Everyone have their own favourite web browser. As for me, my favourite web browser is Opera. Why Opera? Even though Opera is not open source like Mozilla Firefox, it has a lot of great features that make me love Opera. One of them is the mouse gestures. The mouse gestures feature in Opera is indeed the most powerfull feature that a browser can have. Opera allows you to fully customize the mouse gestures.

With mouse gestures, you can perform actions without having to browse through the menu, clicking buttons and pressing any keys on the keyboard (almost). For me, it will greatly improve your browsing experiance and the navigation for the lazy. In this post I will list a few useful default Opera mouse gestures.

Back and Forward
To move back to a previous page, you can actually right click without releasing your mouse button, drag the cursor to the left and release it. To go forward, right click, hold and drag the cursor to the right. You don't even need to click the back or forward button.

Stop
To stop a page from loading, just right click without releasing the button, and drag the cursor up.

Open a link in a new tab
To open a link in a new tab, right click on the link without releasing the button and drag the cursor down.

Open a link in a new background tab
To open a link in a new background tab, right click on the link, drag the cursor down and up without releasing the button. Make sure the cursor is on the particular link before you release the button. It is quite difficult if the link is small or there are other links near the link. The cursor don't need to be on the link before you release it.

Refresh a page
To reload or refresh a page, right click, without releasing the button drag the cursor up and down, and release the button.

Close the active tab
There are 2 mouse gestures to close an active tab. First is right click, drag the cursor down and right before you release the right mouse button. The second one is right click, drag the cursor right, left and right again. I prefer the first method since it only involves 2 gestures.

Fast-forward
Opera is able to find the 'next page' automatically, for example, on Google\Yahoo\MSN search results. In Opera, you can simply fast-forward without having to find and manually click the link to go to the next search results. To perform a fast-forward action, right click, without releasing the button, drag the cursor right and up. The fast-forward and rewind also works with some blogs.

Rewind
On Google search result, the rewind command will bring you to the main search page of Google. On Yahoo and MSN, this command will bring you to the first search result page. To perform the rewind command, right click and drag the cursor to the left and then down before releasing the button.

If you don't like the default mouse gestures commands, you can easily customize it. Just go to Tools > Preferences > Shortcuts (1). Under mouse setup, click on the profile (2), and click 'Edit' (3).

It took me some time to learn and get used to Opera mouse gestures. Of course, you don't have to learn all of them. Do you use Opera? If you use Opera web browser a lot, do you use the mouse gestures feature?

[Opera]