The other day was Opera’s birthday and to celebrate they gave out free licenses. First off, if you have to pay for a web browser, it better be darn good. After some testing and general web usage, I’ve come to think that it’s just OK.

It’s very streamlined and visually appealing. Plus there are many skins that you can add that make it even better. I have MeGuiDdo installed which is a nice black theme. Opera even has fading effects for rolling over checkboxes and radio buttons. Very nice!

The Goods:
+ Forum Elements are very pretty and CSS customizable.
+ Feels Mac like.
+ Starts up pretty fast.
+ Built in spell check.
+ Seems to render pages pretty fast.
+ Cool Fast Forward and Backword buttons, however annoying when you don’t know what they are.
+ Seems very customizable
+ Sidebar seems handy, but needs more useful options. -Yes I did see you can install more but they don’t seem that great either.

The Bads:
– No built in ad blocking support.
– Crashes the most often of any browser I use.
– In the first few hours I came across three sites that rendered incorrectly.
– You have to register it or get ads!
– Not fond of the eMail look to the RSS feeds. I’d rather use the sidebar.
– No RSS Import?

Granted, I have more Goods than Bads above, but I don’t see any reason to switch to Opera from Firefox or Safari. I think it’s a decent browser and a great alternative to IE, but not quite as good as I was hoping for a ‘pay’ browser.

Either way, I’ll keep it and play it in every now and then. 🙂