Just Browsing

A Week at the Opera, Conclusions

My week-long adventure with Opera is coming to a close, and it’s undeniably a solid, professional product. One thing that struck me is how many nice little convenience features it provides:

• VCR controls to “rewind” and “fast forward”, in addition to the standard back and forward buttons. Rewind takes you to the first page you visited in the current domain. So if I’m surfing around on a website, I can hit rewind to go back to the homepage. Fast forward takes you to the next page on the current website, which Opera guesses (e.g. by looking for a link with the label “Next”). This is convenient for things like stepping through Google search results. The usage wasn’t entirely intuitive, but once you figure it out I can imagine that it is quite useful.
• Tabs can be locked so you can’t surf away from the current page by mistake (e.g. if you have your webmail or news reader loaded in the tab).
• Panning and zooming.
• When the browser crashes, it gives you the option on restart of restoring the last session (which is automatically saved) or starting a new session.
• Content can be blocked on a selective basis, so you could blow out bothersome images or Flash movies from a website. You can also block all images using a popup menu in the status bar.
• Recently closed tabs can be accessed and restored from a trashcan icon in the tab bar. This contrasts with Firefox, which offers an “Undo Tab” option that applies only to the tab you closed last (so if you want to get an older tab back you need to restore all the newer ones first).
• You can copy a link into the URL bar and surf to it in one fell swoop using the “Paste and Go” option in the contextual menu.
• There’s a little notes application that you can open in a tab. You can even copy text straight from a web page selection or web form to a note using the contextual menu. Very cool.
• There are a fair number of widgets available for things searching specific websites, weather forecasts, games, viewing media content and the like. These are HTML-based gadgets that appear on top of the main browser window when you select them in the Widgets menu.

Memory consumption also seemed better than Firefox 2, though to be fair I have more tabs open in my Firefox session, and I expect Firefox 3 to be a big improvement in this regard.

I encountered a few hiccups as well. In the beta version I was testing (9.5), some websites were broken. Even the Scrabulous application on Facebook wouldn’t let me enter my friends’ names in order to invite them to play. This worked fine in the current stable version (9.25). However, the site we use for time tracking (SlimTimer) had issues in both versions (it wouldn’t let me edit the times for completed tasks).

BitTorrent support was also underwhelming (although it’s worth pointing out that Opera is the only major browser to offer any support at all out of the box). It does a good job of making a BitTorrent download look like a normal web download and would no doubt suffice for casual users. But basic features that serious BitTorrent users depends on, like choosing individual files to download from a multi-file torrent, appear to be lacking. The implementation is also pretty buggy, at least in the beta version. My downloads ended up appearing multiple times in the Transfers tab, and when I tried to delete them the browser froze and I had to reboot my computer. Most irksome of all, it is surprising hard to turn the feature off so that you can go back to your normal BitTorrent client.

Opera is a really good web browser. But like Sun Microsystems, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place, namely Microsoft and a formidable open source competitor with a very strong brand. Cool convenience features at the margins aren’t going to enable them to gain significant market share among consumers. To do so, they would have to do something truly game-changing. (Flock, for example, is at least attempting to do this by adding “social” features to the browser.)

In any case, it doesn’t look like this is what Opera has in mind. Instead, they are probably planning to stick to their OEM strategy, which looks to have been very successful so far. Competition is heating up in this space as well, but Opera clearly has a much stronger position than in the consumer market. They know how to sell to corporate partners, and they can differentiate their offering in a number of ways (specific features, customization, support, etc.). With marquee customers like Nintendo and Nokia already on board, I wouldn’t count them out just yet.