A perfect browser?

First let me sing the praises of Opera. I love it! I installed it a couple of days ago and it's my favorite browser by far. I especially love the "notes" section where you can write things down as they come into your head, make lists within folders, copy things of interest from websites to refer back to, etc. I mainly use it as my "to do" lists. It's so much better than pulling up my Word lists I have saved on my desktop, and Opera notes can stay in a narrow (or wide) column to the side, top, or bottom of the screen at all times, or I can hide it.

Opera is the fastest browser I've used. I used IE for years, then installed Firefox about one and a half years ago. I fell in love with FireFox because it was so much faster than IE and I loved the "tabs" system of opening up different sites in the same window. But Opera also has the tabs system I love and it's even faster than Firefox. I have dial up and IE crawls and drives me nuts!

As far as security, IE is lacking compared to the other two I mentioned. I think mainly it's because it's the most widely used and hackers concentrate on it. That's just my opinion, I'm no expert. I've read up on the security of the different browsers, and Opera and Firefox seem to pull ahead of IE.

Opera will also automatically connect to the internet for you, using your default ISP, which means you don't have to manually tell your computer to dial and then bring up your browser afterwards. Just bring Opera up and it does it for you.

Now; drawbacks: some images in Opera are fuzzy on certain websites. I thought it was because of my accelerator, but it didn't help when I disabled it. I've changed every setting I can think of and so far nothing works. The majority of sites I have a clear image. I think the reason for this is because not all sites support the Opera browser, just as some don't support Firefox. But I still never had the fuzzy image problem with Firefox. Some of these webmasters need to get out of the past and catch up with all the new browsers and support them. Microsoft has had a monopoly on the browser world for too long.

I still have to bring IE up to post when I'm putting an image into my entry. On Firefox, all you see when you post an image is a box. I don't know about Opera yet, except on Homesteadblogger entries, the 'rich' entry box is not there; only the html version. It may work on some other site.

Gmail...has been a real problem with Opera. It took me a few hours to figure out I had to bring up the html version of it for it to work. Now it's working fine, but I'm not crazy about the appearance of the html version.

I'm going to email Opera support tonight and ask about all these 'bugs' and if they can give me an answer on how to resolve them. If they can't, I'll still stick with Opera just for the speed of surfing, the tabs, security, and the notes. It's no problem for me to bring up IE to post. All in all, even with its few bugs, Opera is at the top of the heap in the browser world. I'm keeping it!

Sarah