There are only two Web browsers available for Windows 95/98 - Netscape Navigator/Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, right? Wrong. Quite apart from the plethora of rather basic and limited browsers available from shareware and public domain sources, there's Opera. Opera is to the big two browsers what a Mini is to a Rolls-Royce. It does basically the same job, without any of the padding, and takes up far less space and resources. It can also do one or two things that the others can't.

With a download size of little over 1MB, and consuming around 2MB after installation, Opera was designed to be small and fast. Fast enough, in fact, that we were even able to use the 16-bit version on a 386 PC with 4MB of memory under Windows 3.11. Try doing that with even the previous versions of Navigator or Internet Explorer and you'll be greeted to excessive appearances of the hourglass. HTML decoding accounts for plenty of processor cycles in the big two browsers, something that becomes apparent when using them on slower systems, side-by-side with Opera.

Yet Opera is a powerful browser. It supports HTML3.2, SSL 2 and 3 encryption, Javascript and Netscape-compatible plug-ins. One area in which Opera is streets ahead of its rivals is in support for multiple open windows. As can be seen in the screenshot below, four open windows present no problem, although obviously the more you have open the slower each individual page will update. Another impressive feature is the zoom control: if a Web page won't fit on the screen, or is too small to read easily, it can be zoomed up or down at the click of a button, from 20 percent to 1,000 percent. Or, indeed, at the press of a key, since Opera has also been designed to work without a mouse if necessary, making it more accessible to disabled users. For particularly slow Internet connections, image downloading can be switched off, making pages load much faster, although those with image maps may then be hard to navigate.

Opera doesn't offer all the features of the mainstream browsers. There's no Java or DHTML support, its mail client is rudimentary and so is its news reader. But these are things that the developers plan to remedy, using as few bytes of code as possible. Registration of the current version allows you to update to interim versions at no extra charge.

If you want to browse the Web without shelling out for new hardware, Opera is ideal. Even regular surfers, tired with bulky downloads and sluggish performance, will find it impressive, although not all of the latest Web 'standards' are currently implemented.