- the Opera Link feature, the Notes feature and the Fullscreen feature. Opera Link is an unparalleled synchronization tool. It synchronizes just about everything you can expect to synchronize and the best part is, it works seamlessly on OperaMini browser, which is the most used browser in cell-phones, so that you get everything everywhere. Notes is like any other notes widget but built inside the browser and has really good support in the browser. They come very handy while reading stuff on the net and with the increasing role of online tuts in our life, they are the way to go. The Fullscreen feature is not exactly a feature. It is just the way Opera lets you view pages in Fullscreen mode. All you have to do is right-click and the option is sitting right there -- no need to click F11 or go to View menu or visit hell in chrome! It's simple and intuitive and very useful since most of us like to use the Fullscreen mode almost all the time.
Okay, now comes the limitations. Well, not exactly limitations, but just that Opera lacks the humongous no. of extensions that Firefox offers. That maybe be mostly because there are lesser no. of developers and users of Opera. The basic ones like vimperator, video-downloader, etc. are still there but certainly you will feel the dearth. Apart from that, it doesn't have mind-blowing themes for Linux although for Windows, many such themes exist -- again, due to the lesser no. of Linux-Opera users. Nonetheless, these so-called limitations are forgettable compared to the awesome features it offers. And all this comes in less than 10MB size -- even chrome, supposedly the most light weight and blah blah, is around 20 MB. Actually, Opera beats all other browsers in speed and what not; it's just that many people have many myths in their mind arising from the super-duper Google marketing! I hope you will give it a try and experience it's awesomeness (I have to give up watching How I Met Your Mother, else the no. of "awesome" words will only increase; btw, Cobie Smulders is hot).
*citation needed.
No comments:
Post a Comment