I remember when my mom was trying out the Opera browser. She’s always quick to find the next trend. At the time, you had to pay to use it or have pesky ads on your desktop. Those days are gone. The new Opera is free and fast. Are you ready to leave Mozilla behind?

I know, you’re all attached to Mozilla as the only alternative to IE and the blessed-bringer of tabbed browsing. Guess what? Opera invented tabbed browsing. They were also the first to have a Google toolbar. The new opera has this feature where you can use any search engine in the url box. For example, if I wanted to search for the “history of Crete” on Wikepedia, I would type:

w history of Crete

into the url box; hit enter, and it will take you straight the results. And you can set Opera to do this for any search engine you want. I have ones for the Urban Dictionary and infoshop.org, though these would never be included in a standard browser.

This wasn’t what won me over, though. I’m sure you’re not spending countless hours on bittorrent because that would imply that you are downloading copywrited stuff and I don’t know anyone who does that. But let’s just say, you know, that guy, your cousin’s friend, who downloads torrents. If he uses Opera, he can just click on the torrent and it will download like it’s a regular link because Opera has a built-in torrent program.

The thing that won my heart is the “notes” feature. Often I keep a word processing program open just so I can copy/paste things into it that I found online. Opera has a built in note pad. You just select the text and on the right-click menu you can add a note. It will save this text in the “notes” area as well as the url you got it from.

They also have these widgets that you can use to further customize your Opera experience: mp3 players, video games, calendars, news feeds, a “to do” list, etc. You can make your own widgets. I’m a little skeptical of widgets. On the one hand, if all you do all day is browse the net, then why not have everything attached to your browser? On the other, why use a widget sketchpad (for example) to draw pictures when I can use the Gimp or Photoshop?

Hey, Ray**, when you’re looking at porn, don’t you generally have ten or twelve tabs open at a time? When you hover over the tabs in Opera it shows you a little thumbnail of the page (similar to the way Safari does it) so you know just which throbbing man-muscle to click on.

But wait, there’s more! Remember how when you do a Google image search, first you have to click on the link then click again on “see full-sized image”? Opera has a rewind and fast forward button that you would use in situations like that to zip past the middle pages. Those programmers all the way in Norway have me figured out. Amazing.

Dear Mozilla,

It’s been a beautiful love affair. But I’ve found someone better, with more features. I won’t forget you. Can we still be friends?

Love,

The Peacheater
*If your still using the antiquated Microsoft Explorer, get out of the Bronze Age my friend. Do you still listen to 8-tracks?

**Insert here the name of your friend whose internet porn collection rivals the number of records at your local college radio station