Opera 7 Preview Abandon IE? Ridiculous. Pay $39 for a Browser? Nonsense. And Yet ... Eric Grevstad
Mon 12/23/02 -- How promising is Opera 7? Let's put it this way: We suggest you check out Opera Software ASA's new Web browser even though it doesn't display WinPlanet properly (on our Win 2000 desktop, Opera 7 Beta 2 shows this page's body text as bold, a quirk it doesn't repeat with our sibling Hardware Central or other sites).
To be sure, the Norwegian-born browser may not be for you. Plenty of Web surfers -- all right, something over 95 percent of Web surfers -- are content with Windows' built-in, ubiquitous Internet Explorer; though Opera gets our vote over Netscape and the latter's code cousin Mozilla as the best IE alternative, it's currently the choice of fewer than 1 in 100 users. And while IE and the open-source Mozilla are free, Opera charges $39 if you want to turn off its modest adware banner (although you get 14 ad-free days to make up your mind).
But once you download (3.2MB without or 12.6MB with Java) and install Opera, you may find yourself growing quite comfortable with it -- even if not for the program's traditional claim to fame, that it's the fastest page-renderer in the browser biz. Subjectively, Opera does feel a bit snappier than IE 5.5 or 6, but the last few years' quadrupling of CPU speed and availability of broadband connections has trimmed the stopwatch difference to trivial.
Rather than speed, we'd say Opera's two best features are security and flexibility. The former is, alas, an easy win for almost any program compared to the infamous hacker-helper Internet Explorer, but Opera's easy-to-configure security and privacy options -- from the ability to turn off referrer logging (the feature that tells a site where you're coming from) to clever cookie management -- are particularly impressive.
So is its trademark control over how pages appear: A click of an icon or press of a key toggles page graphics on and off, offering fast-loading, uncluttered info, or switches between the page designer's "author mode" and a customizable "user mode" that makes nonstandard HTML a nonissue by rendering the page in a plain layout with the fonts and colors of your choice. (Version 7 extends this with a bevy of one-click style sheets, ranging from large type for visually impaired users to antique text-browser emulators for nostalgia buffs.) Easy zoom controls let you expand or shrink a page almost infinitely.
The choice of author and user modes comes in handy for the dwindling but still nagging number of pages that appear okay in Internet Explorer but wrong in Opera, despite the latter's steady improvement and smarter Dynamic HTML. The fault almost always lies in the page, not the Web-standards-scrupulous Opera, but occasionally -- say in three or four out of a hundred sites, as below with (surprise!) MSN.com -- you're reminded that it's Microsoft's world, we just live in it. (By default, Opera 7 tries to avoid hassle by identifying itself to sites as IE 6.0; you can change this to Opera or Mozilla if you like.)
