With the advent of a slick and stable FireFox, it seems the browser wars are raging once again. MS has kept quiet for quite some time, and at least two major alternatives have emerged: Opera and FireFox. Both are provided for free.

Why use Opera?

I'm currently using Opera. The main reasons for me to use it:

• Much less (if not none at all) vulnerability to IE exploits.
• Stereo browsing. Open several windows simultaneously without cluttering your desktop.
• Some advanced privacy features, like automatically deleting all new cookies on exit, or suppressing referers.
• Save and restore "sessions" (in short, memorize all currently open URLs).
• Search on amazon and search engines with a few key strokes (e.g., use "g keyword" as 'URL' to search on Google).
• You can redefine the keys completely.
• Mouse gestures. Haven't used them yet, but some people say they're handy.
• Spell checking for edit boxes [just remember to use them :)].
• Open a complete bookmark branch with one click, which means all pages opening in the chosen bookmark category simultaneously.

But there are also some caveats:

• When my computer crashes (and Opera with it), Opera always wants to know whether I'd like to restore the last session or not. I always check "Don't ever dare to ask me again", but it keeps on asking.
• After your evaluation period, there are ads appearing directly under the menu, which can be irritating (one solution would be to actually buy Opera).
• It's not possible to bulk-delete cookies, if you want to get rid of several cookies you have to click through each of them. There is no way to just mark some and then delete all marked ones.
• Some cookies obviously can't be deleted, no matter how hard I tried.