Labs

Opera has the smallest market share of the four leading browsers, but you wouldn't guess it from its collection of polished features. New to version 9 are Speed Dial, whereby opening a new tab displays thumbnails of up to nine user-defined webpages, an integrated BitTorrent client and small desktop applications known as widgets (similar to Vista's sidebar gadgets). There's a comprehensive built-in email client. A similar interface is used for RSS newsfeeds to help keep track of read and unread stories.

The Search bar includes a short list of search engines, but search facilities from almost any website can be added with just a couple of clicks. If it's too much hassle

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to pick the desired search engine from the drop-down list, type into the Address bar with a prefix for the search engine in question - G for Google, Y for Yahoo! and so on. Double-clicking a word or right-clicking a block of text on a page reveals options to search for the text using the default or any other search engine, translate it with AltaVista's Babel Fish or even speak it out loud. Another innovative feature is the ability to switch off a distracting advert.

Opera appears to support emerging web standards well, and passes the Acid2 test at www.webstandards.org. However, we found that it didn't cope as well with certain other webpages. Google Maps behaved awkwardly and slowly, and animated slideshows weren't available in the Picasa photo-sharing site. This probably has more to do with Opera's small market share, which places it lower down on web developers' priorities, than technical problems with the browser itself, but it's still significant. The relatively high memory usage is less forgivable, and we experienced a couple of crashes during tests, although the crash recovery feature quickly restored all our open tabs.

There's plenty here to tempt people away from Internet Explorer, but in our experience Opera 9.26 is not quite as robust.