My wife Rachel, steady as a rock for all the time we've been together, is taking voice lessons to become a diva. Every night, the same thing. "Bella signora ..."

Even my dog Beauregard has also gone over to it, joining Rachel in exalted duets of scales and arpeggios. I know what you're thinking, but he's actually pretty good.

And now I learn that the hottest download on the Internet is a browser program called -- Opera.

Opera is the unlikeliest thing since Internet phoning. Created for internal use by Telenor, the Norwegian phone company, it is a full-service browser that fits on a single diskette, downloads in four minutes, and calls up websites faster than you can say Microsoft Internet Explorer Four-Oh.

Why is Opera such a pleasant surprise? Because the past two years have been one long, dreary, white-knuckled fight between Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator. Netscape, the first great browser, was the darling of both the Internet and Wall Street as recently as eight months ago. Since then, Microsoft, with its marketing clout, its deals with computer makers, and its insistence on building the browser right into Windows, not only overcame Netscape, but is threatening that company's very existence.

As the ancient saying goes, when the elephants got to war, the big loser is the grass. But Opera, created on a dime, has very little to lose. Because it deliberately offers fewer features than the code-bloated big browsers, it isn't slowed by its own hugeness.

And the darn thing works. It runs Javascript and all the usual plug-ins. The program itself loads on my Pentium 200 in about eight seconds. And it connects to Yahoo news in about six. You may not know your computer's browser's speed offhand, but take it from me, it isn't this fast. Opera is so fast, you may want to postpone buying that 56k modem for a few weeks.

Opera is as pure as Nordic snow. Netscape interprets Internet HTML code one way, and Internet Explorer a slightly different way. If you have used both, you know that what fits on one doesn't always fit as easily on the other. But Opera swears by the fjords that it is 100% HTML 3.2 compatible -- no variations. So you can use Opera as a kind of pitchpipe, to make sure you're writing universally understandable HTML code.

Opera is very customizable, and allows you to have more than one home page, to stave off boredom. You can window several sites simultaneously. And it's the first browser to figure out the important of hotlinks. Where IE40 clobbers you with its humongous scroll of "Favorites," and Netcape carefully hides its "Bookmarks" panel where you can never find it, Opera puts these frequent links right in from of you, so you're never more than a keyclick from the places you go to the most.

And there is a side benefit that you should be aware of. Unlike Netscape and Internet Explorer, which require almost constant use of the mouse, with all the aches and pains that come from mouse use, Opera lets you use keyboard shortcuts for most operations. If you hate your mouse, or it is trying to maim you, Opera provides a healthy reprieve.

Opera isn't perfect. It doesn't look quite as nice, to me, as its big time competitors. The windows are smaller and harder to adjust. And plug-ins have to be plugged in by hand in the current version. No wizard appears to do it automatically for you.

It's limited to Windows 95 use. And it's not been translated into every language, like the big fellows, although English and Norwegian should cover Minnesota well enough.

Then there's the matter of filthy lucre. Microsoft, and now Netscape, are giving you their browsers free, as a nice gift. In sharp contrast, Opera charges $35 to register. The first 14 days of use are free. But another ancient saying applies here: beware of free gifts from Redmond, Washington.

The only other quibble I have with the product is with the name. All my life, I have never been a big fan of opera. To me, it was establishment music, oversized, stuffy, and a little snobby. The Opera browser is just the opposite of those things -- it's renegade, compact, bright-eyed, and egalitarian. Rock and Roll would be a better name.

But what's in a name. I suggest you check out Opera Software's site and discover Opera's virtues for yourself. Meantime, should you require a cheerful testimonial, look at me -- I'm singing!

For more about Opera .

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.