_________ SWAT MAGAZINE ISSUE THIRTY FOUR OCTOBER __________ / \___________________________________________/ \ / Opera 4.02 Review \ / by SiliconFuRy \ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- siliconfury@apexmail.com [ ------] [ Intro ] [ ----- ] This web browser comes in 2 flavours on the website(www.opera.com). There's one installer with and one installer without the JRE(Java2 Runtime Edition). The latter is 9MB while the former is a mere 1.8MB. Consider wether you have JRE or not before throwing yourself into a 45minute download. Whichever you do get, they both have the same interface, which is different from both IE and Netscape. [ ------------ ] [ Da Interface ] [ ------------ ] At a first glance, this looks very basic and early, because of the few buttons on the main toolbar. While a page is loading, which is what it does when you first load it, the Address bar(which is along the bottom) disappears, and in its place appears a few familiar panels, like transfer status, which is very concise, showing average data transfer rate, time taking to load, ETA for page to load, and a little unique panel showing the number of images loaded/ found in the document. To the left of the address bar there are 3 buttons. The padlock on the far left is the SSL use indicator. The first button toggles the loading of images. Handy if you want pages to load faster on a slow connection. The Next button along turns of all cascading style sheet use, for if something is hard to read, or something... The next button toggles Printview. This is a mode where the currently loaded page is turned into a preview of what it would look like if it were to be printed. When a page is loading, a stop button appears. One really interesting, and awe-inspiring feature of this webbrowser is its MDI(Multiple Document Interface) Interface. This means you can view many webpages without having to load another copy of Opera. This rocks!!! Each page you view has its own mIRC style button which you can easily flip to. The New Window button on the toolbar opens a new MDI page for browsing. Another unique feature is the ability to easily zoom in and out on webpages, from 20% to 1000% of the original size. Text remains the same quality, only its font size changes, but images do distort when zooming, which is no real suprise. Downloading files is a pleasure as well. When you click a file to download, up pops a dialogue box, opting you to download the file, open it in Opera, or find out its MIME association. When you click Save To Disk, another window within the Opera MDI opens, showing the transfer. The great thing is, multiple files can be downloaded, all within the one window. This makes it a very useful and powerful Download Manager. Once a file is done downloading, its association is read, and you can click the meaty button with the associated program's icon to open it. Of course, if you prefer to have the download manager as a floating window, you can uncheck the button for MDI-view. The Hotlist button opens a panel with, by default, a hierarchical list of your bookmarks, which you can easily edit from here. The next tab takes you to a familiar email list, including In/Outbox, Trash, Sent and Drafts folders. The final tab, Contacts, is an outlook-style address book. [ -------------------- ] [ Buit-in Email Client ] [ -------------------- ] Opera even has a powerful built in Email client. Multiple account support means you can manage more than just one POP3 mail account. If you don't want to use a POP3 accout, you can subscribe to Opera's own mail service, OperaMail (www.operamail.com). Email Composition supports attachments, but thats about it, with no text formatting support. Not to fret though, because under preferences, there is an option to use an external email client such as Outlook. Checking email inboxes on POP servers is relatively fast. There are 3 modes available for the Inbox view, the usual split view, or theres max view so the email document fills the window, and theres max list to fill the window with the list of emails. [ ----------- ] [ Help System ] [ ----------- ] Ok, none of us use the help system unless we get REALLY stuck, most of us in the underground figure stuff out during normal use anyway. But for those of you who really do have a problem(either with Opera, or mentally), there is a rather unique HTML help viewer. It uses Opera's own HTML engine, so it also has the ability to zoom into pages. There is a comprehensive page on Keyboard Shortcuts for Opera. This is a good read for anyone of any ability. There are just way too many shortcuts to go through every single one, so get the app yerself ;). [ ----------- ] [ Other Stuff ] [ ----------- ] As well as all this there are some blendings from Netscape and Internet Explorer, with the F11 key taking you to the familiar fullscreen view, which actually shows No toolbars whatsoever when in fullscreen. Opera also comes with a very comprehensive list of Bookmarks, incase you are strifling for a page to visit when your over excited with a new browser. There is also the familiar site of a View Source, but this time, under File->Preferences, you can change what viewer. By default, it uses write.exe(WordPad), but I always change it to the best of the best[tm], notepad ;). There is one option to clear all personal data. This includes cached passwords, open documents, history and other cache, as well as non-persistant cookies. Very handy indeed. All in all this web browser deserves to be on top. Its fast, and has many interface features you just don't see in a web browser these days(referring to IE5). Download it today! And a crack, you download an Evaluation version. Cracks available from http://astalavista.box.sk/ , before people come running into chat rooms blaring "Where cun I get a crack for Opera 4.02????" Shouts to: usual folk, DDNet etc...