Over the past few months I've reacquainted myself with the Opera Web Browser. I'd used it before in previous iterations, and wasn't pleased with the way that it parsed web pages. Displays were off, it was minimally customizable, and seeing that the only thing it offered at the time, was marginally faster browsing, I went sulking back to Mozilla, or IE, or whatever I thought was the gold standard at that point.
I've taken back to Oprea, after Chris told me about their 10th anniversary. What with the variable speeds of downloads and Wi-Fi (haven't plugged in in months) the little speed boost is nice, but I really like the fact that if the computer or program crashes, it can recover your lost tabs. And if you close a tab accidentally, there's a "trash" can where closed tabs from a window can be recovered. The program still borks on tables, from time to time, but there are a lot fewer tables on the internet these days, and there are a couple of minor features that I'm still waiting on, but it's become my favorite browser.
I've also started saving tabs much more aggressively than I used to. I'll open a window, open anywhere from 10 to 60 tabs and then read them over the next few weeks. It's replaced bookmarking, and it lets me survive away from an active connection for a while. Since, Opera saves tabs for ever, basically, there are some tabs that I've had open for a while, and as the title of this post suggests, I lost a huge mess of them a few days ago.
Let this message be both an endorsement for a great program, and a warning against personal stupidity. Save your sessions (oh, did I mention, Oprea lets you do that too!), and don't click the "No" button by default.
Cheers, sam