The world of Torrents is quite fascinating. Never before has watching the full season rerun of Mcgyver or Baywatch become SO possible! By installing simple software called "torrent readers" such as uTorrent, you can download just about ANYTHING from popular and safe torrent sites such as Mininova.org and Isohunt.com. This way, you can download movies, music and other stuff.

There are some controversies about the legality of downloading torrents. Many say that it is illegal, unethical and just plain sneaky. Well, let me clear things out for you. Torrent downloading is NOT PIRACY all in itself. It is originally created as a way for people to share stuff (also called P2P sharing and is not considered piracy, but there are boundaries). As long as you don't commercialize and reproduce the stuff you downloaded, you'll be fine. Moreover, in torrent downloading, there is a required activity called "seeding". Seeding is the act of "re-uploading" the stuff that you have downloaded. In a way, when you "seed" stuff, you're like saying "I do not own this, I just borrowed it".

Video Streaming Sites

The rise of video streaming sites such as Youtube, Metacafe, AOL Video, Imeem, and Myspace video has totally changed the internet, and people's lives, during the past decade. Not only can people show themselves and their own footages to the world, videos have made the internet a more exciting place. Whether you watch and upload videos for pleasure, entertainment, business, advertising, social awareness, etc., you cannot deny that it's fun!

Social Networking Sites

The internet has now countless ways for people to interact with each other. 100 years ago, this would have not been possible! Today, almost everyone has a "virtual version" of himself or herself online: the online profile! The reign of Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Everyones Connected and many other similar social networking sites has given people a variety of options to interact and connect with people around the world.

Making Money Online

Perhaps one the "best of the best" things about the internet is that you can use it to make sideline income. Many people even go as far as making a primary income online. There are many ways by which a person can make money online. He or she can try online auctions, such as Ebay. Many people earn money by retailing products and used stuff on Ebay. Others venture to blogging. When you blog, you can get paid many ways: you can earn from Google Adsense revenues, site sponsors, and referrals. Some pro bloggers I know have discovered so many ways to earn from their blog and they also figured out how to drive massive amounts of blog traffic. Meanwhile, other people venture to internet marketing, or selling both digital and tangible products online.

Search Engines and Instant Information

Google search is something that people never had one hundred years ago. In older days, people had to go to the library and make their research (I'm not saying that going to the library is a useless thing to do now). Today, most of us can enjoy the convenience of getting the information we are looking for by a simple click of a finger. In fact, the term "googling" is a new word that has been coined only during the past ten years. The word describes the speed by which information can be gathered at lightning speed.

Email and Messenger Services

Never underestimate the power of email. It has made the communication of human beings faster and more up to date. Although it has quite affected the "snail mail" or post office industry, email it has been a very important part of our lives, and one of the main communication tools in modern society.

Messenger services are fascinating, too. In the past, making long distance calls is a big deal. Today, you can do it for FREE using messenger services such as Yahoo and MSN Messenger. Thank goodness, if you're kinda lost when you're trying to figure out international codes, country codes and area codes, you can save yourself the trouble by going online and making the call via instant messenger (just make sure you have a decent headset, in which case, you have to read "Cool Headset Designs For Computer Freaks").

To wrap things up, let me say, Voila! The internet saved the day.

Everyone has used the Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer at some point in their life, and many have ended up trying/using Mozilla Firefox as a good alternative, but very few have used any other, except maby for Apple Safari which they accidently downloaded whilst updating Itunes.

Opera is a wonderful internet browser that at one time you used to have to pay to use. It has since been made available for free.

It's main version is for desktop/laptop computers, although they have recently made a version for mobile phones, but in this article we will just be covering the PC version.

Right From The Word Go

For a start Opera is very easy to download and install, going to the Opera homepage will point you towards the download section, or simply googling "Opera" will take you direct to the download page. From here you just click to download it and run it. Setup takes a few minutes and doesn't require a restart after it is finished.

After installing it, you can boot it straight up. The default homepage is a page about getting started with Opera, but it can easily be changed by going onto "Tools" then "Preferences" to change the homepage to whatever you want.

The Features

Tabs

Opera has tabs, much like Firefox and the latest Internet Explorer 7 (IE were really behind the times before Vista). This means that you can open up preety much as many pages as you want without having hundreds of windows cluttering your taskbar.

Mouse Gestures

Another great feature that seems to be very Opera specific (although once again add-ons for IE and Firefox will allow this), are mouse gestures. By holding down the right mouse button you can then move it in different directions to do cause different effects. Moving the mouse left with go back a page. Moving right will go forward to the next page on your browser. Moving down will open a new tab, etc. etc.

Although seemingly complecated at first, they are very simple and once mastered can save great amount of time and effort, and once you have started using them, there really is no way back. If you choose to start using Firefox, the first thing you will automatically do is download the mouse gestures add-on, purely due it's ease of use, and win over clicking the back button at the top of your browser.

Skins

These are available right from the start on both Opera and Firefox (but not available on IE), and both are very similar. Basically if you don't like the look of the browser when you first install it (the black is a little dull), you can apply a new "skin" which are created by other users, which will completly change the look of the browser. There are hundreds of skins, with something to suit everyone. Want everything bright blue? Done. Want a subtle vista matching colour scheme? Done. With a little searching you will find a skin that suits your taste.

Widgets

Widgets, despite their amusing name, can actually be very useful, and can be used for many different purposes. Widgets can do just about anything. There are widgets that show you maps of the world, widgets that allow you to play fun little games such as sim aquarium whilst browsing, some widgets can show you real time webcams from all over the world, others allow you to play radio stations or check the news, and some just tell you the time, or show weather forcasts.

Overall widgets are handy little extras that add that extra bit of entertainment or information whilst your surfing the web.

Torrent Downloader

Opera, unlike Firefox, IE, or any other browser I can find, has a built in torrent downloader. For the average person looking to have a nice looking browser that they can happily surf the net on, this won't effect them; but for those who know about downloading files through a torrent, this could be handy.

Rather than having to download a dedicated torrent program such as utorrent, all torrentsbei can be handled easily inside a seperate tab in Opera, which allows you to see all the usual information such as seeders and peers, aswell as being able to do all the standard tasks such as setting download limits etc.

This is probibly one of Opera's greatest achievements, as by having a built in torrent program, whilst it's competitors do not, it means it can appeal to a wider audience.

Easy To Navigate History

Ever looked at a really good news article, then crossed it down, then wanted to look at it but not been able to find it? Well Opera has it covered. All you have to do is type in whatever you want to find into the adress bar, and it will show you the websites/pages you have visited lately where the specific phrase has been used. A good example would be where I was looking at some motherboard upgrades earlier. If (for example) I couldn't remember the website that I was looking at that had them cheap, then I can just type "motherboard" into the address bar, and it will show that earlier I was looking at *whatever motherboard* on whichever page of ebuyer I was looking at it on. Overall this excellent way of browsing your history is just genious, and is great when you can't remember the exact thing you were looking at.

Conclusion

Many things included here are including in add-ons for firefox, or by downloading the popular IE Pro for Internet Explorer users, but the fact that they come built in, means that the creaters of the browser really are in touch with their users, and that is always a major thing when it comes to creating any sort of program, be it a game, an application, or a browser.

Opera really does set a new standard for web browsers, and i'm sure when IE finally gets an update, or when the next generation of Firefox comes out, things Opera has already done, such as including a torrent downloader, or having mouse gestures, will become the new standard for browsers.

One of the biggest problems are providers that that perform traffic shaping on P2P protocols, see avoid traffic shaping on how to counter that. You'll need that if your ISP is listed with an encryption level greater than 0 or a question mark on the Bad ISP list.

Hopefully your ISP will not have an encryption level other than 0. Use that list to see if your ISP does anything to throttle Bittorrent speeds.

Cablevision's Optimum Online, for example, prevents seeding on Bittorrent. Seeding is the uploading of torrent data to other people. Seeding is essential, because people with higher seeding speeds are more likely to have faster download (leech) speeds since more peers (other computers) are likely to connect and mutually transfer torrent data. Therefore, people using Optimum Online will have slower download speeds in Bittorrent.

Luckily, there is something you can do. Azureus recommends to try enabling Tools -> Options -> Transfer -> Use lazy bitfield or try encryption otherwise .