Tweak to your heart's content

This brings up another of Opera's strong points: It has always been highly configurable. If there's anything you don't like, chances are you can change it, often just by dragging and dropping. There are six toolbars to choose from, configure and place where you want. You can add colors and skins to personalize your window -- or strip it back to the bare bones.

The default list of a dozen or so search engines is editable. Opera can emulate a text browser, show images and links only, show only pictures that have links. You can block image downloads, which speeds things up on a dial-up connection. You can reconfigure your keyboard or create macros to open applications from Opera. Java can be turned on or off, cookies blocked or allowed, and so on, and so on.

Admittedly, finding and applying Opera's configuration tools used to be like trying to conduct Wagner's Ring Cycle without a score. Then, in version 8, the company consolidated the configuration options into four easy-to-use submenus under Tools on the menu bar, where they can easily be found for quick tweaking.

To really get under the hood, in version 9 there's a new Preferences Editor (enter "opera:config" in the address bar). With it you can configure anything, from Author Display Mode to Colors to Fonts to Security to Widgets. Each setting gets its own line with a checkbox or pick list, and each can be easily reset to the default setting which makes it fairly safe to tinker. Nevertheless, this is a powerful tool, so novices should stick to the menus if they aren't sure what they're doing.