Opera 6

I installed Opera 6.0 last night, and I’ve been playing with it a little bit today. I haven’t played enough to really give it a full review, but here’s a few notes:

Things I like (and that separate it from IE 6):

The built-in ability to not accept pop-ups.

The zoom feature so I can customize the size of text and adjust it to comfortable reading level.

The cookie manager is not as customizable as IE, but is less confusing,

The Print preview and turn images off as much easier to get to with the buttons on the browser itself.

Things I don’t like:

The built in banner ad.

The ton of bookmarks that come pre-installed. Way more than IE or even Netscape!

The inability of the email client to set authorization on outgoing email that is different from the incoming mail server.

The Instant messenger client is unable to pull my information from an existing installation of ICQ.

Isn’t it sort of hypocritical to give away free software that gives users the ability to kill pop-up ads, but insist that they see your banner ads at all times? And yes I do realize that if I paid for Opera it would not have the banner ads. That’s all well and fine but I don’t pay anything for IE and I don’t see anything in Opera that makes me want to pay for it over using a free browser. It’s slightly faster, but not anything really noticeable, at least in my configuration. The email client is a huge problem as well, I have this domain, and email addresses attached to this domain. My ISP blocks unauthorized SMTP mail, so I have to set my outgoing mail server to match the ISP’s outgoing mail server, and then authenticate using my ISP user info, not the same as my incoming email server user info. There’s no place in the email setup to setup that authorization. Not a good thing, since that is becoming much more common.

So I won’t be making the switch, for my own reasons, and won’t recommend it for most users, but if you really loathe using anything related to MS, you might want to look at this over using Netscape, which I hate even more..*L*

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