Opera is as feature-rich as Firefox is but it narrowly loses out to the latter. It has lots of features that are hard to find in other browsers. This includes builtin e-mail, IRC chat and bittorrent clients. an option for controlling Opera with voice commands is available, but it is only for Windows 2000/XP and has not been perfected yet. We found it difficult to understand (maybe because of the accent, and there is no option for voice training). Opera's Mouse gesture is another feature which is useful for someone who wants to navigate quickly. The Opera Community accessible from the Help menu provides an easy way to blog and share photos directly from the browser without opening up other Web service sites.

The Panel Sidebar is Opera's version of the library in Firefox. but it has much more packed into it -- bookmarks, Mail Widgets, Contacts, notes, and lots of other useful options. Data sharing is possible through the Opera link -- a free service that synchronizes bookmarks, Speed Dial entries, notes, and other personal data between multiple computers. but where Opera loses out most is the Features section. Despite boasting so many innovative and unique features, it disappoints in key areas like bookmark management as it doesn't provide one-click bookmarking, editing and managing with the ease Firefox offers. Password management is still a bit primitive with irritating dialog boxes popping up whenever a password is entered.

The Wand is Opera's password manager but it is not very intuitive to use. and search engine integration is not as good as other browsers. It provides nine default search services but doesn't provide easy access to other search engines like Firefox and Ie do. It also provides very basic History

Fast Track

By the end of our Speed and Performance tests, we realized that Opera fell somewhere in between Chrome and Safari but did management. better than Firefox. It clocked 6s (cold start), 2s (warm start), and 0.55s (hot start) in the browser startup test. In the CSS/JavaScript tests, it clocked 320ms/6822ms. Surprisingly, page loading was fast and it scored the highest among the browsers compared. There were some issues while surfing Flash, image, and multimedia heavy sites and we experienced some sluggishness and some elements failed to load. as for compatibility issues, it passed the aCID2 test and the aCID3 test proving that it supported more sites than the other browsers. Opera impressed with its low system resource consumption and the CPU did not feel the brunt of the browser's performance.