Personal, Private Web Browsing with Opera 10.53

If you're looking around online for Opera 10.52, Mac's recently launched web browsing application, you're not likely to find it. That's because almost immediately after the release of 10.52 Mac released another version of Opera: Opera 10.53. Confused? Have no fear! 10.53 is exactly the same as 10.52, minus a few glitches and bugs. Specifically, 10.53 corrects a vulnerability issue (which affected only windows users) and a bug that caused Google Maps to freeze periodically on Mac users.

If you're reading this on Window's Explorer or Mac's Safari you may be wondering "so what? What's the big deal? It's just another web browser, right?" Wrong! Opera takes surfing the web to a whole new, almost effortless level:

Personalized Browsing

- Opera features "Speed Dial" which at first glance looks comparable to safari's "top sites" feature, however unlike safari Opera allows you to pick and choose which sites to put into your Speed Dial, regardless of the amount of times you've navigated there.

- You can also navigate to favorite websites through "sessions". Let's say you typically like to have Facebook, Gmail and twitter all open at the same time in separate tabs. Opera allows you to save this setup as a "session", which you can name and open up earlier, allowing you to navigate to these sites at the same time, without using the address bar.

Search Shortcuts

- Speaking of the address bar, just like Firefox, with opera you can use the address bar in Opera for searching

- You can also use the address bar to search for your favorite bookmarked sites. Let's say you've bookmarked your daughter's blog under the title "Lyn's Blog". If you type "Lyn's Blog" into the address bar Opera will take you straight to the page, eliminating the need to search through all your bookmarks.

- You can also use the address bar to search specific search engines. If you type "w hockey" into the address bar you will be taken to Wikipedia articles about hockey. Similarly if you type "z hockey" into the address bar you'll be able to search all products on Amazon relating to hockey without even touching your mouse.

Other features

- Opera also has many mouse short cuts you can use. Holding the right button and moving your mouse to the left will take you to the previous page and double clicking on an empty widow will take you to your home page. These features tend to work better with a mouse than with a touch pad on a laptop.

- you can also use features like the "fast forward button" (which takes you forward to the next page) and the handy zoom button to make browsing easier and swifter

- a handy password manager keeps track of all your passwords, and Opera's privacy settings allow you to customize which private data (for example, cookies) you want to delete regularly.

Opera has a lot of features and shortcuts, which allow you to browse the web more efficiently. However, although these features make Opera far superior to Internet Explorer and Safari, Firefox supports many of the same features as Opera-besides of course the nifty mouse shortcuts, and it's debatable whether or not those are valuable in a web browser, since it's just as easy to click the "back" button as it is to click and slide the mouse to the left. The one area in which Opera excels in is privacy. Opera allows you to choose master passwords for the password manager, and to choose which private data will be recorded and which will be deleted automatically. Opera is a free download for windows and Mac OSX 10.4 and above, so if privacy, personalized web browsing and