Opera, the Web browser I’ve happily used for the last five years or so, is celebrating its tenth anniversary today. (It’s just a couple months older than Salon!)
If Firefox had been around back in 2000 I’d probably have adopted it, but Mozilla, back then, wasn’t ready for prime time, Internet Explorer was a joke, and Opera was great. It offered deep and wide configurability, and tabbed browsing at a time when most people hadn’t even heard of it. It’s always been super-speedy. Since my mode of work often involves keeping open multiple windows each of which might contain a dozen or more open tabs, it’s long been important to me that the browser keep a good record of those open windows — so that, in the event that some other application crashes (Opera almost never does) or the machine freezes up, I can return to my universe of open tabs. Opera still does the best job with this — to get Firefox to do the same thing, you have to add a special extension.
I’m sure the tide of open source will eventually carry Firefox beyond where Opera is today. But there’s something to be celebrated about a small Norwegian software company that sticks to its guns, stares down the giants and keeps improving its product. Opera is normally free if you’re willing to see some ads on the screen, or you can pay a reasonably low fee to make the ads go away, but today, the company’s giving away free registration codes.
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