I use Opera because it just works better than Chrome/-ium or Firefox, has more built-in abilities (sidebar, Unite consisting of webserver, chatrooms, message boards, media player, etc, IRC, mail, RSS-reader, download manager, bittorrent, etc etc)

And because it’s more stable than either Chrome/-ium or Firefox. I have several times found that Chromium crashes every tab if one tab crashes. Opera might be unresponsive for a little while if a tab crash, but it doesn’t affect any other tabs. And it crashes more often than Opera. The statement that the whole program won’t go down if that happens is true, but what good is that when everything crash anyhow? Firefox too crash more than Opera, but there you at least don’t crash all the tabs when one does.

When I install Chromium or Firefox, I have to spend a few hours installing extensions/add-ons just to get the same features I get built-in with Opera.

Another reason I’m using it, is because it’s safer. According to Stay Secure (app/widget/extension from Secunia IIRC), Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer often shows as having several security holes. I’ve checked their browser security page many, many times, and Opera (almost) always is “golden” while the others tend to be “rusty”.

You also get a social network with Opera if you want, called My Opera. It’s got everything you expect from a social network, and in my opinion it’s far better than Facebook. Especially when it comes to privacy.

As with any browser, there are limitations to even Opera’s supreme rule on my computer. Mostly because people tend to code their pages to conform to the non-standard (W3C-standards that is) way Chromium, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer implement HTML, JavaScript, CSS and probably a few other things I know nothing about. So some pages render a little bit different, while official (government) sites tend to be the worst of the lot. At least in my country. I’m still hearing stories about how they’re coding for IE6…..

I might be mistaken, but I believe that more versions of Opera has passed the acid test of standards with 100% than any other browser.

I could’ve kept going for ages about why I love Opera and use it (as much as possible) exclusively, but that would probably be best done in a blog of my own 😉