Firefox success is music to rival's ears

In the past few months, millions of Internet users have switched to a new browser called Firefox, and Jon S. von Tetzchner couldn't be happier about it.

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No, von Tetzchner doesn't own any Firefox stock -- there's no such thing, since a nonprofit group created the Firefox browser. Actually, von Tetzchner is the chief executive of Opera Software ASA, a Norwegian company that sells a browser of its own. That's right. Unlike Firefox or Microsoft, Opera sells its browsers. The 10-year-old company makes money at it too, at least for the past couple of years. And von Tetzchner thinks that the success of Firefox will help his company rake in lots more money in the years ahead by proving that there's nothing inevitable about Microsoft's stranglehold on Web browsing.

Von Tetzchner noted that Firefox came out of nowhere last year, to snap up 5 percent of the global browser market.

''We should be able to do more," he said. ''We have a smaller, faster, more feature-rich browser." Not just better than Microsoft's archaic Internet Explorer. Von Tetzchner says his company's Opera browser beats the stuffing out of Firefox as well.

It's hard to disagree after spending a little time with Opera 8, the newest version of his browser. It's fast, flashy, and crammed with features offered by no other browser.

Speech recognition, for instance. A free add-on program lets you control the browser by speaking into a microphone. You can also have the software read a Web page out loud, in an almost-human-sounding voice -- male or female. It's a nice feature for Web browsers with physical disabilities, or for surfers with a bad case of eyestrain.

Also easy on the eyes is a push-button ''user mode" feature that reformats Web pages to make them more readable. Ever visit a site so gaudy you couldn't stand to look at it? With Opera, you can instantly transform the look of the page, giving it bold black type against a subdued light-green background. Prefer a different style? Opera lets you modify user mode, so you can tailor the appearance of any website to your own tastes.

People who do a lot of Web-based research will embrace the built-in note-taking feature. Just highlight a witty quote from George Bernard Shaw and right-click on it. Up pops a ''copy to note" command. Click that, and the highlighted text is added to a notepad. Now suppose you're accused of making up that clever quote, and you want to find the page it came from. Just click the note, and up pops the original Web page.

There are plenty more goodies where these came from, all part of Opera's campaign to make a browser so good that people would be willing to pay for it. Not that you actually have to pay for it, of course. There's a $39 version that comes with full technical support. But stingy surfers can choose a free version of Opera that displays advertising in a narrow band across the top of the browser.   Continued...