Lesson 11 Great Browser Choices Beyond Firefox
|
Unless you've been living under a rock these past several years, you've undoubtedly heard of Mozilla's popular IE killer, Firefox. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are indisputably the most widely used browsers on the planet. It's hard to compare with such digital giants. But few users know of a little browser that could that was getting world-wide downloads before Firefox was even a household name. Enter Opera!
There are few reasons to switch from IE 7 or Firefox, but if you're
like me, you like to experiment with various applications that perform
the same functionality, finding little options and features that
make said program better than its competitors. Just recently I noticed
a little bug in the most recent version of Firefox
in the form of a memory leak that prompted me to give Opera a test
drive. At first glance, Opera's interface looks like a typical browser. You have the familiar URL address bar residing at the top of the browser's window along with the commonplace forward, backward, and refresh icon buttons. And, of course, what browser application would be complete without the functionality of tabbed” browsing? Opera is certainly no exception, as it sports tabbed browsing like Firefox and IE 7. Installing Opera is like installing any typical Windows application. Within a few button clicks on the installation dialog, you’ll have Opera residing on your hard drive, awaiting a web surfing session. One of the first differences you’ll notice with Opera is, when loading a web page, a little progress bar that's usually reserved for the bottom status bar of a web browser appears on the far right side of your URL address bar. When your web page is fully loaded, the progress bar hides itself. It's a nice little indicator placed at a convenient location, as it informs you on the status of loading images and other web page information.
Opera supports the widely acclaimed tabbing feature, which allows your browser to open up multiple web pages within a single browser window. It seems to be the de facto standard that all web browsers must reserve the key combo Ctrl+T for opening up a new browser tab. Opera adheres to this standard. Do a Ctrl+T and a new tab will open up. Opera also places a convenient New Tab icon on the left side of the tab list; clicking this icon will fire up a new tab opened to a blank page. Opera sports a nifty feature that allows you to label and save your surfing sessions. Simply put, Opera can remember and restore your tabs when you close the browser, so the next time you run Opera, you can reload all your tabs again in one fell swoop. Opera allows you to label your sessions, so you can have more than one. As of this writing, the only way to get this feature in Firefox is to install a specialized plug-in for it, but Opera comes equipped with this functionality out-of-the-box. Here's how to save your current surfing session:
Opera's Session save feature is a unique way to organize your web surfing habits. You can create a session for all your news sitesthe next time you open up this session, Opera can restore your tabs to cnn.com, google news and suchlikeor whatever you enjoy browsing. Once you start using Opera's Session save ability, you'll wonder how you ever lived without such a wonderful browsing feature. Give Opera a spin today! Grab it here: http://www.opera.com/. |
UNCLASSIFIED / FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY Information contained in this document is designated by the Department of Defense (DoD) as For Official Use Only (FOUO) and may not be released to anyone without the prior permission of NHQ CAP and/or CAP-USAF. LINKS OR REFERENCES TO INDIVIDUALS OR COMPANIES DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN ENDORSEMENT OF ANY PRODUCT OR SERVICE YOU MAY RECEIVE FROM SUCH SOURCES. Copyright (c) 1993-2007 TSR Computers Inc. All rights reserved. For information on this website please email webmaster@mer.cap.gov |
