It’s hard to get excited about browser software these days. Opera 10 is like the third most popular browser, and it’s been around for around 13 years. It used to charge the end user directly, then it had an advertising supported business model and now it appears to be free. The 10 version of Opera is currently only in beta, and it works pretty well.
One advantage to Opera is it isn’t popular enough to become a target of as much malware. It states it is the only browser on the market to be fully WC3 compliant, which means if the site is compliant it should work on this browser. Unfortunately a lot of sites are not fully compliant so they may appear funny rendered in Opera 10. But then that’s kind of the problem: it seems no browser can really render every site. Firefox won’t render Netflix and Internet Explorer doesn’t have very good support for ad filtering software.
Why Opera 10 still exists is a bit of an enigma to me. I mean, since Netscape spawned the open source Firefox browser it seemed any threat of a Microsoft monopoly on browsers was abated, but this little company keeps going. Perhaps they make money on their mobile version which they do charge for.
Anyway Opera 10 does work, and the company has been around for a good long while, so this browser is a solid offering, but since it doesn’t have the active support for Firefox plug-ins (it actually states in the Opera 10 FAQ that it supports Netscape(RIP) plug-ins) it appears that in the end it really wouldn’t make a very good choice as a default browser.
It also doesn’t support Active X controls which means, for better or worse, sites that use this proprietary Microsoft non-standard technology won’t work at all.
One spot of interest in the Opera 10 roll-out is its claim to dramatically speed the Internet browsing experience on low bandwidth Internet connections. It’s not clear whether this is some kind of caching program or Google Gears type add-on, but if it works it might be useful in some limited situations. Most people who are going to go to the trouble of downloading this browser probably already have broadband, but there are occasions, especially on WIFI hot spots, where a little extra basic browsing speed would be appreciated.
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