Opera's logo.
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Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal computers and mobile phones.
Features include tabbed browsing, page zooming, mouse gestures, and an integrated download manager. Its security features include built-in phishing and malware protection, strong encryption when browsing secure websites, and the ability to easily delete private data such as HTTP cookies.
Opera runs on a variety of personal computer operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. The Desktop Team recently dropped support for Solaris.
Opera is known for originating many features that are later adapted by other Web browsers. Despite these factors, Opera has captured only a small fraction of the worldwide personal computer browser market. It does, though, have a stronger market share on mobile devices such as mobile phones, smartphones, and personal digital assistants. Editions of Opera are available for devices using the Maemo, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, and iPhone operating systems, as well as Java ME-enabled devices.
Features and compatibility[]
Opera publishes the feature list for each version of their Presto rendering engine at this section of their site, which also lists the correlations between recent versions of Presto and Opera. Wikipedia has a more extended and precise (though obviously less reliable) chart here.