Opera 8.5. It's free!

I shyed away from Opera 6 and steered towards Firefox 1.0 because Opera had a huge area at the top of its chrome for banner ads. I get enough ads in email and websites, I don't need to see ads in my browser. Opera has now released Opera 8.5 and it's free! No banner ads and no fee to use the browser. Why anyone would want to pay for a browser is beyond me, so they finally got it.

The feature list for Opera is impressive. Tabbed browsing, integrated Google search, pop-up blocking, are only some of those features, which can be found in Firefox and Safari. Some of the more interesting features are Sessions, Notes, Zoom, Code validation, and full-screen mode. I'll touch on some of those features here, but you can view online demos at Opera.com/features.

Safari has a feature where you can save bookmarks into a folder and then assign the items in that folder to load in separate tabs. With the click of a bookmark on my bookmarks bar, I can access all the sites that are important to me. Opera goes a step further allowing you to save sessions. Let's say your working through some pages that are related - a series of Photoshop articles, for example. You have several sites open in separate tabs. Go to the File menu to Sessions to Save Session and you can save that collection of sites to review later on. You can then manage those sessions deciding what to keep and get rid of.

The Notes feature could prove to be very useful. There have been so many times where I've come upon important information on sites that I want to keep for future reference. I don't necessarily need to save the whole site or bookmark the site, I just want the information that is pertinent to my research. Opera allows you to select any text that you want to keep as a note, right-click on the text and then choose Copy to Note. Then you can open the Panels view and click on Notes. Your notes are stored in this view. You can then manage those notes.

Every find yourself squinting to read some text on a site? You could change the text size in some browsers, but what if you could just zoom in on that site? Opera allows you to do that by hitting the (+) key on your numerical keypad. Hit (-) to zoom out. Very nice!

Opera's code validation can be activated by hitting Control + Alt + V. The page you are viewing will be sent to the World Wide Web Consortium's validator service. This bypasses a few clicks for you as a developer and gives you the results in a separate tab so you can still get back to your page.

Finally, Opera gives you a full-screen mode when you hit F11. There's no chrome present at all and other than your task bar, all you are viewing is the page in front of you. Yes, Firefox and IE allow you to view pages in full screen mode, but some toolbars are still active. Opera's full-screen mode is truly full-screen.

There are several other features packed into this new release. For example, clicking in the location bar activates a drop-down that gives you access to your bookmarks, an Amazon search, and a Price Comparison search field. When Opera crashes, the next time you launch it asks you where you would like to start your next session. One of the choices is to start with the previous pages that you visited prior to your crash.

With improved security tools, Quick Preferences, IRC chat and Mail, user style sheets, and others, Opera is an impressive browser that might draw more attention away from IE users.