Opera's great if you have the same hald dozen or so websites you check every time you logon. As you can set it up to have multiple home pages. I have 6 (Anand's forum, Hippy's Pub, Slashdot, HardOCP, The Register, & JC News 'n links) different webpages that open up as my home pages every time I open the Opera browser. You can tile or cascade the different webpages inside Opera, or you can have them fully open with a Tab bar along the top (you know like the way Windows 'Display Properties' have little tabs for each page), so whatever page you want, you just click its tab bar & it becomes the top page inside Opera.
Opera is also Java, Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime & acrobate, etc, plugin compatible (you just have to stuff arround a little more when setting it up).
I still also use IE5 though, for general browsing (occasionally when using Opera you'll come across some site using non-standards complient MS code, that needs IE4+ for it to open as designed).