The new version of Opera came out a couple of days ago. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try and alternative browser that wasn’t Internet Explorer or Firefox. When I saw the news on the Digg front page, one feature really stood out. This was Opera Link. I wanted to see how well it performs and if it, along with other features was enough for me to take Opera as seriously as I do Firefox. Could this play around make me a switcher?

There were a few surprising things I loved about Opera right off the bat. The first one being a feature called Speed Dial. This is a page displayed when you open a new tab, and it gives you access to your 9 favourite websites. You can choose what websites you put there and it had a thumbnail of the site along with the title underneath for quick access to the sites you access the most.

Another great feature of Opera is the tab preview. When you hover your mouse over a tab on the tab bar for a few seconds, a little thumbnail will display of the current page, and when you scroll your cursor over the other tabs, the thumbnail will change to the website tab hovered. This may sound a little useless but when you have quite a few tabs open, its a great way to find the webpage you are looking for in your tab bar.

On the topic of tabs, I also love the way Opera handles the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut for switching tabs. Unlike in other browsers where it would switch you over to the next tab, Opera shows a little menu with all you current tabs and you can keep tabbing through them till you get to the one desired and that page will come up. It is much cleaner than having to focus half a dozen tabs to get to the one you desire. Also if you go into the options, you can incorporate tab thumbnails, so along with the titles in the menu, you also get a visual aide.

The final feature that really appealed to me was Opera Links. This is a service provided by Opera that synchronizes your browser bookmarks, speed dial and the personal bar (known as the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox.) All the information goes to the cloud and can be synchronized across browsers. And as an added bonus, you can also access your bookmarks and speed dial right from the Opera Links website. This is useful if you are using an alternative browser or a mobile browser and allows you to view all your bookmarked sites right from in the browser.

Now, my Opera experience did come with a few annoyances. One thing I did find odd is the search on the speed dial. I don’t think it is necessary to have that there due to there being a Google search tool on the address bar. I believe that it would be much more useful as a bookmarks and history search, instead of another web search. And while we are on Bookmarks, I didn’t find the bookmarks manager anywhere near as powerful as Firefox’s Places. I am so use to having my Bookmarks Toolbar, Bookmark Menu and General Bookmarks all separate, but still together in a unified place. With Opera, the Personal Bar was completely separate from the other general bookmarks, which is the same as the bookmarks menu. This is not Opera’s fault this annoyed me, I’m just so use to the new way Firefox manages bookmarks that I find the old way frustrating.

The default Opera UI is a bit of a mess compared to other browsers. I don’t understand why everyone wants to change things! Internet Explorer removed/hid the File menu, and Opera thinks that they would prefer to have the Address bar and Tab bar switched around. This is a little annoyance and should not be a problem one you get use to and familiar with it.

Being so use to the Firefox way of browsing, the pop-up password notification box is here, and annoying! Its not too bad because the website still logs on in the background and you can wait for it to successfully log in before saving your password, but I would still prefer it out of the way completely. And while we are at password saving, the Wand password manager is a little different from others. When you go to a site with a saved password, other browsers would auto-complete the username and password fields. Opera on the other hand highlights the edges. I have no idea what this means and ended up typing my username and password again. It wasn’t till a few sites later I noticed a wand icon in the address bar and clicked it and the fields filled in with my login details. It would have been nice to have a notification bubble telling me how to use it the first time this happens just so a new user like myself is aware.

My last minor gripe with Opera is Google. Yes, Google. I use a lot of Google’s services and it was a little annoying to not have them work as well as they do in Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Gmail was stripped down and didn’t have a lot of the cool display that it does in Firefox. It seemed a little stripped down. Also I couldn’t be invisible on GTalk inside Gmail and I couldn’t use any of the Gmail Lab features. I also got an error message on Google Notepad. I could still use it perfectly fine and it looks normal to me, but there was an error message there for some reason. That was just odd. My iGoogle page has quite a few gadgets and one of the gadgets didn’t like Opera, so it caused it to keep refreshing the page. This made iGoogle unusable. I am also disappointed that there is no Google Gears for Opera either. I understand that this is not really Opera’s fault, it’s Google’s, but nevertheless, I still found it to be worthwhile to mention.

In conclusion, I feel that Opera is a great browser, and with a few tweaks and a bit of getting use to, Opera could be a perfect browser. Its memory and CPU usage was as good, if not better than Firefox 3 RC1’s, and it was very stable. Did playing around with Opera 9.5 make me want to switch. No, I’m still a Firefox user and will continue to do so for a while now. But in saying that, I am going to keep Opera around. It is an amazing alternative browser, second best, and I will use it when I need to use another browser for certain tasks.

Last week, I got accepted into the Live Mesh Tech Preview (also known as Beta.) I had only heard a little bit about it from various websites and podcasts and it sounded and looked like an interesting service. Live Mesh is basically cloud storage, with basically all the same functionality as Dropbox except with a bit more added.

When you download the client, which is around 2MB in size, the installation starts in the background. This took quite a while to install, and even other people I know have commented on that. There is no progress indicator or anything so you are expected to sit back and wait for it to just do its thing. The only reason I can think of for the lengthy installation time is that it probably downloads the actually application off the internet, similar to how the other Windows Live services do it. I really dislike this and would prefer to download the actual install file manually. This was the only issue I had with Mesh, everything else is pretty much positive.

You are again greeted with a new folder on your computer, except here it goes in your User directory. This is basically where you will get access to everything in your Live Mesh. When you create a new folder, it goes in there and any files synchronized between your computer and the cloud are put here. Another interesting thing is that any folders outside here that you wish to synchronize, their shortcut will appear in the directory. This is good as it makes it easy to manage what is going on in the Live Desktop and other computers that are synchronized.

Synchronization with folders is quite fast, with information on progress of the upload and download. If you only synchronize one file, it happens so fast you wouldn’t even notice it going on in the background. You get 5GB storage which is plenty of space for backing up Documents and a few other files. Its not ideal for video or loads of images, but if you had those types of files, you probably wouldn’t want to back them up online anyway (unless you have a fat pipe.) You can synchronize between your computer, the Live Desktop, and other computer. This is great because it means that your Documents folder can be synchronized between multiple computers, and the cloud.

The Live Desktop is the way you access your files and folders on the web. Once you log on, you are greeted with a very straight forward user interface. The thing that makes it so straight forward, is the fact it looks like a very basic Windows desktop, with folders on the desktop that are folders you have synced to the Live Desktop. Clicking the folder will open a window that looks and operates very similar to Windows Explorer does. From here you can view items in the folders as well as make changes, make new folders and upload.

I also tried the image viewer. As I clicked on a picture in Firefox, I was in for a rude awakening, you need Silverlight 2 to use the photo browser, and at this stage, you cannot get SL2 for Firefox. I understand this is in beta so its not much of an issue and shouldn’t be for too long. In Internet Explorer however, it looked and worked pretty well, it had the thumbnails at the top, and you could see the image and use the familiar forward, backwards and play buttons to go through the pictures and start and stop a slideshow. I did find it to be a little slow to load a bunch of relatively small images, but that could have been due to a number of factors.

There are a whole heap of options that are not available yet and at this stage it is Windows only, but they do plan for a Mac client for synchronization. I was very happy with this service and it was done really well. If it is this good at the beta stage, its going to be one hell of a service when it is out of beta and open to the public. There are a few things that I have missed do talk about such as syncing to two machines and remote desktop and such, but at this stage, I have yet to play around with that. You can hear about those from other people, when I cover this again when it is out of beta with more features and functionality, or you can go and try them yourself. I would highly recommend this service to every Windows user out there because it is that great.

Last month, I was playing around with a service called Dropbox. The name of the site pretty much tells you what it basically is, a service that allows you to drop files into a folder on your computer and it syncs it up onto the cloud (the internet) for access there.

When you first install the application, it puts a folder in your Documents directory called My Dropbox. This is where all your files go to get synced with the server, and it is also where files that get put into your Dropbox get downloaded to. When uploading files to the web, I found it to be quite slow, and when I say slow, I mean that my connection can handle a fair bit more. The other issue I had here was that the program wasn’t very good at telling me the progress of my upload, as well as the speed it was going. It was very inaccurate and most of the time, looked as if it had stalled.

You also have a public folder which is a folder that you can publicly share the files in, as long as you give the link to the people you want to share with. You can also share other folders too. You can view and download files using a web browser by logging on to your Dropbox account and you have access to all your files from there. You can also share folders with other Dropbox users. There you have a common folder and it appears on both peoples Dropbox’s and when anyone adds a file to it, it will automatically sync with the other people.

My only real grip was with the uploading of files to the Dropbox. There are still many ways in which this service can grow. The storage is limited to 2GB per user, and depending on how many files you have, and how much you want synced to the internet, this could be a huge limitation for some people. The service could also improve with backup. At the moment, it is only good at backing up individual files, and even then, there are services out there that do it a lot better.

There are many features that I have missed mentioning and overall, Dropbox is an amazing service. It does what it does reasonably well. I am really looking forward at seeing what they do to improve this service and make it a real competitor in the online storage/sync/backup space. If you would like to try it out, I have 9 invitations, and you can get one by commenting below. If you haven’t already, please do try out this great service.

SugarSync (formerly known as Hummingbird) is a service from Sharpcast that allows you to sync and access your files and media from anywhere” on different computers, on the web, even on your mobile phone. SugarSync securely backs up all your computers online and synchronizes them automatically so you always have access to your files. Best of all, SugarSync takes care of everything automatically in the background, so you never have to make backups or email files to yourself. Say goodbye to CD burning and emailing files to yourself; say hello to SugarSync.

I have been using SugarSync for a few weeks now. You install a program to your computer and it will automatically backup everything in your user folder, or folders of your choosing. I found it useful to backup a few important folders, but I did find the software to be a little restrictive. First off, you are limited to 1GB (but you get 10GB more for the beta) which is hardly enough space to backup much. You also cannot pick which files not to backup, which means it is all or nothing.

I did have a problem with accidentally deleting a folder that was backing up. What I thought it would do is delete the folder from the backup, but what it really did was delete the folder from my computer. Then after I managed to restore the files, it went and deleted them again. I don’t think it is right to let a piece of backup software do that. That is probably the killing point in this software for me.

If you want to try out this software, the first 7 people to comment below will get an invitation to this service.