I double-clicked on a PHP file the other day, hoping to edit it in Eclipse. However, a funny thing happened – it opened in Opera. That’s not necessarily funny in itself, but it is when you consider that I’ve never installed Opera. I use Safari, and since installing Leopard I haven’t yet had to test any websites with other browsers. A quick investigation showed that Opera was actually installed as part of Adobe Bridge. Click the image below to see the Opera binary sat happily in a sub-directory of the Bridge installation.

My initial thoughts were that it would be something to do with displaying help, but according to a couple of other blog posts and the comments in them (example), it seems to be used to preview how things will display on mobile devices.

I can’t say it’s really the end of the world as far as I’m concerned, I just thought it weird that I wasn’t asked or told about it during the Bridge install (at least, as far as I know I wasn’t!). But anyway, if Opera has turned up on your system without your knowledge, maybe that’s why!