Opera

Yesterday, John Evans of Syntagma posted about RSS in the Google Personalized Home Page (read his article called "Google RSS is here" - it's well worth it). I followed it up, remembering in the process that I had registered with Google a long time ago, and found that the RSS feed is far better implemented than in My Yahoo. Thank you, John, for pointing this out.

But, while I was snooping around, I saw that Google had produced a toolbar for Firefox, something that I have wanted for a long time. Don't laugh, but I can never remember how to check my Google page rank and so periodically I fire up Internet Explorer just to check the Google toolbar for that information. At last it seemed that I could be free of IE forever; I installed the toolbar for Firefox immediately.

Bad mistake. My machine is ancient and couldn't cope, the new toolbar extending Firefox loading time to a quarter of an hour. To add insult to injury, there were errors in loading and the toolbar did not display page rank when it finally appeared. Okay, I thought, a pity about that but I'll just uninstall it.

That's when I found out that there's no uninstall for the toolbar. So I uninstalled Firefox and re-installed it but (you guessed it) it retained the toolbar. I uninstalled again and tried installing an older version of Firefox. And still it added the toolbar. My world collapsed about my ears; it seemed I had lost Firefox and would have to revert to the disgusting IE.

And then I remembered my old friend Opera, the browser that Mad had converted me from (very reluctantly on my part) a few years ago. I remembered also that version 8 of Opera had arrived recently and was supposed to be state-of-the-art. It seemed fate had decreed an excellent and timely opportunity to try out this new version.

So that is what I did and now I write of the delights of Opera. This is an amazing browser, better than Firefox (in spite of Mad's protests). It loads in far less time and then surfs faster. As well as having all the bells and whistles sported by Firefox, Opera has a few little tricks of its own.

There is the "wand" tool, for instance. We have become used to browsers inserting username and password automatically so that we just have to click the Enter button. Opera's take on this is the Wand - a button that inserts the information when clicked. This means that you don't have to start with the information already inserted (make a typo in your first insertion of the info and suffer ever after in having to choose from a couple of options in Firefox). I hear you protest that this means two clicks instead of one. But no, the Wand not only inserts the info, it also hits the Enter button for you. Brilliant!

Then there is the matter of icons on the buttons. I may be alone in this but I hate Firefox's huge icons. After much searching, I found out how to make it display small icons instead. But there's a glitch. The first instance of Firefox will have small icons, no problem. But load another instance and the program becomes confused, displaying weirdly truncated icons, some large, some small. That has irritated me for ages.

Opera's default display also uses large icons. But the system for changing them is far more obvious (and in more than one place) and (get this, I love it) you can decide exactly what size you want them. I went straight for 50% of normal size and it's perfect. This may mean very little to most users but, to me, it's a big deal. I have to work on an ancient 14-inch screen and space is always my first consideration. The smaller the buttons and icons, the less space they steal from the working area.

Having said all that, I must admit that Opera has one enormous disadvantage: the free version has a large and irritating advertisement as a header. This destroys all my work in reducing the icons to a sensible size. But the browser is so good that I am seriously considering buying the ad-free version. It's $39.00, a fortune in a world of free browsers, yet not so much that it would break the bank. And I'm prepared to pay for the privilege of not being forced to use IE...

The net result is that I have to thank John for more than the news of RSS in Google Personalized Pages; my gratitude goes out to him too for unintentionally engineering the circumstances for my return to Opera. Good one John - thanks muchly!