I keep giving Firefox and Chrome (and even Safari–heck, I even give Internet Exploder the occasional opportunity to redeem itself!) a shot at my eyeballs, and they all consistently fall short, so don’t even go there.
It’s cross platform, so you have little excuse to keep using the kludgy, clumsy, dumbed-down browsers touted by sell-out tech writers and icognoscenti that require all kinds of add-ons just to almost reach Opera’s basic functionality. It used to frustrate the daylights out of me to work on someone else’s machine and be forced to use an antiquated, kludgy, insecure, clumsy, dumbed-down browser that didn’t even have built-in mouse gesturing, but now I carry a thumb drive with Opera Portable, so I don’t have to put up with other folks’ lack of good sense. *heh* Sadly, Opera Portable is still in version 10.51, but that’s not so very bad, since the 10.52 version I’m running (Build 3347) is a beta–a rock solid beta but still not an official release.
One of the less important new things (well, since 10.51) is the “O” tab in the “Tabs” bar that allows accessing most of what used to be in the menu bar by default. It allows those folks who’ve been seduced by the dumbed-down Chrome interface to have a less “cluttered” view, but still allows folks like me who like having a LOT of information and ready manipulations available to invoke the more informative menu bar.
But little things like making transitions easier for folks used to using a dumb browser are just lil candy sprinkles. The real improvements (even over 10.51) are in security and speed–particularly the java engine. Just download it and give it a run at your eyeballs.
BTW, not using Opera Mobile on your smartphone? Think the iPhone/Safari combo is top dog? Maybe not. (When my youngest nephew got his new Wii, several years ago, he was pleasantly surprised it came with an offer for a free web browser. Opera. And I stopped being surprised years ago that IBM/Lenovo included an imbedded version of Opera in a preboot environment. Just sayin’.)
BTW, brief not-very-techie note: Yes, Opera does seem to use “a lot of memory”. But note that the image above shows I have 30 tabs open. *heh* About average, especially since the first 10 are ALWAYS open and “pinned” so they cannot be accidentally closed. And “a lot of memory”–currently somewhere around 100MB with those 30 tabs open–is a relative term on a modern computer with 4-8GB of physical memory.
BTW#2–a not-at-all-techie note: My install of Opera looks a tad different to what you may download and install for reasons other than my affection for the more informative Menu Bar; I have for years skinned whatever installation of Opera I may have on Windows computers or on Linux or BSD computers differently so that I remember which OS I am browsing in. Yes, the OS makes that little difference (apart from how the scrollwheel works in Linux, but that’d be a whole post in itself). The “skin” in the graphic above is the current version of Tobs Theater Paper (TTT-Paper 7.2).