The Opera Web browser has been first at a lot of things, but market share has not been one of them. Its Oslo developers have had a great track record introducing such innovations as tabbed browsing, but many of these ideas have eventually shown up in other programs that wound up drawing more users.
The fact that Opera isn't a fully free download -- either you pay $39 or you must browse with some banner ads on display at the top of its window -- is one reason.
Another is the complexity of this application, which has strained to accommodate every imaginable feature and command.
Opera's new 8.0 release doesn't change the first problem, but it does take a stab at addressing the second one. It doesn't finish that job; that shortfall, the lack of a few useful features and a couple of bugs still hold it back.
The best news about Opera 8 is that its interface designers learned to say "no." Opera 8 (versions are available for Win 95 or newer, Mac OS X 10.2, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris at http://www.opera.com/ ) presents a considerably simpler facade, scrubbed of much of the old version's encrustation of toolbar icons and menu items.
Because more of its default settings make sense -- Opera now blocks pop-up ads automatically -- there's also less need to visit the complicated parts lurking behind the cleaner front end.
Like earlier releases, Opera is small and fast, a sports car next to the overloaded minivan that is Internet Explorer. Its Windows installer is just 3.59 megabytes, it launches in a second or two and it takes up less memory than any other browser I've tried.
Like such IE competitors as Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape and Safari, Opera provides tabbed browsing, in which you open multiple Web pages in a single window, switching from one to another by clicking on a lineup of tab icons. But it adds a few wrinkles to this feature, not all of which function well.
Opera lets you drag pages' tabs back and forth to change their order, instead of showing them only in the order they were opened. A trash-can icon offers access to recently closed pages and blocked pop-ups; closing a tab by mistake doesn't send you scurrying to the history list to find the page you just lost.
Opera also forces every link to open inside the same window, which isn't such a hot idea. If Opera encounters a page formatted to open as a separate window (a reasonably common occurrence), it will honor that request but awkwardly imprison this new floating page inside its own window.
Opera's interface also needs some further pruning. The "tile" and "cascade" commands, which crudely shrink or overlap open pages to display all of them at once, add nothing to the standard tabbed view. And the "User mode" display option, which can present a page as it might have looked on a computer 20 years ago, is cute but isn't worth a toolbar icon.
Opera's security has been one of its bigger advantages, keeping it safe from browser hijacking attempts. Opera 8 adds a defense against "phishing" scams similar to Firefox's: If a site uses encryption to secure transactions conducted there -- as all real financial sites do, unlike the phony ones set up by phishers -- Opera will add a gold highlight to the address bar. Opera will also display the name of the site as listed on its security certificate, if available.
