Your Opera experience starts with the first download of the browser. Hopefully, you will have your Opera Web browser up and running in minutes. If you already know your system well, you can probably go straight to the download page without reading on.
Computers come in different shapes, sizes, and colors.
Though this is generally not something most users concern themselves with, you do need to know a few things before downloading Opera to make sure you get the correct file. A platform is the computer system on which application programs such as Opera run. Different platforms usually mean different environments, which in turn requires different software designs for each particular platform. Therefore, you need to know on which platform and on which operating system you will be running Opera. Examples of platforms are BeOS, EPOC, Linux, Mac, and Windows.