Until a short while ago, Opera was ad-laden until you paid for it (although the text ads option produced neater Google-powered ads). Not too long ago, as of version eight-point-something (I don’t remember the exact number right now), released September 20 (see Opera’s Milestones page), Opera became totally free.

Customization is priority number one: Any toolbar and button can be positioned virtually anywhere. For example, I like to have a new tab button directly to the left of the tabs, like Netscape 7.2 had. In Firefox, the only choice I have is on the far left of the toolbar above the tab bar, while in Opera, it can go anywhere I could possibly want. In the later versions, there is a feature called Widgets, which are essentially the same as anybody else’s implementation, except that they are part of Opera, not the OS.

Opera sets new standards for speed – even Firefox comes second to Opera. The page rendering speeds are simply blazing. When I left Netscape for Opera, this was one of my first observations. Pages render in seconds, not days, as in the case of Internet Explorer 6.

The integrated feed reader and  mail client are a bit different, but work pretty well. Upon viewing a feed’s URL, Opera will display the feeds contents all scrambled up, but will ask you in a polite dialog box whether you want to add it to your feeds. Reading feed messages is normal, but the message pane does not display images, like the readers in other apps do (I think).

The only way to really get a feel for Opera is to use it. It’s a bit different than other browsers, but once you get used to it, you will never want to use another browser, except for the times you visit a site nobody ever bothered to code properly. Go grab Opera now – it’s free!

Upon the first launch of the program, you will be asked to configure Writer (which is currently in Beta) for you blog. Just enter you blog’s address, and your username and password, and the wizard will get to work figuring out all the specifics of your blog (type of blogging system, template formatting, and more). The whole process took only a few minutes to complete over my relatively slow (meaning 95 Kbps tops for downloads) DSL line.

Once it’s all set up, you are presented with the post editing screen, where you type the content of your posts. You can also view the post as it would appear on your blog, or edit the raw HTML of the post. In addition, the latest versions allow you to add tags from a variety of blog search and social networking sites (Technorati, del.icio.us, and few others).

I haven’t yet experimented with pictures, maps or third party plugins, but the potential of Writer’s feature set looks positive. Just for your info, I wrote this post in Writer, illustrating it’s usefulness.

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