Daniel Goldman at Opera Watch is running an interesting experiment dubbed blog tagging: blog about 5 things you would suggest Opera to improve some of their products and then tag 5 other blogs to keep it moving. I’ve been tagged by Ryan Wagner from Cybernet News‘, so here I go.

I really appreciate Opera efforts and innovations through the years and as I once said I firmly believe neither Opera, nor Internet Explorer or Firefox will cater to all users. Which is great as diversity keeps competition and innovation around, something we just forgot about during the dark IE only years.

1. An updater. At less than 5 MB, Opera installer is remarkably small to include not only a web browser and an email client. But nothing beats an automatic 500KB update download. Users shouldn’t have to worry about updates.
2. Extensions. One of the main reasons I prefer Firefox is that it starts from the belief that it can’t be the ideal browser for everybody, so it can be tweaked and customized until you drop.
3. Remove the email client. I am not sure how many people still use desktop email apps but you can count me out. I’d like at least to be able to uncheck the email component when installing it.
4. Offline web applications support. I truly believe it’s the next step for web application: Google Gears is on it and Firefox 3 will make it real for a significant share of web users. I guess Opera is already working on it but just can’t miss not mentioning it here.
5. Web content/protocols handlers. Another one I am expecting from Firefox 3: this will allow for example to open Word documents with Google Docs & Spreadsheets directly or mailto: links with you preferred web mail service.

And that’s it. I tried not to make it sound like “how to convert Opera in Firefox” but I guess it’s hard not to being a long time Mozilla Suite and Firefox user. So, to compensate for my dirty bias, I will say I like Opera’s native BitTorrent support and web feeds reader (which of course can be added with some extension magic). These two features I think pretty much highlight the difference between Mozilla and Opera approaches to web browsers.

I also wish I could suggest something to improve the Nintendo DS Browser. I was eagerly expecting for its release in the US. But when I finally got my hands on it I was so disappointed with its performance that I took it back to the store. I find hard to say the Nintendo DS gear is not powerful enough but then I’d take a smaller feature set for better performance any day. The Wii’s Internet Channel in the other hand totally rocks. And once a Wii keyboard is available it will rock even more.

Now for the tags. Since I can’t see any restriction to English only I’ll include some international Firefox dedicated blogs: Mitch Keeler from Firefox Facts, Nicolás and foXtensor from Zona Firefox (español), Sinklar from Be:Fox (française), aljullu from FirefoxCAT (catalán) and the Difunde Firefox crew (español). Let’s see what you have to say.