Opera browser

[Gavin Ferriby]

Opera 2.12 is a nifty little browser from Norway which I like a lot and
find quite useful.  These are my reasons for liking it:

1) Opera is small, about 950KB.  It loads quickly and responds promptly.
It has all the usual browser features (tables, frames [yech!], audio,
video, cookies, etc.) except Java and Javascript, features which I have
turned off in my copies of Netscape Communicator and MS Internet Explorer
for security reasons (so I don't miss it in Opera 2.12 anyway).

2) Opera can be useful for persons with disabilities: you can zoom in on
portions of the screen; it will play sounds to inform you of various
browser events such as when a page is done loading; you can dispense with
the mouse.  It can actually be used to navigate with only one key.  I can
and do use a mouse regularly, but as one who learned to use computers in
the pre-mouse era I still really prefer key commands, when I can remember
them.

3) Opera can make its own frames.  This ostensibly obscure use is helpful
to me when I read extended pages from web resources such as the Labyrinth
for Medieval Studies (<http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/>)Paul Halsall's
Byzantine Studies page (  ) and  the like.  I have downloaded these using
an off-line reader --in my case, NetAttache, which renders the pages as a
large file of HTML documents.  I then open the file using Opera 2.12 and
use the frames capability to open a second session, thus allowing me to
compare pages and texts --just like the extremely useful feature of the
book, which allows me to keep my thumb in the index or table of contents
(oh, books --I remember them!).

4) The News and Mail features are simple and easy-to-use.

5) In a library environment, Opera 2.12 runs nicely on smaller machines,
386s with only about 8MB RAM.   The system administrator can disable some
of the preferences and over-ride some user choices (and the fact that this
is less-common software means that every hacker in town won't be familiar
with it upon walking into the library).

6) I can use Opera to link to my e-mai client, a useful feature when I
travel (and this program is easily small enough to fit on a very
medium-grade laptop/notebook).

7) Opera 2.12 code was written from scratch, and is not based on Mosaic;
hence it is very elegant and avoids much of the file concatenation which is
so typical of  Netscape and anything at all written by MicroSoft.

8) Opera is comparatively cheap, at $30 a pop with discounts for academics,
students, and educational institutions.  You get a three-month trial period
to see if you like it, and it downloads pretty quickly (of course, mileage
may vary).

You can investigate for yourself at:

	http://opera.nta.no/

9) The small down-side: Opera 2.12 will crash on occasion (I run it on a
Windows95 platform; I'm not completely sure whether the fault is in Opera
or the OS) and it doesn't offer the prolix help which Netscape does,
although the I found the Opera help --well-- actually helpful.

Gavin Ferriby
Editor, Union List of Serials
Consortium of Rhode Island Academic and Research Libraries
Brown University
Gavin_Ferriby at brown.edu
ferriby at bitwise.net