Over the past few years, while Microsoft Internet Explorer has come to dominate the Web browser audience (with former champ Netscape staggering behind), there has been a third browser that has quietly gone about its business, often without fanfare, slowly winning over more and more fans: it's called Opera.

Hardcore netjunkies know lots about Opera, created by a Norwegian company in 1994. When it first appeared, it looked more like an interesting experiment, rather than a viable alternative to the big guys. Opera has always had a "small footprint" on a computer - a very small file size. Downloading and installing Internet Explorer takes A LOT of space if you go for all its bells and whistles.

The newest version of Opera (7.5) is only 3.5 megabytes.

Let me repeat that: 3.5 megabytes. It is the Gettysburg Address of Web browsers. Not a line of code is wasted or in the wrong place. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, is the speech then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton gave at the Democratic Convention in 1988 that went on so long he was booed off the stage.

Opera is also different in another way: its comes in two flavors. You can download Opera for free. But then you have to accept ads, and reduced capabilities. But for $39 US you can buy a version of Opera that is ad free, and ready to kick some IE butt. (And in a rather cool twist, as The Washington Times notes, you can actually make your Opera browser look like IE ... or Netscape or Safari, or whatever you like. These "skins" are free and can be downloaded from the Opera site.)

The newest Opera version includes a cool new feature: an RSS aggregator built into the browser. RSS stands for (at least among some people) Real Simple Syndication. If you really like a column or blog, say, like this blog, you can sign up for its RSS feed. (It's just above here in the right hand column, labeled XML ... see it?) Before Opera, you needed to select an RSS aggregator to collect all these RSS feeds. As the Associated Press noted last week, "Support for RSS had been available primarily through standalone applications and as plug-ins for Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer. RSS also comes with smaller browsers like OmniWeb for Macintosh computers."

The aggregator allows you to create, in a way, your own online newspaper or magazine - only it's all your choices. In the new Opera, those RSS feeds will go into the browser's e-mail client, which is cool because you're far more likely to see them in your e-mail.

If you haven't tried browser, give it a spin. Kick the tires. If you like it, you can get rid of that huge copy of Internet Explorer - oh, excuse me, it's part of the operating system, how could I forget? Well, you can just let that copy of IE sit there like a wedding present from your great-aunt that has to be kept around just in case she shows up for dinner some night.