From some very clever folks in Norway Opera is just one of the browsers I use,
but I can testify to its speed, compact size and the fact that is very
accessible with keyboard commands. It is assistive technology friendly. Sure,
you have to pay for it but it represents a good value. If you need
magnification on your browser you will find it quite impressive. It will reduce
to a 20% scale or magnify to 1000%. You can download it for free and use it for
month and determine if it is useful before shelling out $35.
Here is the text for scaling of text from their help file:
Scaling / Zoom
Opera can scale the complete contents of a document. You can also choose to
only scale the text. Here you can also choose font and colours. Opera can scale
documents from 20 - 1000%. You can type in the percentage directly or choose
from a list. You can also use the keyboard for scaling by pressing the '+' key
on the number pad you increase the scaling by 10%. Likewise if you use the '-'
key the scaling is reduced by 10%. Repeated keystrokes change the scaling down
to 20% or up to 1000%.
We have also added more keys to make it easier for people with eye problems:
6 or * on the numeric keypad - Zooms to 100%
7 or CTRL-"-" - zooms out 100% (ie. 400 - 300)
8 or CTRL-"+" - zooms in 100% (ie. 500 - 600)
At 03:58 AM 12/6/98 -0500, M. J. P. Senk wrote:
>I have heard that the Opera browser allows more control over colors and
>size of the displayed text than its bigger competitors. I could not reach
>http://www.operasoft.com just before posting this article from today's
>Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
>
> Sotto voce browser: As Microsoft, Netscape battle, quite Opera keeps
> going
>
> Sunday, December 06, 1998
>
> By Michael Newman, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
>
> The Antitrust Trial of the Century, like much else in the computer
> world, is proving to be something of a letdown. Last week's highlight
> was a debate about the meaning and etymology of a common term for
> urination.
>
> More about that later. The Justice Department's suit against Microsoft
> is ostensibly about its tactics in the browser market, though the
> testimony does veer off to some strange territory. And Microsoft's
> tactics in the browser market are of keen interest to Sandra
> Thorbjornsen, director of sales and marketing for Opera Software.
>
> Opera develops and markets a browser program to view and retrieve
> information on the World Wide Web, and by any measure - number of
> users, number of employees, amount of disk space its program requires
> - it is small. And it competes directly with the world's largest, most
> powerful software company in the very market that is the subject of
> the Justice Department's lawsuit.
>
> Still, Thorbjornsen is reticent about the case. "We have our opinions"
> she says. But she declines to elaborate.
>
> "We're just working on making our browser better," she says. "We're
> just going to keep a low profile. We have our hands full."
>
> Last week Opera released the latest version of its browser, also
> called Opera. Like the browsers currently offered by Microsoft and
> Netscape, Opera's has been through several iterations; the current
> version is 3.5.
>
> The similarities pretty much stop there, however. To begin with, Opera
> is a fraction of the size of Netscape's Communicator or Microsoft's
> Internet Explorer - 5.1 megabytes with "Java support" compared to 14.3
> and 16.9, respectively.
>
> As a result, Opera says, its browser runs on new computers far more
> quickly, and on older computers far more easily, than Netscape's or
> Microsoft's. Indeed, Opera says users need only a 386 chip and 6
> megabytes of random-access memory.
>
> Reviews of the browser have been enthusiastic. C/Net, an online
> computer-news site, said it is "blindingly fast and a refreshing
> alternative to the monster-truck Internet suites." A reviewer for
> Wired magazine called it "the fastest browser I've ever used."
>
> The browser looks much like the other two, with a row of icons across
> the top indicating "back," "forward" and the rest. It can also have a
> separate window of sites along the side of the screen, like
> Microsoft's latest version of Internet Explorer.
>
> It does have unique features. Opening a new browser window, for
> instance, is far faster with Opera, since it can keep many windows
> open at once. Other browsers offer only one window at a time; to look
> at two Web sites simultaneously, it's necessary to start up a second
> version of the program
>
> Another difference is less to Opera's advantage: After a 30-day free
> trial, users must send the company $35 or the software won't work
> anymore. Smaller and faster may be better, but free beats cheap every
> time.
>
> Still, Thorbjornsen estimates there are about a million users of the
> browser, and new users register at the rate of several thousand per
> month.
>
> "What we have found is that people are looking for an alternative,"
> she says. Many are "happily running it on low-resource computers."
>
> In fact, Opera appears to be a happy, low-resource company itself.
> Founded in 1994 by a group of engineers at the Norwegian equivalent of
> AT&T, it is privately held. It has only 15 employees, most of them
> based in Norway.
>
> ("We'd be very pleased to be in Silicon Valley," says Thorbjornsen,
> who heads up Opera's North American operations from her one-woman
> office in ... Cleveland? "Unfortunately we're in Cleveland and not
> Silicon Valley. Cleveland will have to do for the moment.")
>
> Opera says its plan, besides continuing its promotion with individual
> users, is to "pursue strategic alliances with high-tech companies and
> institutions."
>
> It is, undoubtedly, a long shot. "They're slugging it out with two
> rather well-heeled companies, especially now that AOL has bought
> Netscape," says Jim Balderston, an industry analyst at Zona Research
> in Silicon Valley.
>
> "The problem they face is, a browser is basically a commodity - and a
> commodity is driven by brand recognition and brand loyalty," he says.
> "That doesn't mean their product isn't superior. Their problem is just
> how to get it to desktops." In Zona's quarterly surveys of business
> users, he notes, Opera doesn't even register.
>
> But "they may play a role in the larger market of driving the quality
> of the more commercially recognized browsers," he says. "They become
> the freewheeling, small, agile innovator."
>
> It is a role that Thorbjornsen relishes. "We're just carrying on doing
> what we've been doing," she says. "Yes, we are competing seriously
> with them," she says, referring Microsoft and Netscape. "We have a
> competing product."
>
> There is no danger, however, of Thorbjornsen being summoned to testify
> in the antitrust case. She's more than happy about that, especially
> given the turn the trial took last week.
>
> In a videotaped deposition, Justice lawyer David Boies pressed
> Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates repeatedly about what a Microsoft
> executive meant when he said the company was going to be "pissing on"
> a competitor's product. After some back and forth, Gates conceded that
> a fair synonym for the term was, well, to criticize strongly.
>
> It is an impulse that, so far anyway, Opera has resisted. "We prefer
> to concentrate on our software," Thorbjornsen says. "We'll let users
> be the judge."
>
Marty Tibor
1 Stop Speech Recognition and Adaptive Technology Synapse
3095 Kerner Blvd., Suite S, San Rafael, CA 94901
toll-free 888-285-9988
http://www.synapseadaptive.com
Providers of adaptive and assistive technology solutions.
http://www.unixspeech.com
UNIX, mainframe and Mac speech recognition
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/default.htm
Synapse hosts the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Unofficial Information Pages
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