Opera 11 for Windows Is A Wake-up Call

Opera 11 For Windows …

Opera 11 is the browser your browser wants to be. Yes, that’s right this is the Old Spice Guy of Web browsing.

Take a moment and jump to the features page:

I’m only going to glance over a few things here but these are the ones that stand out.

1. Somebody locked the business guy in a closet and let the Product Manager, Head of R&D and QA Manager produce a robust browser with a strong set of features and great UX.
2. The browser can be installed and run from Disk on Key. I tested this and noticed no degradation in performance.

3. The Opera Toolbar contains a QR Code generator for the current open tab’s URL.

There a bunch of other neat implementations of features here but I’m hoping the Internet Explorer 9 Beta team have noticed the QR Code Generator and sat down for coffee with the Microsoft Tag team and said,

“Hey guys, did you see what Opera did? We should emulate that with a MS Tag generator in the toolbar too. But hey, let’s go one step further and let it recognize the data type you select in the webpage and create the right tag for it. You know like Contact for Address data, URL for a link and so on.”

Tag has an API from what I can tell and if this is Microsoft’s killer competition to QR (I like it and it works well) then why not integrate across the board in IE, Office and other mainstream Microsoft Applications?

Opera 11 for Windows is at least the browser the big guys should be looking at to see smart implementation of useful features, at most with it’s stability and competitive speed Opera is a contender to be wary of. Have you tried it yet?