How many times have you complained that right-click is not working on Mouthshut? How many times have you tried to select some text of a review and it won?t select? You see, the webmasters of Mouthshut are smart! But I can say with a wink ;-) that they are not brilliant. And trust me, after reading this review, they too will wake up to reality and see to it that what I am going to write here does not happen again.
The answer to both the questions I have posed above can be found in Opera browser. You may encounter the problem of right-click in Internet Explorer (definitely) and to a lesser extent in Netscape/Mozilla. But you will not find right-clicking difficult in Opera.
So now you may ask me, what’s so special about Opera that Mouthshut works perfectly fine here? I say that no, Mouthshut doesn’t work fine in Opera. In fact, Mouthshut has been designed to work best in Internet Explorer and Netscape by the webmasters. But they forgot about Opera. I am sure they wouldn’t have even remembered about it since this browser is hardly used by anyone in this age of competition between Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
The scripts being used by Mouthshut work best in IE and Netscape. The scripts do not take into account Opera. My guess is also that it is a bit difficult to create scripts tailor-made for Opera since a very small number of people use it worldwide. It is thanks to Opera that I have been able to download the script that works behind most pages of Mouthshut.
What is OPERA?
----------------------
Well, in this highly competitive world of browser technologies, there are basically three different types of browsers that exist today - Microsoft owned Internet Explorer, the Open-Source project Mozilla and Opera Softwares owned Opera browser. The features available in Opera are much the same as those found in Firefox or Mozilla 1.7. It supports tabbed browsing, has built in email and chat clients, supports a broken download manager and has virtually all the goodies of Firefox.
However, Opera is different from Firefox in one way. Project Mozilla is open-source while the free versions of Opera are ad-supported. You get small advertisements at the top of your browser window from Google-syndication (similar to the ones that you see on all pages of Mouthshut). You can eliminate these advertisements by purchasing the ad-free version from their website ( http://www.opera.com). But you don’t need to worry, because the advertisements are downloaded silently in your browser window and they do not affect the speed of downloads of the webpages.
Opera can be identified both as Internet Explorer and Mozilla. What this means is that when a Web browser connects to a Web site, it tells the Web site which browser it is. Some Web sites provide content tailor-made for particular browsers. Because browsers are in constant development, assumptions made by page designers may not have the intended effect. Hence a Web page that may be viewed easily in (say) IE may not be viewable in Opera. All you need to do is change a quick setting so that Opera identifies to the web site as IE. Of course, the interface of Opera will not change for the intended user.
Opera Softwares claim that this is the world?s fastest web-browser. No wonder! What they say is entirely correct. This is because the algorithms written for Opera are such that it downloads the text from a webpage first and then downloads the multimedia content. You can also block image files from being downloaded (if you desire so) and that will improve the download speed considerably. The ’wand’ button will take care of all your passwords and personal information. You can manage all your cookies through the cookie manager.
I have used Opera since version 6.0. It was not a very impressive one (though a step in the right direction). It did support the concept of tabbed-browsing which was a relatively new concept at the time and others were only trying to catch on. This old version always looked like a highly technical window where each webpage looked different in comparison to Netscape or IE. The latest version is 7.54, which is actually brilliant. The web pages mostly do not look any different from what they may look like in IE or Mozilla.
The built-in pop-up blocker comes in handy most of the times. What is especially useful to me is the built-in search toolbar from where I can search the Internet using Google, Amazon, Ebay, Download.com, Google news or Google groups. It supports skins that can be downloaded from https://my.opera.com/customize/skins/
Recently heard that they have launched a new beta version 8.0 and it supports voice commands too. This means that now you can not only click buttons from your mouse, but also as an alternative, pass a voice command for the same. Sounds cool. Isn’t it?
Overall, this browser is one of the browsers for the future. If your choice is Firefox, then it is a good one. But do try Opera. It is fun to work with. It?s a pity that we cannot junk Internet Explorer forever.