Opera for Windows 12.15

Opera is a very powerful browser that gives the likes of Internet Explorer and Firefox a run for their money.

It is fast when displaying web pages and comes with lots of extra tools that improve web browsing.

Opera supports tabbed browsing, in fact it was one of the first browsers to do so, and has a Speed Dial view when a new tab is opened.

Up to nine bookmarks can be saved on the page, making it very quick to open your favourite sites.

The choice of Speed Dial sites can be the same on all of the computers you use with a My Opera Account. This account also comes with a blog and photo-sharing space. The Speed Dial settings can also be shared with mobile phones running Opera Mini.

An improved content blocker allows individual elements of a web page to be blocked to avoid adverts. The pop-up blocker has also been improved.

Opera has long had a good email client that uses tags rather than folders to organise emails, just like Google Mail. This means that several tags can be attached to the same email if it straddles several categories. Opera has a 'low-bandwidth' mode to increase the speed of email downloads.

Opera 12 is a major upgrade with a host of new features. The primary changes are speed improvements, through hardware acceleration.