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Web Developer Resource Index: Opera

Opera is a multi-platform, free (with ads) Web browser. It isn’t open-source, but the purchase price is very reasonable if the ads annoy you. Chief among its benefits are blazing speed, and unmatched support for CSS standards.

The stylesheet support should come as no surprise, unless you are unaware that the company’s CTO, none other than Håkon Wium Lie, is the man who conceived of and developed CSS while working for the W3C. That he is no big fan of Microsoft is also well known, and he enjoys publicly challenging Mr. Gates to clean-up his browser, and other infamous tactics with regard to Web software.

Opera Software is based out of Norway and the browser is quite popular in Europe, although it struggles to gain a foothold in the States. The company has versions that run under Windows, Mac OS X, OS/2, many flavors of Linux, FreeBSD, Sun Solaris, QNX and BeOS. As Nokia, the most popular mobile phone maker in Europe, is also based out of Norway, it should be no surprise that Opera also has a browser that runs on these devices.

Some of Opera’s many features include tabbed browsing, enhanced security, pop-up blocking, mouse gestures, integrated search, and voice (one of the only mainstream browsers that has this feature built-in).

I personally do not use it very much, preferring open-source technology. But I certainly have a copy for testing, and when I do use it I can easily see that it is a superior browser to the current offering out of Redmond.

Opera consistently remains the fastest browser on the market, rendering pages at amazing speed with its Presto layout engine.

Updated: Saturday, March 18th, 2006 @ 4:14 PM EST [70]

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Last updated: Saturday, March 18th, 2006 @ 4:14 PM EST [2006-03-18T21:14:40Z]   home

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