February 09, 2006

Review: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, And Other Browsers In Four-Way Shootout

Opera 8.5: Configurable And Then Some

By Ed Bott, Scot Finnie, Dennis Fowler, and Ron White

Courtesy of InternetWeek

Page 13 of 18

Configurable And Then Some
As you can imagine, if you turned on all the panels and toolbars, your viewable browser window would be down to the size of an early tintype. Fortunately, everything in Opera is configurable to an almost unlimited degree. Panels can be turned on and off with a single click, and configured to be on the left or the right. You can select which toolbars you want to use, and set them to be visible only if needed. Buttons can be reordered within a toolbar or moved from bar to bar. By dragging buttons and entry fields from one bar to another I'm down to three toolbars.

Everything is configurable, such as how cookies are treated, what you want in the way of pop-up blocking (block all, block unwanted, open in the background, accept them all), allow or deny Java and JavaScript, let GIF animations run or not. You can even have Opera identify itself as Firefox or Internet Explorer to try to trick fussy servers.

Until recently, configuring anything in Opera was a nightmare. At one time (sometime around version 7.0), my list of bookmarks was eating up a big chunk of screen on the left side of the window and I could not figure out how to turn it off. All the configuration options were listed in a single, confusing menu. It took forever to find anything, and longer to figure out how to change it.

That's changed. The folks at Opera have gathered all the configuration tools under the Tools selection on the main menu, and categorized them. Now you can find what you need, and understand what to do, and for the most part the default settings will suffice. I'd like to see them add an easy way to edit the list of search engines, a way that sticks. It can be done by editing Opera's search.ini file, but it's an unsupported tweak, and if you upgrade, your changes vanish.

Configuring Opera has become much easier than it used to be. (Click image to enlarge and to see the Image Gallery.)

Safe And Secure
As fast and safe as ever, Opera is stable as a rock, and smoothly integrates a raft of plug-ins like Adobe Reader, Windows Media Player, Flash, Microsoft DRM, and QuickTime; it even takes the Mozilla Default Plug-in.

Security was always good and has improved. User control over cookies, Java and JavaScript, pop-ups and the like is solid, and the default settings err on the side of safety. A Norwegian import, it has always offered the strongest encryption available. It's now got a security feature I hope I never need: If my system is in danger I can, with two mouse-clicks, close all windows; delete all cookies; delete password-protected pages and data; get rid of the cache; and clear my record of downloads, visited pages, visited links, typed-in addresses and bookmark visit times (but without deleting the bookmarks).

And that's just the default setting. This "nuclear option" can be configured to be less drastic, or I can extend it to wiping away all stored e-mail passwords and the Wand info (Wand is where you can keep personal data to fill out forms).

Page 14: Opera 8.5: Creating A Splash

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