Opera 8 is the first major release of a browser since Mozilla Firefox hit the Web. There are plenty of changes in the new version, but Opera hasn’t abandoned much; it’s more a case of reworking the browser's feature set to make it easier to use and understand. We’re reviewing the Windows version of Opera 8, although it will also be available for Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. Opera 8 is free to download, and as of 20 September 2005 no longer comes with an ad banner that you pay to remove.
Interface
The first thing you notice is the change in Opera’s user interface; it’s now much cleaner by default, with fewer menu items and toolbars. Previous versions of Opera presented new users with far too many options, buttons and panels, and the overall effect was overwhelming. The company listened to this criticism, and has responded by having very few options turned on by default; if you’re an experienced Opera user, you can easily turn them all back on again if you wish.
Some menu options appear on the main menu bar once you start using the relevant feature -- mail, feeds and chat are the most obvious examples. Some of these options will disappear again if you remove all the accounts or other configuration items. Sometimes options don’t disappear until the browser is restarted.
Opera was the first browser to introduce tabbed browsing, now seen on Firefox and other browsers. Tabs in Opera 8 now each have their own close button, which reduces the number of mouse clicks needed to close one. This scheme also takes up more screen space than Firefox’s single close button for all tabs, but is possibly more intuitive. Opera still supports sessions, where a number of open tabs can be saved and reloaded.
Security
The address box in Opera 8 takes on some extra functions that are intended to feed back more information about the site you’re reading. The extra details are shown at the far right of the box, and will only obscure the longest of URLs.
When viewing a Web site over SSL, Opera shows information from the digital certificate used in the connection. This is the organisation name in the certificate. The idea is that you can identify fake sites, such as those used in phishing scams, since the registered name would be different to that of the site you think you’re visiting. However, there are some problems with this principle, in that a clever scammer could use a self-signed certificate with a correct-looking name. Although this would trigger a different kind of alert, you’re then into rather technical territory. Equally, it’s possible for a legitimate site to have a certificate issued to a company name that’s different to the site name -- NatWest bank, for instance, has a certificate issued to the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, of which it's part, but the names don’t match.
A single click on the security information brings up the complete certificate used by the site. This is still slightly cryptic for non-technical user, and we’re unsure whether this is of much use in preventing phishing and other attacks.
For non-secure sites that link to an RSS newsfeed in the page headers, an RSS icon is shown in the address box. Click on the icon, and Opera will ask whether you want to subscribe to the feed; answering 'yes' adds the feed to your subscriptions and opens the Feeds page. Newsfeeds are now handled separately to mail messages, although the layout is the same as in Opera 7.
Opera 8 has a Delete Private Info option. This removes practically all personal information, such as browsing history and cookies, and can also be configured to remove stored passwords. You can change what information is deleted by this option, and you’re always prompted to confirm that’s what you want to do. This option is particularly useful where systems will be shared among a number of people.
Rendering
Opera is probably the most successful browser on handheld platforms, and the same rendering technology is included in this desktop browser. This takes the form of the Fit to Window and Small Screen views. The former takes any Web page -- even those (such as www.zdnet.co.uk) with fixed-width layouts -- and resizes them to fit the whole page into the current window. This uses a number of techniques, including reflowing the page and resizing images if necessary. For sites that use a fully liquid layout, Fit to Window is less useful, since you get much the same effect from the site’s own design. The Small Screen view emulates the very narrow screen of a handheld device, rendering any pages as best it can in that space -- much narrower than a PC screen. This feature is probably of most use to Web designers who want to make sure their site is still usable on a small device without having to dial up from a smartphone.
Opera 8 is the first browser to offer native support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Although this is only a subset of the standard intended for mobile use, it’s still better than no native support at all, which is the case with all other released browsers at the time of writing. Adobe does have a plug-in that provides better support for SVG, but only for certain documents.
Voice
Voice browsing is included in Opera 8 (Windows version only), for both input and output. This means that you can control the browser through simple speech commands, assuming you have a microphone attached to your PC. Opera recommends that you use a headset to get the best signal-to-noise ratio, but we found that we could use a notebook’s built-in microphone with a fair measure of success in ZDNet's relatively quiet office. The speech recognition system doesn’t need -- and indeed does not support -- any training, but works by recognising a relatively limited set of commands. Most of these are intuitive, but all commands need to be preceded by the word 'Opera' for the browser to recognise them. For instance, without looking at the help we guessed commands such as 'home', 'back', 'next link' and 'bookmarks'.
The speech output in Opera 8 is no better or worse than most modern speech synthesisers. However, getting Opera to read a Web page to you could be made easier: you need to highlight the relevant section of text with the mouse, rather than simply instructing the browser to read the page. The speech output also doesn’t take into account any semantic markup in the page -- <acronym> tags, for instance -- to alter the speech output or inflection.
Conclusion
Will people looking for an alternative browser use Opera rather than Firefox (which is free, ad-free and open source)? It has some advantages over Firefox in that it has a built-in mail client and other features, and still manages to be a smaller program. It lacks some tools that would be useful to a Web developer, such as a JavaScript debugger, but for most end users it’s as good a browser as the Mozilla alternatives.
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Member reviews
Version 8 of Opera is an equally good alternative to Internet Explorer as Firefox.
-Integrated notes functionality (I use this constantly both at work and at home)
-M2 mail client, whose instant-search, no filing, database-driven core is the future of email; Thunderbird/OE/Outlook/etc cannot match up.
-M2 contact management, including instant access to all emails from any contact
-Links/Info panels, which give easy access to full information on any given page
-Instant searching throughout the program, including mail, bookmarks, history, links, downloads, notes, etc
-IRC chat
-OperaVoice to read pages to me while I'm doing other things
-Fit-to-width, to fix forum borkiness from large images
-Last session recall, session bookmarking, and session/bookmark nicknames for instant opening of sets of pages
-Fully functional RSS aggregator, with full use of M2's database core for instant searching
-Everything integrated into a small, fast, package, with no extensions to download, no compatibility issues between extensions, no security holes through extensions, and simple updates when the suite is updated. Extensions can be cool, but when the program itself can do everything I need and more, I'd rather not deal with them if it's all the same.
- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10Complete browsing toolkit now in easier-to-use package.
You can use pages fully -- news feeds, videos, tabbed browsing, intelligent pop-up filter, sessions that let you resume browsing anytime. It's well worth that $39.
- 9.00 out of 10
9.00 out of 10- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10There are many good browsers around, but Opera stands out as the best.
- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10It is much better than Firefox and I think Mozilla has some catching up to do.
- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10Missing better history and file saving management
- 9.00 out of 10
9.00 out of 10- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10Lots of features, and still fast.
Opera has introduced most of the 'innovations' of Firefox. And it is still true.
People calling opera bloated, are awfully wrong. It manages to add feature after feature and still be the fastest of its category.
Moreover, it's available on lots of platform, with the same GUI.
Use the ad-paid version to try. You'll see that the paid version is worth its price.
- 8.50 out of 10
8.50 out of 10- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10I have drop-down menus on one of my pages and it still refuses to show these, all other browsers handle it ok..
- 6.00 out of 10
6.00 out of 10All that you need is in one place. Easy to install and use.
- 9.50 out of 10
9.50 out of 10- 9.00 out of 10
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10.00 out of 10With Version 8, Opera has consolidated its leading status in browser developments. No other browser comes even close.
- 10.00 out of 10
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10.00 out of 10Highly recommended!
- 9.00 out of 10
9.00 out of 10Bring back the hotlist! It was the best system ever for managing bookmarks. The new panel screen set-up takes up way too much screen and cannot be customized down. I've been using Opera since version 3 and this is most bloated thing I've ever seen. It reminds me of Netscape. I still have Opera 6 at home and will keep it until it dies because it doesn't have all this stuff and can be made to fit my needs. Please opera make some concession for those of us that want to customize this thing back to a simple, fast browser with no frills like you used to make. I have always loved your stuff, but this thing is driving me to Firefox.
- 6.00 out of 10
6.00 out of 10- 9.00 out of 10
9.00 out of 10With every version of Opera those Norwegians come up with a better browser.
I know it is a matter of personal taste (my wife cannot stand Opera) but I think it is the browser with the best handling.
- 8.50 out of 10
8.50 out of 10- 9.50 out of 10
9.50 out of 10Ideal browser for wide-format screens, allowing you to get multiple info feeds in parallel.
Tabbed browsing works fine; linked pages is even better for some tasks.
Notes and Info windows are very useful.
- 9.00 out of 10
9.00 out of 10Opera has the best array of features of any other browser; it's fast, small, secure, practically never crashes (in my experience) and everyone should give it a try before dismissing it in favour of the more popular Firefox.
- 8.50 out of 10
8.50 out of 10This is a fully featured web browser, it's fast and a joy to use - mouse gestures alone make web browsing easy and intuitive.
I really don't mind paying for something this good. If you really don't want to pay the ad banner is very discreet - I use the free version at work and don't even notice it.
Many of the features we now take for granted first appeared in Opera: tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking which actually works and so on...
- 9.00 out of 10
9.00 out of 10- 9.50 out of 10
9.50 out of 10I recently switched to Opera 8 from the fox. I was happy with Firefox for a while, but too much memory was my primary concern. I believe there may be a memory management problem, because I can't leave firefox running for over ~8 hours without it taking a LOT of memory.
Wow, I didn't expect the speed of Opera. In response to others, since when did bloated become a synonym for feature-rich? I left Firefox because it was what I would call bloated. Opera's a smaller install, uses less CPU, and has a smaller memory footprint. Also, I have noticed no memory eating problems.
Fair concerns with Opera:
Costs money (sorta, even with Ads the viewable area is large) and is not open source.
I have not heard one meaningful argument Firefox over Opera save the open source gripe.
Read around, and you'll notice that no one has the audacity to even try to say any browser is faster then Opera. In the end, I'm sure its the people who have about a gazillion extensions on their Firefox (just to get the full feature set of Opera) who call Opera bloated.
Wow. "Simply the best internet experience." Period.
- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10While Opera may be ad-supported the ads are very unintrusive (if you pick the text ads), and it's well worth the $39 to register and get the full version. Even with the competition being free, Opera is still worth the money.
- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10An excellent browser. If this was free (ad-free), it would surpass Firefox quite easily.
- 8.50 out of 10
8.50 out of 10Whatever Firefox browsing-oddities I've come about, they seem to be all fixed in this latest Opera-browser.
It still leaves a bit behind in the javascript-handling that you get in Firefox (with no-script ext.)
It has a few oddities concerning margins as well.
For the 'regular' user though, this must absolutely be the better choice.
- 8.50 out of 10
8.50 out of 10...but compared to Firefox, feels a bit heavy, even though it is more sophisticated than Firefox out-of-the-box
- 9.30 out of 10
9.30 out of 10- 9.50 out of 10
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9.50 out of 10- 10.00 out of 10
10.00 out of 10