You have to give it to Opera; it’s stayed in there.

Starting as a research project in 1994, Opera has been responsible for some world changing innovations (think tabbed browsing) and yet never seemed to achieve the kind of success it deserved.

But this isn’t a history lesson, it’s an article on a few of the killer features of Opera that keep me using it each day. I use Firefox and Flock pretty frequently as well, but Opera, as of version 9.5 has become my favourite.

Opera is a very overlooked web browser in my opinion. It has some nice features and it’ s really fast at browsing the web too. OK, the widgets don’t integrate into Opera as well as add-ons for Firefox but they’re still pretty damn cool and Opera doesn’t need to be restarted when they’re installed unlike Firefox.

In this post I will discuss a few cool widgets that I have stumbled upon while browsing the Opera Widgets archive.

(1) PageRank Widget

Page Rank is a cool little widget that you can download within Opera that lets you calculate the Page Rank of any website within seconds.

After getting my blog installed on Wordpress, the next step was to consider how to properly market it and promote it. One of my many thoughts turned to StumbleUpon, that giant monster of internet traffic, which is properly utilised, can turn you into the next Seth Godin (with hair preferably!).

But you don’t have to be a blogger or webmaster in order to appreciate and enjoy Stumbleupon. Anyone can use the site to enrich their internet using experience. With lots of different categories, groups and tools, StumbleUpon can change the way you look at the net - even someone as jaded as me who sees countless new pages every day in this job and finds it hard to be impressed with the Next New Thing.

Widgets are tiny nice-looking programs that can do all sorts of interesting stuff ranging from the addition of a simple desktop clock or weather tool to a feature-rich video player. In many cases the purpose of a desktop widget is to bring functionality of the website (or at least part of it) right to your desktop. There are several platforms that can bring widgets to your PC, below I present to you some of the bigger and better ones.