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Opera 11 – Review
December 17, 2010 
2 Comments
Opera Software, the Norwegian browser maker had much to do to get itself listed above its competitors in browser market share. Now they are at 5 in top 5 browsers. Opera Software may not be making much revenue with their Opera Desktop, but they continue innovating, fine-tuning and doing all possible bits and pieces to make it grow. Opera 11 has been released this week after its brief stay with beta, and this version brings up some fresh blood to live long in this browser war.
Last year it looked like Opera was fighting for survival. But now things are little improved for it by reaching out to the milestone of 150 million users. The good and positive thing is that it never stopped innovating. Let’s have a quick round of review of what this browser has in store for the generation that has been fascinated by Google’s advertising tricks for Chrome Browser.
What’s New
Extensions – Finally opera has extensions. Opera extensions are like Firefox’s add-ons. Being an avid user of Opera, I love this feature than the useless widgets. I guess many existing users will also like this feature.
Simplified URL’s – Opera hides the query string, name value pairs of the URL when you have your out of your address bar, thus it gives you better readability of the URL. If you click your address bar you can find the exact URL with query string if it has any. With this Opera shows favicons only in Tabs, not in address bar.
Innovations
Tab Stacking - A nice feature added to this version to deal with tabs-crowd issue. You can simply drag one tab over the other to form grouped or stacked tabs. An arrow will appear once you formed stacked tabs.
Visual Mouse Gestures – Many avid opera users are aware of mouse gesture in opera. Earlier new users needed simple tutorials to learn mouse gestures. But now things have been smoother for them to execute it with really cool visual mouse gestures. Just hold right mouse button to see visual tip for it, then enjoy.
Improvements
Speed – I noticed Opera 11 has some improvements in speed. Opera said this version is 15% -20% faster than 10.63 and also they claim, this is the fastest. When I see this Godaddy.com’s image-crowded home page, I saw the page rendered in 6-9 sec in my 1 Mbps connection. I tested the same link with Firefox and it also has finished loading in 6-10 sec.
Enhanced Updates – Now Opera incorporated auto-update for your browser, extensions and opera unite apps too.
Features
Pin Tabs – Now pin your tabs to avoid them to be closed accidentally when you click here and there. Right click in tab -> Pin tab. Even though this feature was there earlier, this is now improved to offer some more space in your browser tab area, as pinned tab goes and sits at the left side.
On-Demand Plug-in Loading – Now you can set opera to load Flash and Silverlight contents only when you really need it.
Learn more about some other features here
The first thing I noted was the file size of the browser when I was downloading it for Windows. All these features, improvements, tweaks and innovated stuff come in just 7.2 MB. It is just one third of Opera’s previous version 10.63. Opera rocks as usual.
Random Posts
Opera 11 is awesome. Only a fool would use Chrome.
Agent J is awfully wrong! Forget Google’s data-spy-browser.
Opera is radically fast and allows saver surfing, secure privacy, extreme ad-reduced surfing, high speed on low bandwidth Internet-access and the highest chance to make the browser, email-client, news- & feed-reader individual configured as ‘Your Browser’.
Take the chance of the best and savest Internet-security-solution of the hole planet. Remind you may use a better OS than MS-Windows for your security and savety!
TOP Browser of the Year 2010