Handy, you should try the smooth scrolling on Opera 7.2. It's far smoother than IE, at least on the system here I just compared them on. This is at least in part because it renders faster and thereby has less flicker.
There's also no overshoot with normal wheel scrolling like there is with IE. You should try using IE with a remote control connection - it's no fun.
Opera also has mouse gestures if you're really obsessive about staying glued to your mouse. Myself, I tend to just grab the scroll bar and drag it to the bottom or top as required. I reckon I can do this faster than your preferred 'autoscroll' technique (which has been around in Logitech mouse drivers and software such as WordPerfect for several years).
But really, the sensible way to get to the bottom of the page is to cast your eyes downward and guide your pinky towards the button marked 'End'.
Speed differences between browsers are increasingly masked as PCs get faster. It's a little more obvious if you compare them on say, a Celeron 433.
At this point in time, my tests show Opera 7.2 is the fastest at rendering graphics, with Firebird/Mozilla next and IE a distant third. However, the aspect of responsiveness that I
really appreciate is the speed with which Opera can step back through my browsing path.
Anyone who has used Opera 7.2 on this forum will have noticed the extra navigation bar that includes the ability to walk the threads. On any site, you can jump straight back to your entry point with a single click.
The built-in download manager works really well. One of my daughters is an IE fan, but has realized the error of her ways and uses Opera just for her media downloads.
The bookmark and history managers are great. In addition, you can remove all traces of your activity in seconds. Cookie management is excellent, and the popup suppression is smarter than Mozilla's.
If you're fast (by definition you prefer a keyboard to a mouse) or are stuck on a laptop with a stupid touchpad, there's no question Opera will save you time and hassle. Want to jump to the URL input field? Press F8. Cycle through your windows with Ctrl-Tab. Zoom the
entire window contents larger or smaller instantly with the + and - keys.
There's stacks of genuinely useful features. One of my absolute favourites is the built-in Google searching. If I'm typing this post with IE and want to quickly look something up, my fastest course is to press Ctrl-N, wait (because it thinks I want to duplicate the page!), move my hand to the mouse and click a link to Google (if I wanted to type in a new URL, I have to click in the URL locator field because IE moves focus to the page :x ). I then type in my search expression (say, "Epox capacitors") and hit Enter.
In Opera, I press Ctrl-N, type "g Epox capacitors" and hit Enter.
As for Mercutio's comments ...
If you're going to make a big noise, make sure you know what you're talking about. I'm not claiming to be by any means perfect in this regard, but if I make strong assertions, it usually means that I've spent considerable time on the topic at some stage and am prepared to back up what I say.
Opera introduced a new rendering engine in version 7. Teething problems were bad and I am on record as condemning it as alpha software. It now looks seriously stable; no-one here can remember a crash for months. And by God, IE certainly
does crash - so do all browsers - just fairly infrequently these days. And I seem to recall everyone having sport several months ago with a simple line of HTML that consistently crunched Microsoft's finest. This has happened to every product and will no doubt happen again, particularly with the abominable quality of many plugins such as the fetid Flash family.
On the other hand, the frequent crashes in Opera 5 a couple of years ago inspired the authors to add an automatic recovery feature that is still very useful today when either Windows or your hardware is unstable.
I can't see anything wrong with the user interface. You say it's broken - that's a strong claim. Let's have details, not vague noises. 8)
Finally, contrary to what some here seem to be implying, IE does
not render everything on the web correctly. A quick example would be Oracle's online knowledgebase, which also causes Exploder to throw an error when loading each page. Sorry, I can't show you because it's only accessible to paid-up customers. :-?
