Opera for power surfers

Hi! This is the second alter ego of “Black Journal” and welcome to my rant.Hackers/power surfers/web search wizards alike will feel at home with Opera 9.0+

So one of the big discussions right now is the browser war between Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. The biggest market share of browsers is split between these two so it does not come as a big surprise.However many people do not seem to be aware about the fact that Opera may be the best and possibly fastest browser around. At least from a power users perspective Opera’s list of unique features are unmatched. On the surface it looks pretty standard with things like tabbed browsing and fancy GUI. Also widgets,mail client,rss reader,irc client and download manager with bit torrent support are thrown in to make things more interesting.

So let us play around with some of Opera’s features that seem interesting to me. Web developers will I think find the “HTML validator”(accessible via ‘Ctrl+Alt+V’) useful. This works by submitting the web page source code to the server @ w3c(World Wide Web Consortium) which is responsible for standardization on the web. If you are curious like me you play around with a web page’s source and see what makes it tick under the hood. Opera is I think the only browser that allows you to modify the web page’s copy in cache! Hit the ‘Ctrl+F3′ shortcut to view the source of a web page, change something in the source and then hit the “Reload from cache”(Ctrl+R). This feature is also handy for those of you that like to try online hacking challenges that usually involve tinkering with the source of a web page or some script on a web server. Web security enthusiasts too should find good use of this.

Web search is a personal favorite topic of mine and one of my future rants will be on this topic. However for now let us check out Opera’s support for web search. Highlight any text on a webpage,right click and select one of the various search engines under “Search with”. Now Opera goes even further by allowing you to add the search from any…YES any web page. Right click on the search textbox in any webpage,right click and select “Create Search…”. Also you can assign an alphabetic shortcut to your custom search which is accessible in the ‘Address Bar’. For example if you type ‘g’ and your search query in the address bar it will result in a google search query. Searching within the current web page too is easy thanks to the “.” quick search feature. Typing “.” followed by your search keywords, highlight the keywords in the current web page in real time.

“Cookies” are an integral part of today’s web experience and keeping this in mind Opera has advanced cookie management features accessible via : Tools->Advanced->”Cookies…”. You have the option of easily editing cookie values for any web site.Once again web security enthusiasts will certainly find creative use of this Opera feature.

Compatibility is a big issue when it comes to browsers. Opera can be set to falsely identify itself as “Internet Explorer” or “Mozilla” when it communicates with a web server to request a web page. This is useful when some web site employs javascript or some other mans to find out the browser name and redirect the user to a message stating that the current browser is not compatible with the web site. Just right click on any web page and select “Edit Site Preferences..”. This allows you to set the browser identity, cookie and content settings for that particular web site.

This is about it for my Opera rant. I hope I have managed to point out some really useful features of Opera.