Slashdot Mirror

Really, the Opera web browser has allowed me to do great things throughout the internet, with hundreds of tabs open, and consequently more bookmarking being done, and session management, I do not know how productive I would be with Firefox alone. Commonly, when stranded on Firefox-only systems, I am burdened with odd tab loading impairments and generally limited to acting like I am doing literally one thing and one thing only-- no queuing up content or strands of thought, etc. Even with the hierarchical vertical tabbing enhancements through the TBE extension akin to iRider, my productivity seems to drop. So, I am glad to see more (good) publicity for Opera.

The funny thing about comparing operating systems is that frequent users of each OS are blind to the failings of their own, and are driven insane by the failings of others. For example, I find scrolling in even the latest OSX to be painful, but I love it on Windows. People get driven nuts by explorer pausing when it tries to find things that aren't there, but I don't notice it and instead go batty when Finder wastes time panning to the right in column view.

On Windows, I have a small set of utilities (notably strokeit, trip* and remote desktop) that I rely on heavily, and while other platforms have their equivalents, I just don't find them anywhere near as good (remote desktop, in particular).

Now don't get me too wrong - I would rather use default OSX over default Windows, but give me a customised Windows, and I'll take it over any other OS. It's the same reason I use an IE shell (iRider) over FireFox - one may be the technically 'better' solution, but the other just does exactly what I need it to, and lets me do it faster.

I guess my point is the obvious - people are most productive in whatever they're used to, and whatever suits them.

Answer:

Because this is not really a stand alone browser. It is a rip off version of IE. Just like irider and myie2/maxthon to name a couple

Ironically, as all of these browsers are "Internet Explorer with a plugin" and nothing actually new, they can be installed on any desktop that allows IE to be installed, even though they may be EVEN LESS secure that explorer (which isnt exactly secure to begin with)

Well, it didn't affect irider, which is IE-based, presumably because it opens popups in its own (excellent) 'tree-tab' system.

20 IE Windows??? Man, this guy has got to get a copy of Firefox ...

How about having a vertical flowchart feature that displayed webpages(history? bookmarks?) in small mini-images (ie. 90 x 70 pixels) in the sidebar. Something along the lines of what iRider has but with more options/features/plugin support.

I know it's not 'quite' the same, but for Windows, Irider, an internet-explorer rejib (like avantbrowser) has a tree-based history view in the left-hand pane. Sort of like a cross between what's seen in this story, and tabbed browsing.

It's pretty neat, but I actually like having a billion different windows open, so it wasn't for me.

Not sure they were first. I have used iRider (Windows XP, IE5) some time ago. Something like that was one of the two things I was missing on OS X.

(Disclaimer: I'm a firm Opera fan.)

I found this recently. It seems to be quite a fresh approach to browsing interfaces, and may be worth a serious appraisal. Be warned, though: it uses IE for rendering.

In a recent PC Magazine article by John Dvorak, He mentioned a irider. I haven't tried it yet, but he sure seemed to think it was cool. Apparently, it is loaded with features, and was developed by "some old XTree Hackers". I don't know if that means authors of XTree, or fans of XTree, but either way, it sounds like it's worth a look. Unfortunately, it sounds like it is only for Windows, and it costs $29.95.

But there is free 30 day trial..

Tell him to look at this. Two grand innovations: pinning (mark a page "open" (even on exit) until I explicitly say to kill it) and outline-style tabbed browsing, (naturally organizes browsing behavior into little "books"). I just wish it were open source and ran on linux . . .

iRider has some interesting features, such as thumbnail navigation, downloading pages in the background by right-clicking a link, open multiple links by highlighting them and clicking one, keeping pages in memory for fast page recall, etc.

Make sure to checkout the demo movie.

iRider has some interesting features, such as thumbnail navigation, downloading pages in the background by right-clicking a link, open multiple links by highlighting them and clicking one, keeping pages in memory for fast page recall, etc.

Make sure to checkout the demo movie.

iRider

If you take a look on that site, you'll see that the browser sport a rather interesting way to 'visualize' the navigator through a website. I've spent about 20 mins with it, and it is very handy, it feels more natural, the way it's organizes the history. It still have some roughs edges (I pushed the memory usage over the 200 MiBs, adjustable though) mainly relating to scripts, frames and other strange things that pollute the web.

Anyway, I think it's worth 10 mins test run.

Navigation is an embarrassment. Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons -- we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser.