(LinuxWorld) — When it comes to opera in the traditional sense of the word, I prefer Boris Badenov to Boris Godounov. When it comes to Opera the Web browser, however, I've been avid fan for years. For quite a long stretch, Opera was the fastest browser I could find. I'm not sure it could win that title anymore, but it's still quite fast and it's more feature-rich than ever — it has more features than I could hope to cover in one article.
The latest version of Opera for Linux is 7.11, and it is vastly improved over earlier versions with the exception that it seems to have more JavaScript problems than earlier versions (more on this later).
The first thing I noticed is that Opera 7.11 is more stable on my systems than versions I've used in the past. Installation was a breeze. I just unrolled the tarball, ran the installation script and chose the obvious answers to the few questions it asks. It didn't detect the path to Java on my system automatically, but once I set the path to my installed version of Java, Opera began to run Java applets without problems.
Opera has always had some very cool ease-of-use features. I love the mouse gestures feature in Opera, for example. I find it intuitive and easy to move backward a page by holding down a mouse button and swiping the pointer left or right. It is certainly much easier to use the gesture than jumping to the keyboard to press Alt-Left, or pointing at the left arrow.
While mouse gestures have been around for a while, Opera 7.11 added lots of nice little touches to improve ease of use. When you pull down a bookmark menu from the toolbar, it now includes the option to add the current page to that particular menu. KDE Konqueror has had this feature since the dawn of man. It spoiled me immediately, so I miss it in browsers that make you go through more steps to add a bookmark to a specific menu.
Opera 7.11 offers tons of other nice features and touches. Opera now includes a notepad where you can jot down notes you can drag and drop into email messages. Opera now applies a custom graphical skin instantly upon download. All you have to do is decide whether you want to keep that skin as the active one. There are countless skins available from the Opera Web site, so everyone is likely to find one that suits their fancy.
Modem down, IE
Many years ago, I ran a series of tests on modems. This was back when 9600 bps was considered a breakthrough speed. It turned out all but one of the modems I tested could connect to any other modem it dialed. One modem — a Hayes — would only connect to other Hayes modems. Hayes analyzed the handshaking process and discovered it was the only modem following the v.90 specification perfectly. Its strict compliance is what caused it to fail to connect to other modems that were sloppy in their implementation of the standard.
Hayes thought this difference gave the company a reason to boast. Customers disagreed. Modem buyers don't care about specifications, they just want to dial up and connect.
JavaScript compliance is like that. Opera claims its JavaScript is ECMA compliant. It may be. Indeed, for all I know, Opera may have the strictest compliance in JavaScript available. However, Opera JavaScript has problems with many of my favorite Web sites. It makes no difference to me whether Opera is at fault or the site is at fault. I want to browse those pages and take advantage of those features. (See resources for a link to a site that includes JavaScript that Opera does not handle properly — it is only one of many examples.)
Here's where the analogy reverses itself. Unlike the Hayes situation where only one modem failed, in this case only one browser seems to pass. That browser, you guessed it, is Microsoft Internet Explorer. It would take another column to discuss the implications of this predicament, but the bottom line to most people will simply be that they don't want to be annoyed by JavaScript incompatibilities. Opera (and everyone else — Mozilla, Konqueror and the rest) needs to get its act together with respect to JavaScript.
Editor's note: The above image is reduced in size and color palette to allow it to load quickly. Click on this image to see the original.
You've got mail
The most significant addition in Opera 7.11 is the mail client, called M2. I confess that until now, I hated the Opera mail client. It was a conglomeration of bizarre and missing features, and terribly unstable. The Opera 7.11 mail client is such a dramatic improvement that I'd be tempted to begin using it on a regular basis if I weren't so acclimated to Mutt (a console-based mail client).
The mail client has all the basics and then some. It supports IMAP very well, which is something new for Opera (IMAP support in previous cuts was poor). You can set up multiple accounts, which is a feature many people demand.
The mail client makes it ridiculously easy to add contacts to your address book. It filters spam. Moreover, you can "flag" messages with one of several labels, such as "To do," "Mail back," "Important" and so on. I haven't seen this feature since I used Eudora email. I liked it then, but almost forgot it existed until I saw it in Opera 7.11.
It has a poorly documented feature called "views" that doesn't seem to be very useful. Perhaps if Opera makes it easier to figure out how and why one would use views, the value of the feature will be more evident.
You may not even notice one of the coolest features in the mail client, the "Quick reply." You can type a quick reply to the current message into a small text entry area below the message and then send that reply by clicking on the "Quick reply" button. This is immensely handy because it lets you read the current message while replying without having to open another window or "quote" the text in your reply. If you don't happen to like this feature, you can turn it off and the text area (and button) will not appear.
Bottom line
Opera is free, as long as you don't mind it embedding banner ads in the user interface. (It also inserts an "ad" for the M2 client as your signature by default, but you can change this easily and still use M2 for free.) Opera is $39 if you want to buy it. It's not worth purchasing just to get rid of the banner ad, but your humble narrator thinks it is well worth purchasing for several other reasons.
Except for a few flaws, it is a terrific, amazingly feature-rich browser and mail client, so it is worth the money if one simply looks at the value received. More important, however, is that it is worthwhile to support a company that puts so much effort into its products, and produces them for so many platforms.
Buy it or not, Opera 7.11 earns my highest recommendation.
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