This is rubbish, I was looking for a browser for the little netbook I take overseas and sometimes have to connect via a mobile phone. Having access to this feature and the ability to toggle images without digging into the preferences is very useful. Kudos to Opera for extending the mobile concept to the ‘desktop’. The world is going online, and most of it is low bandwidth.

While I also use Firefox, I hate the fact that every time a new version comes out, extensions quit working! I constantly have to wait for the authors to re-write their code to work with the new Firefox model. With Opera, all ‘extensions’ that I need or use are already built-in, and they ‘just work’ in each new version of Opera.

As a power user, I find Opera beats all the other browsers. I’ve also noticed that when someone bashes Opera, it’s because they have no idea what it is capable of.

Imagine a browser where you just ctrl+shift click 10 items to examine them in a new tab. By the time you’ve finished clicking on the links most of the tabs are already loaded. Found what you wanted? Then you can just dispose of those tabs you don’t need with mouse gestures (takes a fraction of a second and you don’t need to pay any attention at what you’re doing). Closed one you still needed? Just ctrl+z and it’s back. Screen getting full of useless tabs? ctrl+alt+w and they’re all gone. Computer/Browser crashed? Just restart the browser and you’re back at where you were in a matter of seconds.

This whole scenario can be achieved with minimum effort in less than a minute. Yes, Opera is blazing fast and all this functionality is pre-built into the browser.

You will appreciate the speed and ease of navigation with multiple tabs and minimum effort if your work involves using a lot of web interfaces and running multiple work threads at the same time.

Opera is and has always been at the forefront of browser innovation. Many features you see in modern browsers have been implemented inside Opera for years before that – tabbed browsing, customizable search in the toolbar, mouse gestures, full page zooming, speed dial, keeping track of and reopening closed tabs with a single click.

You can too select which session to start when you run the browser after a crash.

Go to Tools –> Preferences. First option is Startup. From menu, select Continue from Last Time. This will open last open tabs atstartup.

If you want to save all tabs to open at another dat, use File –> Sessions –> Save This Session. Give it a name. To open, go to File –> Sessions –> Manage Sessions. Select saved session, and open!

Hope that helped!

Shift+G toggle images on and off.
Shift+I put you in the author mode, no CSS. Like reading feeds.

See tutorials here http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/gestures/

And your browsing will never be the same again…

Its the fact that you make so much of unresearched claims that kinda exposes your bias.

As I said, Opera like all other browsers got their + and –
but to go so far as say Opera has stagnated regarding innovation is completely hilarious.

Opera’s been the engine room of browser innovation in the last 3-5years. no exemptions.

Shift+G and Shift+I: When you feel like browsing the Internet w/o the distraction.

Right click > Block Contents: Hey I can block ads w/o installing any add-on. And if that isn’t enough;

F12: Turn off Java and JavaScript. And easily toggle proxy servers on and off.

Customized Search: Yeah one for Google Images, one for Flickr, one for Compfigt, one for my own blog, and many many more.

M2 Client: Get noticed about new mails w/o having another external app open. Neat.

Duplicate tab: Guess Firefox can’t do this, huh? Even Google cloned this feature.

Wand: Auto-fill form information.

Opera Link: Have my bookmarks, notes, search, speed dial across computers and operating system.

Theme: Change it, w/o having to restart the browser! OMG.

Shift+Arrow Keys: Mouseless browsing.

Notes: Save this comment, in case my Internet connection got interrupted. So I can copy it again.

Ah, endless possibilities…

The reason why Opera is maybe missing the “buzz” on the thousands of weblogs with post like “top 10 extensions..” and “10 ways to speed up..” is because it will be very unusual to need an extension to make something on Opera, bc it’s already built-in, and only failfox users needs to speed up their browser. I’m actually running my Opera with almost 73 tabs, and only consuming 232mb on ram, if I start failfox with only 36 of the 73 pages I’ve opened on my Opera it consume around 273mb of my memory!!

@Shree Mulay
What I use to group tabs is starting kindda a work around, I don’t actually use the tab bar, I use the windows view on my sidebar, so I can start multiple instances of Opera and group them by topic or like work vs fun. Just press ctrl+N and it will open a new Opera window. See pic:
http://i40.tinypic.com/34imxyx.jpg
And you have a search field, so you can do a quick search for a specific tab in a second.

And by the way, if we go on removing duplicate things as said in article (”Widgets should be removed because it duplicates the functionality”), I guess only thing left in Firefox will be its original Gecko engine! Most of other things are plain copies!