Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  A Browser That Talks Back (01 Mar 2005) The browser itself is fast and consistently crash-free. Opera has been ahead of the curve on tech specs and performance since the mid-1990s, but Wired News recently dubbed it "The Forgotten Browser"—latecomer Firefox now gets gushing reviews for features Opera had years ago. If Opera wants to strike back by luring away headset-wearing freaks like me, it has a bit more work to do. The speech-recognition software, which comes from IBM, performed well even with the stereo cranking a couple of feet away, but there are a few missing features. You can't speak URLs into the browser yet. It would also be nice if Opera had a "search" command—shouting "Opera, search Paul Boutin!" would look for the phrase "Paul Boutin" using my default search engine. Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2114194/ Read 39 more articles from Slate sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Creating an upwards spiral for your intranet     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy