I figured my first blog post on an Opera website blog should be, of course, about Opera. So why do I use Opera?

I actually made my choice of browser ages ago, back when the free version of Opera was supported by advertising on top of the browser, and now I'm an Opera loyalist. I couldn't be bothered downloading and testing every browser, so I picked the most common ones: Internet Explorer (which comes as default with Windows), Firefox, Opera, and Netscape Navigator (does that even still exist?).

Sure, I could read other people's opinions on different browsers and their results from testing which browser is faster/more secure/uses less resources, but in the end, it's how the browsers perform on my computer when I use it that matters.

In short, I scratched Netscape Navigator from the list because I found it very slow (meaning it took longer than IE to download/display webpages). Then it was a match between Firefox and Opera, because Internet Explorer back then lacked the features that the other two had. I found that Firefox was somewhat slower than Opera and Internet Explorer.

Although Opera was looked down on back then due to the advertising on the free version of Opera, I liked how it was small, yet had several features without having to download additional add-ons. Also, the most important thing to me back then was downloads. In Opera, if the website allows it, I can resume a download whenever I want, even if I have closed Opera. Whereas Firefox would only allow download resume if you kept the browser open. Maybe I just hadn't figured out how to resume downloads on Firefox, or perhaps this has been changed in newer versions of Firefox, and as far as I know, Internet Explorer still doesn't allow download resume at all.

Now, I still use Opera, but I must admit that Internet Explorer has come a long way and I would consider the new IE as my second choice of browser. I also have Firefox 3 and Safari installed on my computer for website testing purposes, but I haven't bothered to play around with it.

Looking forwards to the release of Opera 10 :3