Opera 6.0 is out...

[conantheobald]

...and my first impressions are; "this is how the browser wars are supposed to be".

Theres an array of built in features - gimmicks, if you will - like the mandatory email and IM stuff, but the one I'm most impressed with is the "Hotclick" dictionary/encyclopedia/translate feature. Double-click on a word, or right-click on a phrase, and you get a menu allowing you to look it up or translate it.

Pretty cool, I thought. It sounds almost like Microsoft's "SmartTags", but it's been implemented properly and won't cause half the controversy.

Oh, and it's only 3 Megs to download (Microsoft - whywhywhy 17MB for IE6???)

[Chris H]

Translate does sound good. Mouse gestures are great.

Reason it's only 3Megs is that that installation doesn't include the JAVA.

And it still won't log onto my banks home banking page. And they haven't sorted out some probs with the email client. Havan't tried the newsreader yet, but previous versions have been laughable.

I'd love Opera to be a serious alternative to IE, but they haven't got there yet. Soon though.

[Husain]

I use Opera 5 and like it a lot. Opera, however, does not understand CSS2 quite well yet. I don't know if version 6 has solved this 'misunderstanding'

One thing I can say for sure: Opera is much better than Netscape.