Peter Griffin: My first taste of opera

Web browsers — they're the gateway to the internet for us, the little rectangular box through which we view our favourite websites. Most of us use a web browser called Internet Explorer, but it's old and familiar and has a reputation for letting nasty web infections through to your computer.

Internet Explorer's main adversary is Firefox, a respectable browser which Kiwi uber-geek Ben Goodger had a hand in developing. That alone should lead you to give Firefox a go.

But there's a third challenger, Opera, which is now up to its eighth iteration.

It has some neat things that Firefox has, like tabbed browsing, which lets you open several webpages without filling your desktop with window panes.

You can speak commands to your Opera web browser using a microphone.

This is likely to appeal to a niche audience but it also signals where things are going.

An added extra is a security bar which allows you to tweak your security settings without having to use pull-down menus.

Some websites seem to take a bit longer to adjust to Opera than to IE or Firefox. Others look plain ugly when displayed in Opera. That's because web developers haven't universally taken to tailoring their websites for Opera yet. The advertisements, which are mandatory with the free version, sit along the top of the browser and make it look ugly.

Opera Mail is a free POP email program designed to do everything Microsoft's Outlook does. It doesn't add anything exciting.

Firefox has quirks I dislike, but Opera has many more. There is, however, keen interest — Opera 8.0 had notched up just over one million downloads by the time I acquired the 3.6MB (megabyte) package.

But I'll be sticking with Firefox for the time being. The web browser war will heat up when Microsoft releases its new browser later this year. The question is whether it will be good enough to lure back the hordes defecting to Firefox and Opera.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY