Each user is different, and not everyone will use Opera for the same reason, depending on where he lives and what’s his needs.
More and more people are using Opera as their main web browser around the world. Opera is a very good browser with a lot of built-in features, privacy tools and is a lightweight browser compared to others.
In this Article
- 1. Built-in VPN and enhanced privacy
- 2. Built-in ad blocker
- 3. Lightweight browser
- 4. Turbo feature
- 5. Extensions
- 6. Flow feature
- 7. Free of permission boxes
- 8. Battery saver
- 9. Sidebar message
- 10. Up to 50 tabs history
- 11. Tab preview
1. Built-in VPN and enhanced privacy
Opera has been the first web browser to add a built-in Virtual Private Network (VPN) feature directly on the browser. The VPN allows you to browse more securely, especially when you are connected to public Wi-Fi in a restaurant or coffee shop. It can also be useful to hide your user data from websites, to buy airplane tickets for example. It uses a 256-bits algorithm to encrypt the requests.
2. Built-in ad blocker
The ads can be very annoying today, and a lot of people are adding an ad blocker to their favorite web browser. Opera browser has an ad blocker built-in, no need to add any other extension. Their ad blocker is working very well because it’s blocking ads directly in the rendering engine.
3. Lightweight browser
A lot of people and especially African people love to use the Opera browser because it’s a lightweight browser. In most of Africa, the connection speed is lower and mobiles are older, making the Opera browser very useful, especially on their mobile and using the turbo feature.
4. Turbo feature
With the turbo feature on Opera, the webpages are rendered on the Opera web servers and then sent to the user. It saves a lot of data and makes the connection to the websites faster. It work better with very well knows a website that gets frequent access as they are cached on the Opera web servers.
5. Extensions
Opera supports most Chrome extensions, making the extension ecosystem very good despite the low popularity of Opera compared to Google Chrome. And they go deeper than Chrome, as they are extending the extension system to provide sidebar extensions.
6. Flow feature
It can be a tough job to move something from your mobile to your computer or the other way. Opera gives you the possibility to do so by just connecting the Opera Touch browser on your smartphone to the Opera browser on your computer. With this feature, you can share links, images, videos, notes, and files.
7. Free of permission boxes
Today, with the notification feature, the first website visit comes with a lot of pop-up boxes. It can be annoying to see all these boxes every day. Opera fixes it by introducing a new feature in their browser for Android, so when a website wants to push notifications, it needs to ask the browser first. The notification is blocked by default by Opera and can be changed in the browser configuration
8. Battery saver
Despite all the features, battery usage is quite low on Opera browser, not as good as Safari but definitely better than Chrome and Firefox. It also has a battery saver mode that you can switch on manually and automatically when your battery is low. You can win up to one hour of battery, depending on your mobile or computer model.
As written before, the Opera browser allows having an extension on the sidebar. With this, you can have your message application like WhatsApp on the sidebar, so you can continue to browse the web while waiting for a message or staying on a conversation.
10. Up to 50 tabs history
By tab history, I mean the tab that will still be opened when you restart the web browser. Opera browser will open again up to 50 tabs on the relaunch, while other browsers will limit this to 10 tabs.
11. Tab preview
With Opera, when you put your mouse over another tab then the active one, it will allow you to preview the content of the tab. It’s a very nice feature making the experience easier when you are searching for a specific tab while you open a lot of different ones, I know you do.
Opera is always putting innovation first and adding a lot of new cool features before other browsers, they are not afraid of taking the risk to do so. There are also things not good to say about Opera, not everything had worked so well, but they are always trying to fix the issues and make the user experience better. It’s a web browser you should try if you are looking for a new one.
Author
Maxime Levesque
Maxime Levesque is a technical engineer with more than 5 years of professional experience. He is an expert in computer and phones, mostly on Apple products. Maxime is also the founder of TechBrowser.
