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.

The Address bar now shows suggestions based on the title of the page as well as the address so you don't have to remember the beginning of an address to find it in the history.

Opera supports Bittorrent downloads. These type of downloads make best use of available bandwidth by splitting files up and downloading the different bits from several locations at the same time.

The principle of the system is that files downloaded onto your computer should be accessible to others, but Opera can turn this off to conserve bandwidth quotas.

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 9.6 has a new 'low-bandwidth' mode to increase the speed of email downloads.

Widgets are small programs for showing news feeds or other information, some of which can be taken from the web. They are accessed with a single keystroke and are written by the Opera community rather than the company itself.