The newsreader functionality has been upgraded but I have not used it as yet. Frankly, Usenet newsgroups hold strong interest for seasoned Internet users while casual surfers usually avoid this area. Again, I do not use this function when surfing and cannot comment on the Opera implementation. The small file size of early Opera versions won praise from many corners of the Internet. With V5, we encounter bloat resulting from added features.
Opera comes in two flavors.
While Opera's size weighs in at half the size of NS and IE, the time required to download the larger version with a dialup modem becomes more of an issue. When installing early Opera versions, the Java add-on involved the annoyance of a separate download from the Sun Microsystems website. Frankly, when visiting websites containing java applications and javascript, Opera performed unevenly. With V5, the Java enabled version installs effortlessly and developers have ironed out the most severe incompatibility issues. However, small, nagging javascript compatibility problems persist.