Opera for 3 Euro
Tuesday, April 5. 2005
If you live in Germany or have access to German magazines you should listen. Go and get the current issue (8/2005) of the c't magazine. The CD that comes with it gives you a code which allows you to get a free license key for Opera 7.54u2 (the current version). You get 3 keys for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. You are allowed to use them on as many copies as you like inside your own household.
Opera 8 is announced to be out very soon. So it's very nice that the code from the CD will allow you to buy Opera 8 for EUR 8,- instead of EUR 34,-. So alltogether you will get a nice and legal Opera 8 for EUR 11,- (the 3,- for the c't included). A very good price for a great piece of software.
As you might already assume I'm a big Opera fan. I'm using it since version 6 and can't imagine an internet life without it :-). It's the smallest (just 3.4MB), fastest (see these benchmarks) and most feature-rich browser on earth. It was the first browser to introduce real tabbed browsing (and still the only one with a useable implementation) and the first to introduce mouse gestures. I haven't seen the latter in any other browser to work as good as in Opera. I could sum up all of Opera's wonderful features now (mail, rss, irc, ...) but someone else did that already: Why Opera
Just a last note of claryfication. I like Firefox, too. This is what I install on other people's computers. But I want more for myself. For me the difference between FF and Opera is like the difference between a Java 1.3 Swing GUI and a native Windows GUI. It just feels awkward.
Cheers
Matthias
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Just as a contrast, I installed Opera the other night for the first time. Its default configuration made me want to pull out my hair. There is SOOOOO much crap all over the place! In the 40 seconds that I spent looking at it, I couldn't figure out how to turn any of it off, so I ended up just testing the bookmarklet I was developing and closing it down. Perhaps once it is configured to a more usuable state I would like it, but sheesh, what the heck are they thinking?
Also, none of the fonts were anit-aliased, something I've been used to in linux apps for the last 3 years or so.
What do you mean "real" tabbed browsing by the way? I've been using various different web browsers under linux for years now that use tabs, and they all seemed pretty real.
real "tabbed" browsing - the MDI interface - lets you tile the pages inside the main window. You can't imagine how useful this is - you have probably never created a linked page and went through your google findings on the left page while the links you clicked showed in the page on the right.
Anyway. Firefox is good. There's things that Firefox can do that Opera cannot. But to my taste Opera is so much more usable than FF with whatever extensions you install. I've tried.
Bei real tabs I mean that Opera offers a real MDI interface. Everything also stays in just one system process.
As an example what Opera should look like see my configuration: ;)
http://yumdap.net/files/operascreen1.png
http://yumdap.net/files/operascreen2.png
It should be like this out-of-the-box. Too bad it isn't but they supposedly simplified the interface in the upcoming version 8.
I don't understand what the 'minimalist toolbar' is for..
it is (from left to right) navigation, addressbar, statusbar, searchbar, zoom and advanced setting in a single toolbar.