Happy 10-year Birthday, Opera!

There are lots of people in the world do not know opera web browser, and may never consider using an IE alternative. But for me, opera has been my browser of choice for 7 years.

The first version of opera I used is 3.x. At that time, IE 4 started to take over the browser market and lots of people were very disappointed about the sluggish Netscape 4. I found opera from Gao Chunhui's personal webstite, and became an fan since then.

The best way to describe opera is: fastest and most innovative web browser. On the office website, they also claim opera has better security track record than others, but I wish they did not say that. Maybe opera's security history looks great on paper, but I believe opera's underdog image helps a lot. I still experience a few crashes with the latest 8.0.2 version, maybe the bugs are hard to be exploited, but they mean something. Firefox once bragged about its security, but you know...

Now lots of people switched to firefox for better user experience (like tabed browsing, easy font size controlling etc), and I know why: it has opera features! And actually it makes me a little bit uncomfortable for firefox not acknowledging its competitor for those features.

Well, there are still lots of things for opera to improve (a few of them are even showstoppers for some people), I am happy with the way opera is. Happy birthday, Opera!