I downloaded Opera 9.5 the other day and I have to say I'm pretty impressed. I've wanted to try Opera for years, but I just never got around to it. Now I'm sorry I haven't been using it all along.
At it's heart, Opera is basically just like every other browser: You load pages, and it renders them in a window. Every mature browser should render every page identically, and Opera so far renders everything just fine.
The big advantage that sticks out to me is the application speed. The "feel" of the program is noticeably faster than Internet Explorer, in terms of navigating the menus and dialogs and tabs and so forth. This is how an application should be, considering all the horsepower in modern computers. Sadly, most Microsoft software -- and almost all open source software that uses those crazy complicated skinnable GUI libraries to run on different operating systems -- is so bogged down with layer after layer of APIs that the software feels incredibly sluggish even on a fast computer.
Opera seems to render page content much faster, too, although I admit that is probably the result of their design choice on rendering images of unknown size. Internet Explorer 7 waits until it's downloaded all the images of unknown size referenced on a page before it will try to render the page, which results in a longer delay before seeing any part of the page. Opera (and Firefox) shows you what it knows about the page and fills in the images later, which results in a much faster feel, but the tradeoff is the possibility of the page shifting around to fit the images as they load.
I like the "speed dial" feature a lot, too. In IE7 and Firefox 2, when you open a new tab, you just get a big white empty page, then you have to navigate where you want to go. With Opera, you get a "speed dial" page with lists nine customizable sites that you can just click on and go. Also, at any time, you can just hit CTRL and a number and the speed dial page comes up in a new tab (like, instantly). Pretty cool.
(Oops, I just ran across a Javascript compatibility issue in one of my web sites... I guess it can't all be sunshine and roses.)
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