A Night at the Opera

A continuing theme of Opera, in my life, is that it is something I have always wanted to know more about. Relative to the general population, there is a small community of people who rave about the musical theater and the Web browser, and I have always wondered what those people knew that I did not. But, as I wander through the course of a day, careening from inspiration to distraction, from obligation to moments of quiet nothing-to-do-ness, I never seem to find the time to really experience Opera in any meaningful sense in either of its incarnations.

You are probably like me. Your life is filled with the movie of the week, and situation comedies like My Name Is Earl and game shows like Who's Got An Elbow? Throw in a special or two on how the world would look a hundred years after Man's extinction and, of course, Shark Week, and who has time for Dvorak or Wagner? And you point, you click, you get information and it all seems to be working, so why take the time and trouble to learn a new Web browser?

Well, you would do it because the experience was rewarding. It enriches you, either emotionally or productivity-wise. Maybe you have been a perfect fit for years and just never known. I was like that with Lamb Korma.

Opera was there when nobody else was, in the darkest days of Internet Explorer. Opera began in the middle 1990s as an alternative to IE, and was made available on Linux, Macintosh and Windows PCs and eventually handhelds and other mobile devices. Starting around 2000, these were all made into more or less equivalent versions, the way Dreamweaver looks and acts the same on PCs and Macs. Opera was one of the first browsers to offer a tabbed interface. But what it was most famous for was its speed, and… its advertising.

Yeah, probably the biggest reason you haven't been absorbed into the Operaverse is that for many years, development was funded in part by advertising which appeared within the otherwise free browser environment. So everyone could click on a link to your blog and there would be a photo of your kitty. And you could click on a link to your blog in Opera and there would be a photo of your kitty, and above everything on the page an ad for ibuprofen or some vacation Web site. If you sent a tiny pile of money to Opera, they would then send you back a key that would turn off the ads. But yeah, it was fast.

I feel like we all owe Opera a debt of gratitude for hanging in there, even though it never has managed to capture the imagination the way, say, Firefox has. The powers that be, behind the Opera browser, are the same minds that brought us so much of the baked-in goodness of CSS, and one of the first good CSS books, too.

Opera was always different. We didn't realize how important that alone was, back in the day. Lately, it hasn't just been different for difference sake, but innovative. Opera features a QuickFind functionality now that not only remembers what Web pages you have surfed to recently—every browser does that, now—but also remembers the content on that page. So if you are shopping for Hawaiian shirts now that the weather is nice and remember that the place you liked the most was actually in Colorado [!] you could search within Opera and find the page you visited.

Opera offers all of the standard features most people take for granted in any third-millennium browser, history, synching, search engine customization and so on, and a few that we may come to expect in the years ahead, like Mouse Gestures, where certain mouse movements will trigger certain behaviors in the browser, such as moving you forward or backward through a site.

I am really happy with Marc Cohn and Rickie Lee Jones. And I am really happy with Firefox and Safari, too. But I understand why people are impressed with Aida, too. And maybe one day I'll be one of them….