Developed by Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivars when they were working for Telenor, the Norwegian telecom, Opera is a modern and compact Web browser. The two started Opera Software in 1995, and had a shareware version of their browser available for download on the Internet by the third quarter of 1996. Ever since, Opera has been gaining momentum, winning industry awards, garnering good press, and attracting a devoted following of users. Opera packs a lot of punch in a small, lean package. The application weighs in at a mere 1.5 Mbytes, and is available for download in both 16 and 32-bit Windows versions.
Installation takes less than a minute.
The latest version requires only 4 Mbytes of RAM and 3 to 7 Mbytes of hard disk space. There's a BeOS beta, and a frequently updated alternate operating system status page is maintained at the Opera site. The browser supports 128bit SSL encryption, version 2 and 3. With a modern code-base and a small development team, Opera Software has managed to produce a browser with most of the capabilities of Communicator and Internet Explorer, at a fraction of the footprint. By focusing heavily on customer feedback, Opera Software has established a strong user community.