Yet another review of Opera 9. "There is a lot more to this feature rich, standards compliant web browser and each day I find new ways of using Opera to heighten my browsing comforts. Definitely the developers of Firefox - another web browser that I am really fond of - can imbibe a couple of the path breaking features found in Opera."
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-09
How are using the Z and X keys great? They are spaced pretty far apart here, and not very convenient. Are they at least reassignable? I have only used Opera 5, btw, as that was the ONLY version available for my platforms of choice, and probably never will be available again.
Member since:2006-01-02
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-12
If you go into the Preferences in the Advanced tab under Shortcuts you have the ability to change any keyboard shortcut that opera uses.
For example, they changed the default shortcut to open a new tab from ctrl-n to ctrl-t to be more like firefox in opera 9. However, I've been using it since opera 5 and ctrl-n has become so second nature that I just went in and changed it back.
You'd be surprised how much you can truly configure opera to your own needs. Even after 5+ years of using it I find new things all the time.
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-10-09
How? Easily - on QWERTY keyboards they are next to each other. If you have a different type of keyboard, re-assign the keys to whatever is convienent for you. I believe as of Opera 9, QWERTY is the prodominate single keyboard layout. Yes, if you add up all the other keyboard layouts all over the world, there will be more than QWERTY. As for the single individual key layout, QWERTY is #1. So, the smart folks who write Opera decided to use a default keyset for the #1 popular keyboard layout. They also gave everyone who doesn't use QWERTY a way to change it to suit their layout! How cool is that?
As for running Opera 5, and your platform of choice, there is only one platform Opera only runs at version 5 on - OS/2. If that's still your platform of choice, more power to you, but that's like running windows 3.11 still. MAYBE Windows 95. If you want to run old outdated OSs, then expect old outdated software!
BeOS is still at 3.x of Opera, so no way you're running 5 on it.
If I were Opera, I wouldn't have even made a version for OS/2. Waste of time and resources for what is essential a dead OS except for legacy ATMs and such.
Member since:
2005-07-10
I think this was a great review.
I barely used Opera 8 due to its instability, not to mention quite a few annoyances when running in OS X (such as the Emacs-style shortcuts ctrl+a, ctrl+e etc not working). With Opera 9, however, I've started using Opera much more on my Mac (I've used the weekly development builds). Come to think of it, I've used it almost exclusively for the last couple of months, and it has become rock stable. Safari doesn't crash often here, but Opera 9 has it beat hands down. If Opera crashes, all the tabs will be there upon restart, so not much is lost. (Saft gives Safari the same feature.)
It's also very fast and has a great set of shortcuts. I love being able to use 'z' and 'x' for navigating back and forth, not to mention navigating the links of a web page using shift+arrows. Content blocking as well as site-specific preferences makes it even better. Also, using 218MB of memory after running for a week having over 50 tabs open and almost 100 tabs instantly available from the "Window -> Closed" menu (or Apple+Alt+z) is fairly solid, I think. I'm running weekly now, so I don't know if it will be less using a final version.
All in all it's truly a great browser, and if you haven't tried it, you really should.