I’m what you might call a browser vagabond. I switch web browsers every few months, sampling the latest releases and trying to find that perfect fit for what I want and need out of the single most important piece of software on my desktop. I think I may have found the closest thing to perfect with Opera 10.
Opera 10 Beta 2 (Unite Build)
For the last 6 months or so I’ve been using Google Chrome, and really enjoying it. It’s blazingly fast, has a tremendously elegant user interface, uses my favorite rendering engine (WebKit), is open source, and is updated very frequently (I run off the dev builds.) But it was far from perfect, especially in comparison to what I had left behind with Firefox. Namely, it lacks extensions, a robust web developer toolset (the Inspector is broken and falls way behind tools like Firebug) and suffers from a lack of customization options.
The last time I had tried Opera was with the release of v9. I had tracked the improvements the company had made to browser for many years, and tried each major release. Although I had always found it’s performance to be top notch, the user experience really bugged me. The interface was… bizarre, in my opinion. Although it could be customized I never managed to come up with a layout that rivaled the simplicity of Firefox.
Like many, I was intrigued when I heard about Opera’s “Unite” system. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s an experiment (of sorts) in expanding upon the concept of the browser from just a viewer of the Internet into a participant; it embeds functionality (exposed as modular “services”) that transform it into a server. There are a variety of services, from a file browser and web server to a streaming media player and social note sharing hub. Heck, it can even serve as a personal OpenID provider. The concept is pretty exciting, and I’m already in love with the file sharing and media playing functionality, but after playing with the beta I realized that Unite isn’t really the big seller for me: the browser itself is.
In one release, Opera managed to fix everything that bugged me about the browser. The tabs, the navigation controls, the panels/sidebar; they repackaged the chrome in a way that is minimal (which I love), flexible/customizable (important for many) and easily transitioned to from other browsers. With the user interface problem resolved, I was able to sample the features old and new that Opera has to offer;
- Unite — As I said, it turns your browser into a server, offering media streaming, file sharing, etc.
- Turbo — I’ve already fallen in love with this on my laptop. When you’re on a low bandwidth connection (like when I’m tethered to my Blackberry) it dynamically compresses assets on a page to reduce download time. Image quality is dramatically reduced, but it gets the page to you dramatically faster than it would normally. LOVE this feature.
- Link — Sort of like Xmarks or Mozilla Weave on steroids. Syncs your bookmarks, notes and other data between browser installations on different PCs and on Opera Mini, which I am quickly growing to love on my Blackberry.
If you haven’t given Opera a try lately, please do. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what you find. The latest beta version can be found here, the Unite-enabled beta builds can be found here, and the general release version is available from their homepage.
to the household introduced an odd problem; while my Mac Pro has never had issues syncing files to the PCs in the house using FolderShare, the Air refused to do so. After 
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