Opera 11

You probably think about your browser for a couple of minutes a day, tops. After all, it mostly just sits there getting on with its job, while you get on with yours. But Firefox 4 is just around the corner and Internet Explorer 9 has launched – time to think about whether your current browser is right for you.

Opera has long been known as a browser that sticks assiduously to web standards, even while others cheerfully follow slightly wayward versions of web mark-up. Now, however, former disadvantages for browsers like Opera – such as widespread use of ActiveX controls – have pretty much vanished, leaving the playing field level.

Opera is definitely worth a try on your phone, where the mobile version kicks proverbial butt. But what about the standard version (PC, Mac, and Linux)?

Several years ago Opera had features I wanted that other browsers didn’t offer: tabbed browsing, mouse-gestures, ‘speed dial’ screen of most popular websites, forward button, and even a built-in torrent client. One thing Opera still has exclusively is ‘Paste and go’ (ctrl-shift-V), which simultaneously pastes text into and launches the address bar - which adds several minutes of productivity to my day.

Version 11 adds easier mouse gestures – you can now hold down the right click button of your mouse to see an overlay of the key mouse gestures available. Then just use a flick of your wrist to take action, whether to open a new tab, forward, or follow more advanced sequences of gesture-based navigation.

Extensions – there were around 400 at the time of writing – finally provide Opera with a tool it’s been missing compared to its major competitors. Installation is simple, and the extensions ‘store’ is easy to navigate. I liked the Translate extension to switch languages on the fly, as well as To-Read Sites, which provides a handy place to stack pages I want to save for later.

Also enhanced and updated is behind-the-scenes support for HTML 5, CSS3 and encoding (incorporated into Opera’s ‘Presto’ rendering engine). These help make Opera fast to load tabs, windows and pages.

My favourite change, though, has to be tab-stacking, which groups my always-innumerable tabs, simply by dragging and dropping them on top of each other. This allows me to quickly convert my 30+ open tabs into four or five sets, then access individual tabs just by clicking a drop down arrow next to the top tab in the group. I like that you can reorder tabs within a stack, but I wish there were easier ways to work with the stacks, such as to pin all or close all.

And it’s at this point that I realise that while Opera is full of nifty features, it often implements them in ways that make me want even more. The developers at Opera work to make Opera everything you could ever want in a browser, but the result sometimes makes it too difficult to remember all the nifty aspects that really should win people over.

As a result, it’s a tinkerer’s browser; fantastically customisable – if you spend time with it, and hide the bits you don’t use – fast, sleek, stable and a comfortable fit for your personal browsing preferences. Sadly, however, many of us don’t have the time to spend to learn all its features, and it’s a shame, because Opera rewards the extra effort.

It will take me a couple of months to see if it displaces Chrome, my current browser of choice, but I definitely want to give it the opportunity to do so. I hope some of you will, too.