One other thing that FF and Chrome may or may not let you do is view/edit all your link items on the web as well – http://my.opera.com/community/login/?service=link

Also, for better or worse, now that you’ve signed up to use Opera Link you now have available to you your own blogs, photo sharing, friends etc in the My Opera community http://my.opera.com/community/ (look me up )

Chat:
I don’t think there’s anything hidden hear I can illuminate for you. It connects to servers, joins rooms and sends and receives text. As with all other parts of Opera, help is a [F1] press away like – http://help.opera.com/Windows/11.60/en/chat.html

One thing I’m not sure on is why you feel the need to get mail and chat windows out of the way of other tabs? There’s quite a bit that can be done with Opera tabs: moving, pinning, stacking, tiling. Perhaps one of these might be better than creating a separate Opera window? If you get too many tabs, the Window panel is a tree-like view of all you have open, and can normally be a good way to organise things.

You seem to be doing a bit of clicking, so I’d be doing you a disservice if I don’t point out the lots-n-lots-o-keyboard shortcuts available in Opera, including the panels – http://help.opera.com/Windows/11.60/en/keyboard.html#key-panels-activate. There are 13 panels available in Opera out-of-the-box, with quite a few more on offer here http://my.opera.com/community/customize/panel/

Unfortunately, the ctrl+shift+ listings don’t seem to go direct to a particular panel as advertised (on the Win7 box in front of me at least), but I use F4 frequently to open up the panel, and then mouse from there. You can still use the arrow and Tab keys to get around the panels as well. Also, as listed here http://help.opera.com/Windows/11.60/en/keyboard.html#single-key there are numerous single-key shortcuts, but they are disabled by default. To enable – ctrl+12 (or alt+p), Shortcuts, Enable single-key shortcuts, OK.

As with everything in Opera, all keyboard shortcuts can be customised, and you can even create new ones that don’t exit. This blog post is helpful for those keen for a Vim-like Opera experience as found in other browsers via Vimperator or Pentadactyl add-ons – http://my.opera.com/Blazeix/blog/vimperator-for-opera.

One other thing to note with Notes… If you use multiple computers, or multiple Operas on the same computer, Notes are one of the many items syncable via Opera Link. I’ll reserve further Opera Link comments until Steve tries it out.

I’ll have to agree with the default mail panel layout. 11.60 saw the change to the ‘list and messages on the right’ layout, rather than the more familiar, and previous default ‘list and message below’. I changed mine.

As Steve is, I also use IMAP. I receive emails, I send emails, it works. Conveniently, Opera knows emails that come from mailing lists and automagically creates appropriate filtered views for them. And of course, there’s keyboard shortcuts for the mail panel – http://help.opera.com/Windows/11.60/en/keyboard.html#key-mail

Also… “Hmm this looks a bit like Firefox”, should say “Hmm, Firefox looks a bit like this”.

I look forward to your future posts. With any luck, after your sure-to-be adoring praise of Opera in all it’s glory, others won’t look at me funny when I proclaim “Jump on in, the water’s fine!”