Why Two Browsers (Or Even Three) are Better Than One and Opera is the Best One of All

I have several different browsers installed on my laptop. In particular, I have Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. I use to have Chrome too but that’s another story. The fact is, I use each and every one of them. I use Firefox and Opera a lot, Safari a little and IE rarely.

Why do I use four browsers? The short answer is: it’s complicated! The main reason I use four browsers is because I’m in the habit of creating learning objects and I need to test my learning objects in the most popular browsers to see whether or not they behave the way I intended. Apart from that I use a particular browser based on what it is that I’m doing. (More on this in a future post.)

Up until about two months ago I wasn’t even using Opera but then there was something very specific which I needed to do that I couldn’t find a way of doing in either Firefox or IE. I was researching an overseas trip and needed to find a way of keeping tabs on a series of web pages relating to each of the cities I was intending to visit. For various reasons social bookmarking didn’t seem to be the way to go. I thought about opening all of these pages in IE then saving them as my Home Pages but IE will only let you save a maximum of eight Home page tabs.

So I decided to download Opera and give it a go. To my surprise the one thing that I really need to do right now can be done in Opera. Using Opera gives me the ability to save a “snapshot” of a series of tabs as a session for viewing at a later date.

It might not sound like much to you but when you’re trying to organise an overseas trip being able to do this can save a lot of time and effort. I have now created a session for each and every one of the cities I will be visiting later in the year. In my next post I'll show you how to save a session in Opera and how to manage your sessions.