The evolution of the "browser" has had a huge impact on making content available to everyone everywhere. We also take it for granted that we can walk up to any computer connected to the Internet and expect to find a browser there. Not only that but we automatically know how to use it! The world went from zero to hundreds of millions of users in a very short time. In effect, the largest focus group ever validated that & browsing& was a fundamental human trait. No training required. Since most of us spend a good deal of time browsing, shouldn’t we have a browser that meets all of our needs and gives us the fastest, simplest, and most secure browsing experience? Just because Internet Explorer has the largest market share, does that mean it is our only choice? If General Motors sells the most cars does that mean we all choose a GM car? This story is about the history of browsers and why I have chosen to make the new Opera 8 my browser of choice on both the ThinkPad and the Sony Ericsson P910a mobile phone. Why? Speed, Security and Simplicity.
Back in the early 1990’s it was really hard to browse. The world wide web had been around since the late 1980’s but it wasn’t usable by most people. The first browser was written by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT computer, called WorldWideWeb. It is said that he finished the first version on Christmas day, 1990. But, it wasn’t until Marc Andreesen and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign came up with a visual interface to the Web for Windows in the early 1990’s, called Mosaic, that millions of people could "browse" from web page to web page. (The team later went on to help form a company called Netscape). Mosaic was one of dozens of "browsers" to be developed during the 1990’s (See complete history).
There were actually a lot of browsers to choose from ten years ago. One of them was called the Web Explorer. A number of us at IBM back then believed that if we could combine the OS/2 operating system with the IBM Global Network and the Web Explorer, we would have a great combination. It was announced in June 1994. At the time it was the best browser one could get. If Netscape had not been so confident in themselves and if IBM had reached out to them more aggressively, the Web Explorer might be the browser of choice today. By the Fall of 1996, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — wonder where they came up with the name — had a third of the market, and passed Netscape to became the leading web browser in 1999. It went on to totally dominate the browser market.
On April 3, 2000 a Federal judge found that Microsoft used their monopoly power illegally to squash Netscape which in turn had previously swallowed up most of the other browser competitors. Once IE was the only fish left, development and improvement of it stopped and 90+% of the world’s surfers were stuck with it. IE became an easy target for malicious programmers to deliver malware of all kinds to our desktop. No more. Now there are choices once again — and any of them are much better than IE. The Netscape browser team spawned the Mozilla Foundation and it in turn created a new browser called Firefox. It is quite good, but there is another choice called Opera that many people, myself included, feel is even better.
Opera was created in 1994, when two engineers at Telenor (a Norwegian phone company) developed a completely different kind of browser — one that would work with Windows, Linux, Apple, a wide variety of handheld mobile phones, setup TV boxes, and various other devices. The company they formed, Opera Software ASA, has been in business for ten years and one year ago became a public company traded on the Oslo Bors stock exchange (trading symbol: Opera). I have been so impressed with Opera’s products and management team that I agreed to join the board of directors of the company at the beginning of 2004. Even though I have an obvious special interest in the company, I have used many different browsers over the years and the new Opera 8 — released on April 19 — is the best I have seen. There are many reasons why I say that but the bottom line is that Opera provides the best Speed, Security and Simplicity.
Speed
The new Opera 8 browser, which works with Windows and Linux — Mac version in beta — is really fast. The software that makes it work was developed from scratch. It has no baggage and it isn’t tied to Windows or any other operating system. It is built from the ground up to be a really fast browser. Opera has a "rendering engine" which is designed to display the text of a web page quickly — without being slowed down by the huge images and other multimedia content that some web sites like to force on us. Navigation between web pages is lightning fast with Opera. It has numerous keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures which understand your intentions. From my point of view, the biggest productivity boost from using Opera is the tabbed interface. Instead of a separate copy of IE for each web page, Opera has a single instance and inside of it are tabs across the top — one for each active web page. You can organize your favorite links in folders and each folder has an "Open all folder items" link. With one mouse click I can open a dozen of the web pages that I use most often. If I accidentally close a web page, a single click in the trashcan drop-down list allows me to restore it.
Security
More and more web sites are operating in a secure mode. If you notice, you will see https instead of http more and more often. When you see https that means that the traffic between you and the server is encrypted. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad actors out there posing as secure sites. With Opera, when you go to a secure site, such as https://www.americanexpress.com/, a small text box appears to the right of the address window, highlighted in yellow, after you log in. If you click on the yellow field, a dialogue box appears (see below) that shows you the name and owner of the server that sent you the web page. You can also inspect the security certificate on the server and see who issued it. By looking at the security information you can get an indication of the trustworthiness of the site. This will help you avoid the risk of being subjected to online fraud, such as phishing and pharming.
Opera was designed with security in mind from the get go. It is not tied to the operating system and is not as vulnerable to attacks as IE and some other browsers. It does not allow "secret agents" on web pages. Another security feature called "Delete Private Data" (see below) allows you to clear all private data with a mouse click: cookies, history, etc. Think of it as a web browsing sanitizer.
Simplicity
The new version of Opera has a page-resizing function that adapts Web pages to fit the width of any screen or window. This means you will never have to scroll left and right to see an entire web page. Another aspect of simplicity is having a browser that is independent — it is not part of Windows. Opera is available in English, German, Dutch and Polish, with more languages to follow. It runs on Linux, Windows, the Mac and numerous other platforms. You can also talk to Opera with your laptop’s built-in microphone and navigate the Internet with your voice. For example you can say "Opera Back" and you will be taken back to the previous page. Some web pages have very small fonts and are hard to read. You can say "Opera Zoom in" and the size of the page will be magnified by 10%. Each time you say it again, the page will increase another 10%. Opera can also read the text content of web pages to you. Since a huge percentage of people more than forty years old have some level of visual impairment, a talking browser can be a good companion for many. See the full list of available voice commands.
All of us use search extensively. For finding emails I use X1 but for finding most everything else I use Google. Most browsers have a search box somewhere, as does Opera, but what I like better is to use the same address box I use for entering a web site. For example, if I am looking for motorcycle I simply type "g motorcycle" in the address box and I will immediately see the Google results of the search. If I type "e motorcycle" I will see a page at eBay or with "a motorcycle" a page at Amazon. Using this technique has become second nature to me.
Another aspect of simplicity is the use of tabs. Other browsers have tabs, and I am certain that the next version of IE will have tabs, but none have been at it as long as Opera. They started with tabs ten years ago and have perfected how to leverage them to the user’s benefit. Not only do tabs provide a much faster way to browse, they also provide a cleaner, more intuitive way to navigate between your open pages. I like to organize my tabs in a certain sequence so I have a mental picture of where things are — left to right I have Excite, Wall Street Journal, Google News, Weather, etc. (See my current Opera browser below). You can drag and drop the tabs and place them in whatever sequence you want and you can also place links in a a optional "Personal Bar" above the tabs and tailor the labels of them. Like bookmarks but always visible to you in an intuitive personal way.
Opera 8 also makes it very simple to subscribe to and read blogs. Just click on the "xml" link on any blog page and an Opera dialogue box pops up to allow you to subscribe. You can give the blog any name you want and set the frequency for how often you want your Opera browser to check with the blog to see if any new posts have been made. Opera will automatically download them — you are always current. A single click on "Feeds" in Opera and you see a list of all the blogs you are subscribed to and you can easily browse through the postings.
Note: If you want to subscribe to the patrickWeb blog, just click on this… 
Power
One last area about Opera 8 to comment on is User JavaScript. This feature is not for everyone and so I put it in a category of it’s own — power. Opera 8 has introduced an extremely powerful new feature called User JavaScript which allows you to add, remove, fix, or totally redesign web sites that you visit. For example, you could modify your favorite news page to also show you local weather or to include an interactive game. You could also go to Amazon to look for an item you want to buy and have prices from eBay appear on the Amazon page. There is no end to what can be done. Needless to say, some will find ways to use this power to do malicious things but without a doubt we will see many useful scripts introduced that will enhance our browsing experience and make things easier and more personalized. See the Opera tutorial if you want to learn more details about scripts for your browser.
Summary
The new Opera 8 browser is fast, secure, simple, and powerful. It is also empowering. The Opera browser is designed to work the way you want it to work — it makes browsing a productive and powerful experience. Apparently a lot of people feel the same way. In the first two weeks after the release of Opera 8, there were more than two million downloads. The other reason I like Opera is that I know the company has a strong vision with much more up their sleeve. They also have a strong commitment to open Internet standards — in fact they helped create some of them. You can take a closer look at the Opera community if you want to get more insight about what people are saying about the products and directions.
Epilogue
The vast majority of web pages are viewed through a browser on a PC. Two years from now it may be less than 50% – it might be a lot less. Is the PC going away? No. It is not a decline in PC’s which will cause this drop in the percentage of web accesses. In fact PC’s are growing. I cannot imagine giving up my PC. However, the era of the PC as the center of innovation and activity on the Internet is over. Things are about to shift from personal computing to pervasive computing. Pervasive computing, as it’s name implies, refers to computing devices which are Everywhere. This would include personal digital assistants (PDA’s), mobile phones, pagers, public kiosks, and a new generation of devices we haven’t heard of yet. A vast assortment of devices that fit our every need or whim and they will all be connected to the Internet and have a browser. A large number of them will be using Opera.
