Opera: Making You Faster

I’m beginning to wonder if there are some closet Flash fans in Opera Software’s PR department. Today’s release of Opera 9.60 features the slogan, Making You Faster. And while speed has always been a highlight of the web browser, it was just six months ago that they used a red-and-yellow blur to promote the then-current beta release.

Safe online banking and shopping - New fraud protection from Opera

I’ve been a fan of Opera since I was in college, when a friend introduced me to this browser that wasn’t Netscape and wasn’t Internet Explorer, but was really fast and fit (at the time) on a floppy. (Remember those?) Since then I’ve gone back and forth between Mozilla/Firefox and Opera a lot, and these days I use both regularly. Opera’s still very fast, and still unusually small — somehow they manage to fit a web browser, an email client, a news & feed reader, and even a chat program in the same space that Firefox fits just a browser.

Their strong suit has long been innovation: a lot of features that have become standard in web browsers got their start in Opera. One of the nice capabilities that’s been added recently is Opera Link, which will synchronize bookmarks, search history, notes and other data not just between different computers running Opera, but also with mobile phones running Opera Mini and Opera Mobile.

On a related note, Opera has released the following short video, “Sketch of my life,” all about choices. (I haven’t watched it with sound yet, since I don’t have speakers on my computer at work.)

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