Did you know that you don't have to surf the net with microsoft's Internet Explorer (you know the blue "e" thing)?

There are stacks of other free web browsers out there but Opera is my favourite. Firefox is good but I don't like the use of extensions and it's too time consuming to set up.

Internet Explorer (IE) is the target for most things malicious because that is the browser most people use. IT is also slow. Opera is more secure. In my experience it is way faster than Internet Explorer as well which is perhaps more important when you are still on dialup as I was when I started using it. I notice the speed difference mostly when I am helping out friends on another pc with only IE installed. It's a drag.

Opera is much more flexible in how it can be setup too. It introduced tabbed browsing years ago and you can have a bar with your most frequently used favourites (bookmarks) always on display. You can also have displayed the speed at which the page is loading, open new pages in tabs in the background, get RSS feeds and it has chat and email incorporated into it AND you can import all your IE favourites. Mouse gestures! Now they are nifty. With Opera if you chose you can turn on the mouse gestures feature whereby if you want to go back a page in your surfing for instance all you do is a quick move to the left with you mouse.

To be honest I haven't found or understood all the features of this browser but I'd recommend it to everyone. I have tried converting friends but most can't be bothered taking an hour or so to learn something new so don't discover what they are missing out on. You really have to try it with an open mind as it IS different to IE. Opera complies to the W3C standard. There is plenty of help and forums out there if you run into problems or don't understand something and feel free to email me and see if I can be of help if you take the plunge. There is just too much to Opera for me to be able to write about it here.