Opera 6.03 Review

Ever wondered what other Internet browsers are available outside of Internet Explorer?. Opera 6.03 from Opera Software boasts itself on being the fastest browser on earth. Does it really live up to its claim of being unique and being fast? Is it the wild child of the browser family and can it ever surpass Internet Explorer as the browser of choice? Let's find out.

Introduction

Opera was born in 1994 by Jon S. von Tetzchner and Geir Ivars during their tenure at Norwegian telecom Telenor. Opera Software ASA became a reality in 1995 and from there they worked towards create Opera 2.1 which became available for download as Shareware for the Windows platform. For most users in the dial-up era of Internet communication, browsing speed was an issue since most users were either on a 14.4 or 28.8 dialup connection. As time progressed, people were scrapping their dial-up modems for cable modems, as the promise for high speed Internet communication was becoming a reality. The problem with browsing for many users was the fact that even though they had a cable or DSL connection to the Internet, some still felt as though they truly were not experiencing the speed that was once prominent in the early days of cable or DSL access. Opera started to take off in 1999 as they moved into embedding their browser on many different platforms and also teamed up with Be, the team that brought out BeOS.

After a record year in 2000 with over a million downloads of Opera within the month of January, Opera was on their way to creating some competition against the Goliath known as Internet Explorer from Microsoft. So with Opera now on version 6.03, can it compete in the digital playground against Microsoft?

First Impressions

I was first introduced to Opera several years ago back when Opera 2.1 was released as a shareware title. Back then, I found the browser to lack in several areas and diverted back to Internet Explorer, which had just been recently installed as Netscape started to lose ground in the browser wars. Just recently I downloaded Opera 6.03 and found that the browser itself was still fairly small, although originally it could fit on a standard floppy disk. The browser itself sounded promising as they've added a ton of functionality since my last stroll through the World Wide Web using Opera as my browser.

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