Where do I begin?. Ok, here it goes. Opera has been around for really long, I have been using it on and off from version 6.0 I guess. But with the new firefox browser in market, I lost of track of Opera recently. But going through some tech magazines I found this article about opera and voice. Voice commands in a browser, come on you can’t be serious. But I thought what the hell, let me download and try this one too. Man, was I in for a surprise!!.
I got the beta from http://www.opera.com, checked it out. It had all the regular features that you can expect from a latest browser - tabbed browsing, Pop-up blocker, pop mails, chat, google search next to address path etc. But all that was a no brainer. But the two things that impressed me were : Voice and RSS feeds.
First thing I wanted to know was, how do I get the voice feature working. There is a voice button in the toolbar, or you can set it up from tools - preferences - voice. It was real fun after that. I didnt change any settings first and looked up the voice help. Just say ’’ opera voice commands’’, it opens the voice commands page. I checked the voice commands present, started out with a couple of simple ones, like ’’opera back’’, ’’opera forward’’ etc, if there you are a pretty quiet room, it works flawlessly. I was amazed. There is a password manager (called as wand) for sites that require logon. I have my yahoo mail stored and all I have to say is ’’opera login’’ and the browser logs me in. Fantastic !!, isnt it?. There are like lots of commands present in the list still learning to use all of them, but this is real cool, and shows us all as to what the future has in store for us.
Now to the second feature the RSS feeds. To the non-geeks out there, who live a normal living outside the internet, its Really Simple Syndication (RSS). There are a lot of news sites that support this type of news feeds, all you have to do is click on the rss button in any of these sites and you will get subscribed to all those news links. Say for example go to http://www.cnn.com, in the bottom of the page you have a link that says RSS headlines, just click on that link and it provides a list of news source from CNN, all you have to do is click on that link and you will get all the headlines and a brief description of the news in your browser without actually going into the site. If you are interested in further reading that story, you can click on that link and get the full details. Cool isn’t it?. There are lots of RSS aggregators present in the market, but opera comes integrated with one, so there is no need to install one separately. Nice touch eh!.
There are other lots of cool stuff in the browser, like developing your own stylesheets to change the font size and layouts. Skins etc. Did I tell you about the mouse gestures. (did I say 2 features earlier, no its three) That is fantastic too. There are like a hundred different options based on my mouse movements, with mouse click in combinations with ctrl key etc. These can be used to open in new window, zoom in, zoom out, duplicate page, copy, paste and what not.
Now coming to the cons, its not a freeware, yes adware based, uses google syndication to present based ads based on the pages you visit. And the voice interface is not perfect yet, but who cares this is some real innovation and every software takes its time become stable, I am sure it will get better in the future versions (This is beta afterall). Thatz it folks, I will keep posting additions to these as I find out some more cool features. Please post your comments.
Cheers.