Opera 9.1

The Opera Web browser is, in words of its own developers, safe, powerful and fully customizable. And let me tell you something, they don't lie. It is faster and more secure than other browsers and, the best of everything, it is completely free.

Let's take a look at this software and its features. Opera was the pioneer of tabbed browsing in 2000, and now it features quick navigation thanks to its Speed Dial (a quick way to assign keys of the numeric keypad to your favorite sites). So every time you open a new tab, all your sites are ready. As they state on their website, it's really easy to populate and addictive to use.

You can see thumbnail previews of loaded Web sites just hovering your mouse on any tab and you can also have widgets to make your desktop experience more fun. It is easy to save notes about any Web site while browsing, and to create search shortcuts from any search field on the Web.

Opera doubles as a basic BitTorrent client, and it has a built-in POP/IMAP E-mail client, a news reader, a mailing list organizer and a RSS/Atom newsfeed reader. It features transfer manager, password manager, integrated search, keyboard shortcuts, voice recognition, mouse gestures to control Web surfing, "Fast Forward" and even special features like full screen and kiosk-mode for unattended computers in public places. The software is available in a multitude of languages and you can customize it with different skins.

It supports all major Web standards (CSS 2.1, XHTML 1.1, HTML 4.01, WML 2.0, ECMAScript, DOM 2 and SVG 1.1 basic) and works under several platforms, including Windows, Solaris Sparc, Solaris Intel, QNX, OS/2, MacOS, Linux Sparc, Linux PowerPC, Linux i386, FreeBSD i386 and BeOS.

To conclude, we recommend Opera web browser to those users who think about how to go beyond the advantages that a common browser as Internet Explorer could offer them, but consuming less system resources than other browsers as Firefox. Try it, there's absolutely nothing to lose.

C

Claudio Sánchez

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