I admit, I've been an IE user since the dawn of time. I've seen Netscape come and go (well, as good as gone), and I've never really seen that much additional functionality in Firefox to make me make the swtich. I know each browser has their own camps, and campers tend to defend their respective browsers with a passion, but there's now a few good reasons why you should consider changing. Change to what? Opera. That little browser that nobody ever really cared about.
These guys have really come out of nowhere. Their market penetration was always low, and for good reasons, their browser simply didn't stack up to IE/Firefox (yes, even Safari) in terms of functionality, security, and useabilty. With the release of Opera 9.5 beta, the whole game has changed.
So what features can it possibly have that would make me change a good 10+ years of running IE? Let's have a look:
Speed dial
Generally, I access a handful of sites regularly. I want to be able to access these sites quickly. Opera's speed dial let me do just that. You can set it as the default, hence any new tab or browser instance will spawn this page. The plus side here is you can get each of the pages to automatically refresh in your speed dial every n seconds, hence you can see when your test/prod environments have fallen over, a build has failed, or new content has been added to your iGoogle page etc.
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Mouse Gestures
If your using your mouse to click on the back, refresh, new tab, close tab buttons, then you're sorely missing the fun of mouse gestures. It's nothing new, you can get plugins for mouse gestures in IE and Firefox, but in Opera they're standard. You can use gestures to cycle through the entire page history of the tab your on. On most browsers they'll store just the URL and postback vars, but in Opera the rendered page gets cached so you're not stuck waiting for things to reload as you navigate the history.
Full info on mouse gestures
Address bar search
In the spirit of Google's One box to rule them all, you have all you need in the address bar. Want to search Google for cheap broadband? Type in "g cheap broadband". What about finding a PS3 on Ebay? "e ps3". Nice, simple, reusable.
The best part about this is you can integrate it with your own intranet. Say I want to create a search keyword for Bugzilla:
This enables me to do search my bugs from any page such as: "b connection timeout"
Pages that don't render
I haven't had too much of a problem with this. Sure, the more technically advanced pages that have heaps of javascripting in them (eg: Subtext engines), or are owned by microsoft (eg Popfly.ms) don't jive well with this browser. The saving grace is that instead of having to open IE and navigate to the page I'm trying to view, I can simpy right click in Opera to bring up the context menu, and go Open With -> Firefox, IE, Safari, or any other browser I have installed.
APNG (Animated portable network graphics) support
This is an extention of the existing PNG image format which came out way back in 2004. In March 2007, Firefox added a bit of support for it, until late April when the PNG group rejected the whole thing. I'll go into APNG later, as I think it and its alternatives are a huge step forward in terms of web graphics, particularly compared to animated GIFS.
Other things
There are a few other features in Opera that perhaps aren't as useful, but worth a mention including Widgets, skins and tab previews. These all work well, but don't go much towards accelerating your browsing productivity, so I won't go into them too much. If you like playing with such things, then there are a lot of ways to download and customise Opera to suit.
Opera 9.5 beta is a big step forward for Opera that has really put them up playing with the big boys of the browser world. Its cross-platform support means that everyone can get a piece of it, including mobile users where Opera Mini 4 is available with compressed pages to combat the infiltration of iPhone/Safari.
Many of the features in Opera have been around in various forms for quite a while. Most of these features, however, are included as seperate downloads or plugins that can cause the browser to bloat or run slower than normal. Opera 9.5 beta has a very clean, minimalistic, yet highly functional feel to it which has finally drawn me away from IE and onto something much better.