Opera 8

A cleaner interface is the most obvious improvement in this release of Opera, but there are also a number of not so obvious enhancements.

The inclusion of voice commands means that you can surf the web simply by talking to your PC (microphone and extra software required), whilst Small Screen Rendering technology and full support for SVG graphics ensures you can correctly view any website in almost any screen or window size.

Extra security helps to protect against phishing attacks by displaying the certificate owner for every secure site and a rating (1 to 3).

Page rendering is extremely fast, and is better than all the other available browsers.

It comes with its own mail client, M2, and includes integrated spam filters, automatic email organisation, and mailing list/newsgroup support. It also has full support for Google's Gmail.

The interface is entirely customisable, so you can display only the functions you want and even change the look and feel to suit.

Opera still has problems displaying some sites, but this is more to do with the coding on the sites rather than with the browser itself.