Back to the future

A small Norwegian company, backed enthusiastically by a community of higher education researchers worldwide, has launched a lean browser as an alternative to the increasingly memory-hungry Big Two (Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer). The browser, Opera, fits onto a floppy disk and will run on a 386 PC with 8MB of RAM. It works on all Windows operating systems and IBM's OS/2. It is fully HTML compliant and has added features for users with disabilities. The company, Opera Software, is now developing Macintosh, BeOS and Linux versions with the help of the research community. Details and download at: www. operasoftware.com.