Opera is my favorite browser for several reasons. First, it’s small and fast but full of clever features. The download for the latest Windows version 9 is 4.7 megabytes, which includes not merely the browser but mail, news, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) clients. It also includes many essential enhancements for which other browsers need add-on programs. Among many useful features are a built-in search bar that goes directly to Google (or to seven other search sites), a password manager, a cookie manager, a handy print preview mode, and “fast forward” and “rewind” buttons that select the most likely next or previous pages.

One very welcome feature is a set of options for dealing with those annoying pop-up ads. You can accept them, refuse them, or (most useful of all) open only those pop-ups you specifically request, globally or for specific sites. Yes, other browsers now include some kind of pop-up blocking, but Opera’s is simple, unintrusive, and effective. Microsoft’s pop-up blocking (belatedly added to Internet Explorer with Windows XP Service Pack 2) is nearly as annoying as the pop-ups themselves; comparing Opera’s implementation to Microsoft’s should be enough to convince anyone to switch. There is also the ability to block individual sites by right-clicking a link or image and selecting “Block Content.”

Second, Opera is an elegant alternative to the bloat and corporate arrogance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Its thoughtfully-conceived user interface provides the maximum range of options to let you interact with the Web in the way that’s best for you. For mouse users, Opera makes full use of buttons and wheels, and offers a repertoire of special “gestures” for navigational functions. For those who don’t like (or can’t use) rodents, Opera provides a complete set of keyboard commands and shortcuts.

Opera has unique features designed to help users with imperfect eyesight enjoy the Web. Pressing the “+” key on the numeric keypad enlarges everything in the browser window by 10%; pressing it repeatedly will zoom up to 1000% (the “-” key zooms out). Opera also includes a set of “user mode” options that override a Web page’s fonts, colors, and styles, making text easier to read. You can select an “accessibility layout” that sets text to black sans-serif on a light green background, or choose a “high contrast” setting with black on white or white on black text. Other “user mode” options show HTML structures and elements to help Web designers debug their pages.

A large choice of “skins” and toolbar selections lets you extensively customize how Opera looks. Opera’s Web site includes pre-packaged “setups” to give Opera the look of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari, to ease the transition for users of those browsers. There is also an extensive and continually growing collection of user-developed skins. For Web site developers, Opera strictly adheres to World Wide Web Consortium’s standards for HTML and CSS. So developing and testing a site using Opera means the site should work well with any browser.

Third, because Opera doesn’t rely on Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer components, it has none of the security vulnerabilities that regularly threaten users of Microsoft Internet Explorer. When they do discover a security problem, Opera Software acknowledges it and quickly issues a new version of the browser (they don’t use patches because the entire Opera installation download is smaller than most Microsoft patches). Opera 9 provides advanced security features to protect users against “phishing” scams, including a pop-up notification if a secure site’s certificate doesn’t match the site’s name.

Opera started out as time-limited shareware, and then went to an “adware” model that was fully functional but displayed an advertising banner until you bought a registration code to remove the banner. In September 2005, Opera’s executives finally conceded that it’s too difficult to convince people to pay for their browser when every other browser is free. With the release of Opera 8.5, they removed the banners and registration system and made it free for all to download and use.

The inevitable question is how Opera Software can make money now that their flagship product is free. As a small Norwegian company, they aren’t a monopoly like Microsoft or a media conglomerate like Time-Warner, with lots of lucrative products to offset what they give away. The answer is that they expect to attract enough users to make up in the long run the revenue they’re forgoing in the short term. They have a partnership agreement with Google that provides a small payment every time you use the convenient search bar (and most Opera users use it a lot). They also have licensed Opera’s “Presto” rendering engine to Adobe— if you use any of their Web tools you’re using Opera. They sell and license versions of Opera to mobile phone manufacturers for wireless Web browsing, as well as to various hardware developers for “vertical” applications (Opera for Toaster Ovens, anyone?).

Unfortunately, you’ll probably need to keep Microsoft Internet Explorer around. Many Web sites were developed using the popular Microsoft Front Page software. The resulting pages liberally employ proprietary extensions and characteristics specific to Microsoft Internet Explorer. This means some sites will have problems, or even be unusable, with anything other than Microsoft Internet Explorer. With one notable exception, most of those troublesome sites are the work of amateurs, who click all the fancy formatting and script-extension doo-dads on Front Page’s menus and tool bars without understanding what they’re doing. The “notable exception,” of course, is Microsoft. With typical monopolistic arrogance, some of their Web sites intentionally block or distort pages when a user has a non-Microsoft browser.

Another obstacle is that the Web sites of some banks and corporations check your browser when you enter. If you’re using something other than the current version of Microsoft Internet Explorer (or perhaps a recent version of Netscape or Mozilla) you might see a page informing you that you’re using an “unknown,” “incompatible,” or “obsolete” browser. They typically offer a convenient link to download Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Opera provides a handy way around that problem: Press F12 and you’ll get an option menu that lets you set Opera to identify itself as Microsoft Internet Explorer or as Mozilla (Netscape) for that site. This little white lie is usually enough to get past the gatekeeper. You have the choice of leaving “Opera” in the identification Opera sends to Web sites, or “masking” the identification to exactly duplicate what the other browser sends. “Masking” is useful for those sites that reject anything other than a “genuine” browser, but it’s better to let Webmasters know you’re using Opera unless they give you no other choice. Professional Web developers will only recognize Opera as a “known,” “compatible,” or “up-to-date” browser if it shows up in their logs.

Don’t let compatibility worries put you off. I’ve been using Opera since 1998, and it’s been my sole browser most of that time. I find that version 9 (identifying itself as Opera) works perfectly well about 98% of the time. Changing the identification with F12 usually gets around the checkpoints (and works fine) when it doesn’t. Microsoft-specific formatting or proprietary script extensions only very rarely force me to resort to Microsoft Internet Explorer. You’re probably better off avoiding such sites anyway, especially if they use ActiveX, a proprietary feature of Windows and Internet Explorer that lets Web sites run programs (and possibly wreak havoc) on your computer. If you must resort to lying, it’s probably best to identify as Mozilla rather than Microsoft Internet Explorer. That may avoid Microsoft-specific features on the Web site that could cause problems.

Once you try Opera, you’ll surely find that its cleverness, speed, and usability more than make up for the occasional compatibility problems (which again, you’d get with any browser other than Microsoft’s latest). And whatever inconvenience incompatibility might cause is certainly less than the inconvenience of continually downloading patch after bloated patch from Microsoft to plug dangerous security holes in Internet Explorer. I suspect that the growing exodus from Internet Explorer and its security vulnerabilities will ultimately encourage Web designers to move away from Microsoft-specific features, to everyone’s benefit.

The current free version of Opera is available for Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. Older versions are available for OS/2 and QNX.

PocoMail

I use PocoMail for e-mail and Usenet news. It’s small and very clever shareware ($40; $30 for an upgrade to the current version 4.5), written by Slaven Radic of Victoria, British Columbia. Originally a project he wrote himself (with a support staff of four), Radic (as Poco Systems Inc) now aspires to challenge Microsoft with Barca, which adds a calendar, planner, notes, and diary to PocoMail’s e-mail capabilities for corporate users.

You might wonder why it’s necessary to buy an e-mail program when Microsoft so generously includes Outlook Express with Windows (and bundles the full Outlook with Microsoft Office). There are two reasons. The first is that many Microsoft products are what I call “arrogant software.” The underlying philosophy seems to be that Microsoft has determined the best— and only— way to do things, and users are thus obligated to adapt themselves to the software. Outlook isn’t quite as arrogant as Word (with which I have lost many a bloody battle), but I still find it unpleasant to use (in part because I find some of its “friendliness” quite annoying).

The more important and practical reason is that the prevalence of Microsoft Outlook means virus writers and hackers too frequently exploit it and its security weaknesses to commit their crimes. It’s analogous to modern agriculture, where the “monoculture” of single standard varieties of crops makes the entire crop vulnerable to disease. Many if not most e-mail viruses and worms will stop in their tracks when the recipient uses something other than Microsoft Outlook.

PocoMail, when used with a little common sense, is essentially immune to worms, viruses, and common techniques spammers use to invade your privacy. Unlike Outlook and some third-party mail programs, it includes its own HTML display routines rather than the Internet Explorer “engine” built into Windows. That completely avoids the Microsoft’s security vulnerabilities. You can also tell it to ignore HTML entirely and just show you the text. PocoMail also protects your privacy by not loading images from Web links embedded in mail (unless you specifically enable image loading). This circumvents the “beacons” spammers often insert to confirm receipt, verify “live” addresses for sale to other spammers, and possibly track your Web activity. And it will not open attachments unless you specifically ask it to; even then it warns about the potential risk and asks for confirmation.

Early in 2003, a computer infected with the “Yaha.E” virus sent me over 1000 infected e-mails. They piled up ominously in my mailbox and made me rather anxious, but never affected my machine. PocoMail let me safely examine the messages without opening or running the noxious attachments. My virus scanner confirmed what they were and deleted all the attachments, so no harm was done. Then I set PocoMail to delete anything from the sender of the virus from the mail server without downloading it. Had I been using Microsoft Outlook, my computer would have been infected— and sent the worm to everyone I knew— before I realized what was happening.

Security is not the only reason for preferring PocoMail. Originally the product of an individual, it’s small, lean, and efficient, with a freshness of approach you’ll seldom see from a large team of corporate coders. But it offers a lot of control over mailboxes, message styles, signatures, fonts, colors, spam filtering, and just about every other aspect of its operation. It’s the opposite of arrogant. The message editor provides intelligent quoting and a built-in spelling checker. PocoMail includes a powerful scripting language to control distribution and delivery of messages, but I have not found a need to try it. You can also customize PocoMail’s appearance with a multitude of “skins.” The latest version 4 has a snazzier but slightly simpler user interface, better options for searching through large collections of mail, and faster performance.

PocoMail includes advanced junk mail filtering that combines key word scoring with Bayesian filtering. You can edit a list of key words in headers and body text, assigning them a score. If the scores from key words and various other characteristics is high enough, PocoMail sends the e-mail to a “Junk Mail” folder as it comes in. Augmenting that is a Bayesian filter that you “train” to recognize the contrasting statistical characteristics of valid e-mail and spam by clicking “Junk Mail” or “Good” buttons. I find that the combined filtering works quite well, especially since so much spam includes misspellings, random spaces and punctuation, and strings of random words specifically intended to confuse Bayesian filtering. The filtering doesn’t work with e-mails that contain only a link to a graphical message, but PocoMail won’t display the image unless you request it.

If you’re among the many people who use Microsoft Outlook because it was there when you got your computer, or because your Internet provider’s installation CD set it up for you, it’s well worth exploring alternative e-mail programs. Not only can you avoid many viruses and worms, but you might find a better way to do e-mail.

Take Command

Even though the only officially-sanctioned way to interact with modern computers is by pointing and clicking on hieroglyphic icons, there are many tasks more easily done at an “old fashioned” command prompt. JP Software’s Take Command for Windows (new users, $100, upgrades $50) is a powerful replacement for the CMD.EXE that runs when you open a “Command Prompt.” If you spend any time at all using the “Command Prompt,” Take Command is indispensable. It adds hundreds of powerful commands and enhancements that Microsoft never bothered to add to their command-line interpreters, and replaces a slew of DOS or console-mode utilities.

A complete list of added commands would be too lengthy to include here. But a (very) few of them are a text file viewer; a file/text finder; editable command and directory histories; file date/time “touch;” FTP capability to manipulate remote files as if they were local (I use it to manage this Web site); GUI dialog management; T and Y “pipe fittings;” and file descriptions (originally a way around the “8.3” file name limitation of DOS, but still very useful). You can also play audio files, or send e-mail or instant messages from the command line. Many standard commands are enhanced. For example, you can get a directory of files with today’s date (with file names colored according to their extension); specify a list of files to exclude from copying moving, or deletion; schedule copying, deleting, renaming, or moving “access denied” files for the next reboot; or set the computer’s clock from a time server. You can create aliases for commands or groups of commands, and map them to keys.

Take Command provides enhanced command line editing. You can recall the previous command with the up-arrow key, select command from a list, or use control-0 through control-9 to select an individual parameter of the previous command. Since Take Command is a fully graphical application, it provides a scroll-back buffer from which you can cut and paste text.

Take Command greatly enhances the Microsoft’s batch file capability into a comprehensive and powerful programming language. Control structures include block IF, DO loops, and subroutines. And an extensive set of system information variables and functions manipulate numbers, strings, file names, and even Registry keys. It integrates with REXX, Perl, and Ruby if that’s what you prefer. An interactive debugger is built in. And if that’s not enough, Take Command provides a plug-in interface to add your own commands, or download plug-in libraries. Despite all the enhancements, the developers have gone to great lengths to ensure compatibility with all the Microsoft quirks (documented and otherwise) often exploited in batch files.

As a small but useful example of Take command’s extensions, I have a simple alias to show the total size of all files in the current directory and all its sub-directories. When I’m working on a travel photo essay, I create a directory for all the pictures, with separate sub-directories for the 16-bit master files, full-sized JPEG versions, small JPEGs for the Web, camera raw files with their Adobe Camera Raw “sidecars,” and miscellaneous working files. When I’m finished with all the pictures, I archive everything to a set of DVDs. I need to know how large all that data is to determine how it fits on the disks. The alias is DIRSIZE and the code is ECHO %@comma[%@filesize[/s *.*]]. It uses two “variable functions:” @filesize does the actual scanning and totaling, and @comma formats the resulting number with commas. The old-fashioned ECHO command writes the output. Adding some parameters to @filesize (@filesize[/s *.*,bc]]) would format the number without the need for @comma, and I could get the result in kilobytes or megabytes rather than bytes by changing @filesize[/s *.*,bc]] to @filesize[/s *.*,kc]] or @filesize[/s *.*,mc]].

JP Software previously sold a separate console-mode command interpreter called 4NT. It had the same functionality as Take Command, but could run some text applications faster because it was purely text based without the GUI windowing overhead. I used it to run the combination of batch files and Pascal filters that creates the index of pictures for this Web site. They also offered TCI, a graphical container that ran console applications in tabbed windows. Version 9 of Take Command now combines these functions into a single program that also includes a basic graphical file explorer with directory tree and file view panes. One or more instances of the command interpreter (now renamed TCC) run in tabbed windows within Take Command. Any other console-mode applications can also run in tabbed windows. You can still launch TCC separately as a console application, but there seems little reason to do that. Windowing performance has improved to the point where it causes no loss of speed. If you aren’t using the file explorer, you can quickly toggle one or both panes out of the way until you need it. You can also set up a toolbar with buttons to launch your favorite applications.

The integrated “graphical console” approach lets you easily switch between a graphical and a command line interface as you deem appropriate, all within in one application. The integration brings other advantages. You can drag and drop a file from the explorer (or from any other application or the desktop) to the command line window. The name of the file then gets added to the command line, enclosed in quotes if the name has embedded spaces. That’s certainly easier than typing long file names! The file explorer isn’t as powerful as some file managers— I use and recommend VCOM’s $40 PowerDesk® Pro; there’s also a good freeware version— but it’s more than adequate.

Take Command 9 is the latest in a line of advanced command interpreters that began in 1989 with 4DOS, a replacement for the primitive COMMAND.COM that was the text-based face of MS-DOS in the days before Windows made computers user-friendly. I started using 4DOS in 1990, on a 12 MHz 286 machine running MS-DOS 3.3. I’ve relied on it, and its various descendants, ever since. Over the years I’ve seen the command interpreter evolve an impressive array of features. But I suspect it may now have reached its full maturity in terms of truly useful features. So my guess is that future versions of Take Command will focus on enhancing the integrated file explorer to make it competitive with products like PowerDesk.

UltraEdit

IDM’s UltraEdit is an excellent shareware text editor for programmers and Web developers ($50 for new users; $25 annually for upgrades). Unlike many Windows products, it has a lot of features without excessive bloat. It can work with multiple files, including searching and replacing text on a selected set of disk files. It includes check-as-you-go spell checking, word-wrap, and text formatting. For Web development it includes a browser view (using the Internet Explorer libraries integrated into Windows) and an integrated version of HTML Tidy, an HTML validator. UltraEdit can handle various flavors and formats of ASCII (for Unix and DOS) and includes a full macro and scripting capability.

While there are several other editors that offer these features, UltraEdit includes a full hex-file editor, integrated ftp (useful for publishing Web files and debugging CGI scripts), and configurable syntax highlighting for up to ten different programming languages (including HTML, C/C++, and Perl). The latest version (14) adds “environments” configured for different types of users and tasks, including Web development, technical writing, programming, and system administration. You can configure any of the “environments” to your own preferences.

A shareware competitor to UltraEdit well worth considering is NoteTab. NoteTab comes in three versions, “Light,” “Standard,” and “Pro.” The “Light” version is freeware, but it is anything but light on features. It’s a great replacement for Microsoft’s crippled Notepad editor, and handles large and multiple files in any available font. The “Standard” version costs $20 and includes a spell checker and thesaurus, better text formatting, and the ability to search and replace text in files on disk. The “Pro” version costs $30, and adds HTML syntax highlighting, faster text replace, bookmarks, outlining, and numerous other features.

It can be difficult to decide between NoteTab Pro and UltraEdit. NoteTab is cheaper and, perhaps, slightly friendlier to use. But I think UltraEdit has enough additional useful features to give it an edge. Try both and decide for yourself. Even if you don’t need a full-featured editor like UltraEdit or NoteTab Pro, it’s well worth downloading the free NoteTab Light.

Terabyte Unlimited Image for Windows

A “drive image” backup is an exact copy of an entire hard disk or partition on CD, DVD, tape, or some other external media (preferably with compression to save space and writing time). It can be a real life-saver— or at least a system-saver— if a hard drive suffers a catastrophic failure. That’s happened to me twice. Just plug in a new hard disk, restore the image from a CD or DVD, boot the restored disk, and you’re up and running. It’s an essential complement to a file-level backup that allows easy access to individual files.

I first discovered Terabyte’s Image products in 2003, when I bought a Memorex “True 8x” DVD writer. The drive came bundled with Nero Express OEM, which included an adequate file-level backup feature. But it lacked a drive image capability. Version 2 of NTI’s Backup NOW!, which I had been using for years to make file-level and drive-image backups on a CD writer, didn’t support any DVD writers. So my first thought was to look at upgrading to the then-current version 3. Its Web site claimed “extensive backup device support” including the “widest range” of DVD writers. In the fine print was a note to check their Web site for a list of supported devices. My DVD burner wasn’t on the list, and their prompt reply to my e-mail query was an apology that they had no plans to support it any time soon. So off to Google I went.

Although the Web site for Symantec’s Drive Image claimed it would work with “virtually any internal or external drive,” my drive wasn’t one of them. And even if it did support my writer, it required Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1. Putting another reeking pile of Microsoft bloat and security holes on my machine wasn’t particularly appealing. Acronis True Image, PC Magazine’s “Editors’ Choice” for drive backup, could only write DVDs using external UDF packet-writing software— and the one that came with my drive can’t format DVD+R disks. Paragon’s Drive Backup couldn’t burn an image directly to DVD at all under Windows 98. (I have since bought a new computer with XP).

Having exhausted the realm of commercial shrink-wrap software, I turned to shareware. I found exactly what I was looking for in Terabyte Unlimited Image for Windows. This is a straightforward, no-nonsense tool that creates a bootable CD or DVD with a compressed image of a hard disk partition. At $39, it’s about half the price of its cheapest commercial competitor. Its user interface isn’t fancy or pretty, but all the features are easily accessible. And mirabile dictu, it could write directly to my DVD writer! How could a little shareware company manage what NTI or Symantec (heir to the famous Norton Utilities) can’t? I don’t know. But it works. And it probably works with any DVD writer (a real advantage of shareware is that you can find out if it really works on your system before you buy it).

The purchase price also includes Image for DOS and Image for Linux. You’ll need Image for DOS to create bootable CDs or DVDs, since it has the loader and DOS needed to boot. You’ll also need it if you’re running Windows 98/ME and you want to back up your C drive. For modern NT-based systems (Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista), Terabyte includes PHYLock™, a driver that can lock system files and allow the backup of a running C drive from Windows. But it’s apparently not possible to implement this capability under DOS-based Windows.

The solution— and a viable alternative for XP as well— is to put Image for DOS on a bootable floppy disk (the Image for Windows installer includes an option to create one using its own MS-DOS clone) and make the backup after booting from that disk. Image for DOS works at the hardware level so it can find and access your CD or DVD writer— and even read an NTFS partition on a large hard disk— without any special drivers. Image for DOS (along with the file that creates a bootable CD or DVD) is small enough to fit on a single floppy. But it has all the features of the Windows version, including a decent user interface and the ability to write directly to a DVD burner or to a USB external drive. Even if you don’t use Image for DOS as your normal backup tool, it’s a good idea to let the installer create that floppy disk. That way you’ll have more options to restore an image file if Windows becomes corrupt and unable to run.

Image for Windows offers two selectable levels of optional encryption for backup files. It can also optionally omit the Windows paging and hibernation files to save time and space on an image of a system partition (those large files contain no useful data, and Windows will just re-create them when you start it from a restored partition). There’s also the option to make a differential backup of only the files that have changed since the last full backup. That should make frequent backups much more convenient. Another very useful feature is TBIView™, a Windows Explorer extension that lets you navigate a drive image file on a hard disk, CD, or DVD, and extract individual files. The original versions of TBIView were so slow— accessing a DVD backup could take several hours— that it was useful only when desperately needed. But it nonetheless saved me from stupid mistakes more times than I’m willing to admit. The current version 2 of the Image products changed the format of drive image files, which greatly speeds up TBIView. It’s now fast enough to effectively make Image for Windows a file-level backup program as well as a drive image backup tool.

Another useful free add-on utility is BINGBURN™. If you write image files to a hard drive, BINGBURN can create a set of bootable CDs or DVDs from the files. I have found that the fastest way to back up my C drive is to write the image files on my second internal hard drive. This takes only a few minutes (including a full byte-by-byte verification of the image files), as opposed to an hour or more to write directly to DVD. Then I can do other things with my computer as BINGBURN creates the DVDs.

Commercial products may now have caught up with the DVD writing capabilities of Image. But I can definitely recommend Image for Windows as an excellent and inexpensive drive image backup tool that’s doubles as an excellent and inexpensive file backup and recovery program. And it’s impressive proof that software can be powerful and useful without unnecessary bloat or fancy bells and whistles. Image for DOS, which fits handily on a floppy disk, proves that the art of writing elegant and compact code is not lost. Microsoft could learn much from Terabyte Unlimited!

Terabyte frequently makes minor updates to the Image software. You can sign up for a mailing list that announces those updates. The only real criticism I have about the Image products is that Terabyte’s Web site makes downloading these updates unnecessarily difficult for registered users. Clicking any of the “download” links gets you the current trial version, which you don’t want. You get the current registered version through the link confusingly labeled Existing Customers: Click here to upgrade from V1 to V2. It leads to a “Product Download” screen that asks for your name, e-mail, and the order number that came with the e-mail confirming your original purchase. If you’ve bought version 2, clicking “Submit” finally gets you the download page for the current registered version. If the order number was from a purchase of version 1, you’ll get a screen for buying an upgrade. Once you know this secret it’s not difficult to get updates, but you’re in for some frustration until you figure it out.