Opera for Free!
Opera is my favorite browser. It's hyper customizable, and extremely usable. It takes a while to get everything down exactly how you like it, but every little thing can be modified fairly easily by either manipulating it visually or editing a series of text files.
The biggest problem though, was you had to pay for Opera or suffer a terrible ad banner. However, Opera has signed some lucrative contracts with mobile companies to produce software for phones, and come along a number of other great deals... so they are taking the Google approach to marketing. Yep, Opera is now officially free, for good! No ad banner, no nothing.
If you ever turned down this browser before, give it a chance now. It's free and it's highly developed. It gives you more options than you can use. I've used it for years and I'm still finding new options. In fact, I just recently learned about voice operation features.
Yes, you can get on a mic, and tell Opera what to do.
While this seems like a bad gimmick, it adds a great feature for those of us who suck at staring at text forever - by merely highlight some text and speaking the command "Opera Speak" into the microphone, Opera will begin reciting all the text you have highlighted. This is a great way to digest some longer stuff... turn book texts online into full-on audio books! Incredibly, there are very few speech errors (mostly stuff that will make sense to you), and the program even replicates intonations in speech. For instance, the speech shifts when talking in parenthesis and breaks for commas and sentences properly.
All in all, check it out. No ads, and it's free. Why not?
Also, be on the lookout for another TeeJ entry coming soon.
- Good ol' PA