[justlurking]

But it's great for cutting down the number of brower sessions on my desktop. I can read muliple threads on Free Republic with only one browser session, and it is easy to shutdown.

You can do the same thing with Mozilla Firefox (and it may be in the earlier versions of Mozilla, too). I really like the "tabbed" browser, as well.

I still have to use IE for a few things, though. I have to use certain plug-ins approximately weekly for my job. But, for everything else I've been using Firefox (it used to be called Firebird).

[steve86]

These are the things I like best in Opera (no particular order):

Tabbed browsing.
Mouse movements.
Selective pop-up blocking.
So easy to customize panels (or find someone who has already done it). I use the "minimum panel" setup which maximizes screen space yet still gives me the shrinkable bookmark panel on the left).
Ability to reload saved windows on startup (I load same 8 starting pages as tabs most every time).
Ability to set automatic refresh timer (like for a quote page -- refresh once a minute or whatever).
Java 1.4.2-03 works very well with Opera 7.50B1.

I know that Fire-whatever has the tabs, blocking, and the mouse movement extensions -- I use it occasionally but the response to the mouse movements is slower and annoying to me. I was having Java problems but those may be fixed in the latest version. Firebird does give me better printing than Opera and I often switch to it for critical hardcopy.

No idea if IE implements any of these features. I have read of people adding custom toolbars and stuff.