The days when Opera was the only credible alternative web browser client to Internet Explorer died when Mozilla Firefox arose from the ashes of Netscape. Not only did Firefox build on the Opera feature set, but it added to it in spades. Firefox also has the advantage of being free – unlike Opera, which forces served banner advertising on to users unwilling to pay to remove them. The Mozilla/Firefox browser brand now has a market share of about 8.5 per cent depending upon the reports you read, while Opera remains at around the one per cent level. So what does Opera 8 do differently that might change this state of affairs?

Well for a start it’s the smallest of the browser triumvirate at just 3.7MB for the basic Opera download. Opera 8 also outperforms both Firefox and IE in terms of speed, with the quickest start up and page rendering times. By loading the textual content of any HTML page before it has been styled by the CSS style sheet, Opera shows you what’s on the page quicker than the competition. Our initial test results compare very favourably to those posted here . If browsing speed is important to you, then Opera 8 leads the field. Back in the real world, size and speed aren’t everything, security is. However, in this regard Opera 8 (and Opera generically for that matter) also outperforms its rivals. The respected Secunia security advisories site reveals that Internet Explorer 6.x has 19 out of 80 advisories remaining unpatched, Firefox 1.x has 4 out of 15, and Opera 8 a clean slate of 0 and 0. Opera 8 has added a security toolbar that shows the name of the organisation which owns the security certificate for the site you are visiting. However, we still prefer the third party approach, such as SpoofStick , which instead cuts through the more common phisher trick of URL obfuscation to display the real URL of the site you are looking at.

Also new is a redesigned user interface that provides Opera with the largest usable screen estate of any browser client. By applying a ‘slim and clean’ approach to menus, toolbars and general design Opera 8 has increased the web browsing window size. This focus on functionality doesn’t stop there though. Catering for both physical/motor and visual problems Opera has introduced a voice option. You need to download the voice libraries however, as they are not included by default, the reason being that the small footprint selling point would suffer a little from the additional 10Mb. Once installed though, you get a superb text-to-speech reader, and also the ability to control Opera itself by way of voice commands. If you hate horizontal scrolling, you’ll love the ‘fit to window’ feature which does just that. There’s even a pretty decent password manager built in, the ‘wand’, which cuts down on third party utility clutter. Best of all is the fact that you get all this functionality (voice commands apart) out of the box and without the need for downloading plug-ins.

Of course, Opera 8 isn’t just a web browser it’s also an email client. The M2 component does everything you’d expect, including multiple account support with both POP3 and IMAP, spam filtering, newsgroup and RSS/Atom feed integration and so on. We like the full text index/search function which makes message retrieval a breeze, and the fact that it’s all database driven. There’s also good Google Gmail support.

But where Opera 8 falls down is in gaining the support of the web community. Far more sites refuse to work properly when using Opera (even with the default ‘pretend to be MSIE 6’ option) compared to Firefox. Few refuse to load; they just didn’t work as expected. This isn’t the fault of Opera, which is the most standards-compliant browser around, but rather the result of market forces. With a 90 per cent share everyone makes sure their sites work with Internet Explorer, and with 8.5 per cent few can afford to ignore Firefox. Because Opera remains a small fish in a big pond, it’s not on the to do list of some developers. This, combined with the fact that relatively few people want banner ads in their browser, leaves Opera with a very hard fight on its hands in the battle of the browsers.