Somewhat on a whim, I downloaded the Opera browser today. I've only been using it for about an hour now, but after going through the little tutorial they have I am pretty excited. There are a bunch of really cool features! Of course, if I ever bothered to read Firefox's tutorial I might learn some cool new things about it, too. :) The best thing I've found so far is the Speed Dial, which is a page containing links to a number of your favorite websites for easy access. It is displayed by default when you open a tab, and you can set the background to be any image on your computer! Here is a screenshot:
Another nice feature is the integrated email client, though I have no use for it since I use Gmail's web interface and can get there in one click from the Speed Dial. Some other utilities are a note-taking widget and a speed enhancer called Opera Turbo. Keep in mind that all of this is available by default, without having to go look for third party add-ons as in Firefox. Of course, there seems to be a plethora of after market widgets you can add as well.
The only potential downside is plugin support; I'm not sure how easy it will be to get Flash and Java working. On Windows it shouldn't be a problem, since I noticed during my last Windows period that at least the Flash plugin explicitly mentioned Opera in the installer. Linux might be another matter, though. I'll report back when I have time to document my struggles; due to homework pressures I probably shouldn't have taken the time to write this much, but oh well!
If I piqued your interest, you can of course download Opera for free from http://www.opera.com/browser/.
I will maybe have to try this.
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