What’s New in the Opera 11.60 Browser | PCWorld Business Center.  (No longer available online. Original text included below.)

Web browsers are in the news. Google’s Chrome is poised to overtake Firefox as the number two browser as Firefox struggles with market share and revenue. IE9 is increasing its market share, but mostly at the cost of other versions of IE. Today Opera announced it has a new release. Does Opera have good news, and more importantly, a reason for your business to consider using it?

Opera Innovation

First available in 1994, Opera has never been a top three browser, but it has made significant contributions to the features we now take for granted in web browsers. The first version of Opera incorporated tabbed pages within one window, now a common feature among the top three web browsers: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Google’s Chrome. In 2000, Opera added an integrated search bar and pop-up blocking, both again now common in most web browsers. In 2007 Opera introduced “Speed Dial”, which showed previews of specially bookmarked pages, similar to the Apps page that Google Chrome now uses.

Recent Efforts

More recently, Opera has continued adding features. Opera Unite allows users to share content with friends. Though the same functionality is found in numerous online social services like Facebook, Unite allows users to skip the web service and share directly through the browser. Unfortunately, this requires your collegues to be using Opera, and with its market share below 5%, this isn’t likely to happen unless you standardize your office. 

Opera Turbo is another new feature not seen on mainstream browsers. Turbo speeds up your browsing experience by using Opera’s servers to compress the webpages you request, allowing them to load up to five times faster. Amazon is using a similar technique for its Kindle tablets. Unfortunately, encrypted pages, the type you probably use for a large part of your business day, are not able to be compressed, so its usefulness may be limited.

11.60 Update

Version 11.60 of Opera isn’t a major release, so new features are limited. The only four to note are:

• Opera now uses the Opera Presto 2.10 rendering engine, which undoubtedly brings some speed improvements, but is unlikely to affect your daily use noticeably.
• A new interface for the built in Opera Mail, which while possibly interesting to home users, is unlikely to be used in a business with an established email system.
• Adding a “Star menu” to the address field to simplify creating bookmarks and adding items to Speed Dial.
• Added HTML5 parsing, which promises to bring increased webpage compatibility as more browsers support it, especially important for a business that is moving its website to HTML5.

Looking back to the last major release of Opera, 11.00, Extensions were a big addition, but Firefox and Chrome have had them for ages. Tab Stacking can make your work a bit simpler, but generally this functionality is available on other browsers through extensions. Most other new features were underwhelming, or already available on other browsers as well.

Do Businesses Need Opera?

Opera has demonstrated innovation since its start. Lately, however, Chrome is the browser making a difference, with Opera playing catchup, Internet Explorer trying to retain market share, and Firefox scrambling to stay relevent. When it comes to usefulness in business, there are a few features like Opera Unite that could prove useful if standardized, but overall, there’s little reason to consider Opera unless you can’t stand Microsoft, don’t trust Google, and fear the fall of Firefox.