Rob Pegoraro over at the Washingon Post wrote an article Building a Better Browser where he outlined what he wanted from the perfect browser. Opera made a fair showing in the original list, but how many of these are already present in Opera?

1) Firefox’s and Safari’s toolbar layouts: Both browsers take no more space than necessary to lay out their buttons and bars, leaving maximum room for viewing the page itself.

Ok, well the unregistered version of Opera uses an ad-bar, but other than that, you can customize your toolbars to do whatever and only whatever you want. Simply right-click and choose “customize.”

So Opera can do this.

2) Firefox’s find-in-page command: When you want to look for a word or phrase in a page, other browsers pop up the same “find” dialogue you’ve seen in a million other programs. Firefox’s developers went to the trouble of rewriting this function. Their implementation starts searching as you type, highlighting the first match. Simple buttons let you jump to the next or previous match — or highlight every occurrence of the search term.

Opera can do this too. Type . to search for any text or , to just search for link text. There are no buttons for previous/next but Opera uses the standard previous/next keystrokes (In Windows/Un*x, F3 will find next, shift + F3 will find previous. You can also use ctrl + g. MacOpera uses command instead of ctrl.)

3) Opera’s page magnification: Any old browser can make text look bigger if necessary, but Opera does the same for every part of a page, images as well as text. And it offers far more degrees of zoom.

Yup, and again, keyboard or mouse. See Day 3: Web Page Preferences for more details.

4) Firefox’s anti-phishing defenses: Instead of putting a tiny key or lock icon in a corner of the screen when you land on a secured site (i.e., those operated by legitimate financial institutions, as opposed to the fakes run by phishers), Firefox paints the address bar in gold and displays the domain name of the current site in the status bar.

Opera does this. See Day 6: Advanced Preferences 3.

5) Safari’s status bar: This oft-neglected component is hidden by default, part of Apple’s simplicity-no-matter-what agenda. But if you elect to display it (see the View menu), you’ll get some valuable tips the next time you float the cursor over a link. The status bar will not only show the address of the site the link points to, but also indicate if the link is coded to open in a separate window or not.

Well, Opera does this, except for the part about whether or not a page is coded to open in a new page or not. Opera also shows both the <title> and the destination URL in the tooltip when you hover a link. I’m going to give Opera partial credit for this one.

6) Firefox’s built-in Web searching: This browser’s search bar allows you to start a search at Google — or at any other site listed in its drop-down menu. Adding additional search sites is simple (for example, I’ve added one for the Internet Movie Database), although deleting them takes more work than necessary. Also, the address bar doubles as a shortcut to an “I’m feeling lucky” Google search — type a phrase, and you’ll be taken to the site Google thinks is the best match.

Opera has had this for ages… except that it isn’t simple to add them. You can do it, just not through the user-interface. Again, partial credit.

7) Safari’s forms auto-fill: Not having to type in the same street address every single time is a luxury some (but not enough) browsers afford these days. For now, only Safari is smart enough to offer to copy your contact info out of your own listing in the Address Book program.

Opera gives you personal information fields (see Day 2: Wand Preferences) and autocompletes them as you type. I’ve tried Safari’s and found that it worked fairly well, but also made mistakes if the page wasn’t coded properly. I consider Opera equal to Safari on this one, but the auto-complete-the-whole-form thing is a request I’ve seen before, so hopefully Opera will improve in the future (while maintaining the Personal Information fields as well)

8) IE’s and Safari’s “save the whole page” options: If you want to keep a page around for posterity, just saving its HTML won’t do. You want the pictures, too. These two browsers include an option to save the entire contents of a page in a single file.

Opera will let you save an entire page in a folder, but not as a file. Long-standing request, and there is a standard for it. Opera needs to address this.

9) Safari’s bookmarks management: I’m continuously flabbergasted at the way every other program in this category makes you select a “Properties” icon or menu item to rename a bookmark or change its address. In Safari, you select the text you want to change and type right over it — just like you would with any file on the desktop.

I don’t really consider this a feature because it would be far too easy to change something unintentionally. You have to open a separate window (Opera can display/manage Bookmarks in a Panel). But it’s not my list, so I have to admit that Opera doesn’t do this even though I’ve never wanted it to.

10) Opera’s and Safari’s password managers: Opera lets you enter a stored password just by hitting the Ctrl and Enter keys; and Safari integrates its password store in the system-wide Keychain used by all Mac programs — meaning other Mac-savvy browsers can benefit from this store of user IDs and passwords, too.

And of course only Opera works on anything but Mac.

11) Safari’s RSS newsreader: While Opera and Firefox have built-in RSS (Really Simple Syndication) software to subscribe to updates from sites that use this popular standard, Safari beats them both by making previewing an RSS feed a single-click option (with the other browsers, you have to subscribe to a feed to see what it looks like). It also provides some handy browsing and finding options; for example, you can use a simple slider control to collapse RSS feed items to just headlines or group several sites’ RSS feeds on a single page.

Opera’s RSS support needs to support groups, but otherwise these seem like minor complaints.

12) IE for Mac’s printing: This long-since-abandoned browser still stands alone in its thoughtful integration of such sensible hard-copy options as the ability to shrink a page slightly to keep one line of text from spilling over to a second page.

Never used IE for Mac for very long, but printing on every browser could be better if it avoiding such silly things as that. Opera’s fit to width feature does make printing better.

13) Opera’s efficient operation: This browser consistently uses less memory than the others.

Yet another entry where Opera is the only browser mentioned. And don’t forget that Opera has an email program, Usenet, RSS, and IRC clients built-in.

14) Firefox’s and Mozilla’s open-source development: The story of browsers has too often been a story of abandonment, as corporate owners decide there’s only so much reward they can get out of developing a program and giving it away for free. In their time, Netscape, Internet Explorer and even, to a certain extent, Safari have been left to collect dust by their owners. With Firefox and Mozilla, as long as a programmer thinks there’s room for improvement and has time to contribute better code, these programs will continue to progress.

Opera has been around for a long time and will continue to be around for a long time. Safari is actively being developed. The idea that the average user is going to benefit from being able to tinker with their own source code is rather silly, and I would hate to see what would happen to Firefox’s development if there wasn’t an organization behind it fund-raising and maintaining it. Let’s see where they are in a few years.

Conclusion

Looking at this list, Opera is capable of almost everything Rob is looking for. Most items are fully supported, a few could use improvements, but lacks only 3 entirely (Safari’s bookmarks, IE/Mac’s printing and not being open source). Of those 3, 2 are for Mac users only (IE/Mac, which is no longer developed, and Safari). 1 (IE/Mac’s printing) is not supported by any current browser, and 1 I’m still not sure is even a feature (Safari’s bookmarks).

Does Opera have room for improvement? You bet. So does every browser. For the ideal browser that Rob is looking for, what is your best option, especially if you are not using a Mac?

Rob has come up with a good list of browser features, and shown that every browser has some advantages, but I think it’s clear from this list that Opera has the majority of the features, and has some which are not found in any other browser.