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And its consistent on every platform, and always has been *the browser* to push new things on browsers.

While Opera does have a lot of neat features, Google Gears support and the new fast Javascript engine haven't been released, these features do make web apps such as Gmai, Google Docs and Buxfer a lot better.

Another interesting thing about Opera is that its marketshare on CIS countries is more than IE/FF/Other browsers. Are they just technically more aware or whats the cause for that?

When Opera wasn't free, people could easily crack it, Opera was a lot faster on dialup connections (because it rendered pages immediately instead of waiting for them to load completely), it had caching that was actually useful and didn't need a lot of system resouces. So installing a "free" browser resulted in faster and cheaper internet. The latest Opera versions are installed because people remember how fast it was. It's still a great browser, and if other browsers aren't a lot better then why bother migrating?

Opera Mini seems to repeat the same success story, GPRS/EDGE internet is slow and pretty expensive in CIS (around $0.15-$0.20 per megabyte), and because Opera Mini compresses reduces the pages' size by 5-20 times, it's even used on devices with "real" browsers.

Press release

Maybe it wasn't online at the time of submission, but now it is.

My example: http://echo.nextapp.com/content/test/operacss/

The consequences get a bit more catastrophic with applications with larger quantities of nested DIVs. Things really start to break when you start measuring using Element.offsetHeight.

Apologies for posting it here...again...but I'm tired of replying to users who ask "why does component X not render properly in Opera, it passes Acid3 thus something must be wrong with the component."

But does it run on Linux?

It was released for all Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

Opera has always been my favourite browser. It has pretty much everything packed in that you want and need, and still its really lightweight and smooth. Even firefox doesn't get close, a lot of times it feels quite non-smooth. Responsiveness from the GUI and things like scrolling does *a lot*. And its consistent on every platform, and always has been *the browser* to push new things on browsers. Mouse gestures, speed dial, advanced browsers on Wii/Mobile phones etc.

The old "Next" page also has been updated with little bit of information about 10.10, which will include Opera Unite. So its not included in this version yet.

Another interesting thing about Opera is that its marketshare on CIS countries is more than IE/FF/Other browsers. Are they just technically more aware or whats the cause for that?

But does it run on Linux?

It was released for all Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

Opera has always been my favourite browser. It has pretty much everything packed in that you want and need, and still its really lightweight and smooth. Even firefox doesn't get close, a lot of times it feels quite non-smooth. Responsiveness from the GUI and things like scrolling does *a lot*. And its consistent on every platform, and always has been *the browser* to push new things on browsers. Mouse gestures, speed dial, advanced browsers on Wii/Mobile phones etc.

The old "Next" page also has been updated with little bit of information about 10.10, which will include Opera Unite. So its not included in this version yet.

Another interesting thing about Opera is that its marketshare on CIS countries is more than IE/FF/Other browsers. Are they just technically more aware or whats the cause for that?

I'm surprised Opera isn't more represented, given the number of Russian cyber-crimminals. Opera is quite widely used in Russia. Opera once did a random street sampling in the eastern bloc after Google's video of asking people "What is a browser" in New York Square (to which people replied "Google" or "Yahoo" etc). They found most people knew what it was and majority used Opera:
http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2009/06/25/what-is-a-browser-russian-edition

Which goes to show, those technically minded use Opera, which helps support my claims it is the better browser (for IT guys at least)

It's hard to go to iTunes. If I go to iTunes, it'll tell me that I need to download and install the iTunes software. If I try to install the iTunes software, it'll tell me that I need to install QuickTime. And based on my prior experience with QuickTime, I think I'd rather be punched in the face, than install that piece of crap on my computer.

Amazon doesn't sell music... in my country anyway. Neither does Lala, nor eMusic, last I checked.

On the Piratebay, on the other hand, music is only a few clicks away. I need no additional software - the torrent client is built into my browser.

is this IE thing of which you speak?

Why not try using a real browser, one that's not a virus magnet and the one that has the best security reputation by far. It's 100% free as in beer, has an order of magnitude more functionality and you can even make it pretty much like that IE toy, if that makes you feel better.

Check out the current beta for Opera, on 64 bit flash is CPU intensive, but it really doesn't crash anymore (to many pages with flash at once may prove fatal though)

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2009/08/07/whats-with-the-red-dots-on-the-tabs

"It's full featured and well established browser and quality is unsurpassed, and it's in widespread use on other devices like cellphones, PDAs, gaming systems (Nintendo DSi), etc. The only problem Opera has is that no body is using it on the PC"

How would you know?

For a fairly long time Microsoft would detect Opera and throw junk at it so it didn't work as well as IE. So for a while Opera identified itself as IE. That's why those geniuses at CNET don't think Opera ever hits their site, and why their, and eveyrones, IE numbers are wrong - they're artificially high.

Out of the box, for many years, Opera didn't identify itself as Opera. Veteran Opera users know thwe first thing you do with a new release is make sure it identifies itself as IE if it isn't still set that way from "the factory".

http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/843/
http://sillydog.org/forum/sdt_3373.php

http://news.cnet.com/The-Acid2-challenge-to-Microsoft/2010-1032_3-5618723.html

"Microsoft's own Web servers are configured to send different versions of Web pages to disparate browsers. For example, the servers sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets from the ones they send to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. As a result, Opera renders pages differently."

And by differently, they meant "largely unreadable" but were being polite to their advertisor.

Opera users have Widgets.

Regards,
Ruemere

Opera actually has major marketshare in Russia and CIS countries. They're the major player there, and IE and FF strugling behind. The usual marketshare statistics almost always just count US or major EU countries, ignoring everything else and it gives false statistics because they ignore almost half of the world's people.

What I find quite interesting is that those CIS countries have found the best alternative browser, even in general population. Maybe theres some intelligence to catch up in usa? :)

This is something Opera could actually push quite much via other countries. Opera has 40-60% marketshare in CIS countries, better than both FF and IE. They push the support for HTML5 and its new tags there and CIS websites adopt it (cyrillic language differences make it so that most people use local websites instead of US ones). IE and FF also has to start supporting the same to get marketshare there, and bam: you have the support elsewhere too. And they can also start supporting it on Wii, Mobile Phones and other accessories they make web browsers too. People usually underestimate the power of Opera because of their smaller marketshare (in US home PC's).

I'd suggest filing a bug then.

There are several widgets on the address bar, none of which change in layout or behavior depending on which tab you're on, and only one of which changes its contents... and they're ALL "part of the tab"?

You can't understand that some people might see things differently than you? If you want to imagine the relations, look at a toolbar button as a "tool", and a tab as a "place". Then it's just a difference between if someone prefers picking a "tool", and then using it on a "place", or going to the "place" first, and picking a "tool" to use there.

If you want to put your tabs somewhere weird, be my guest, but not giving me an option to put it back is a complete deal-killer for me. It drives me crazy. I quit using Opera when they started doing that,

Opera may default differently than you'd like, but if you want to change it to "tabs below address bar", it's been doable since at least 2006.

Not only that but they can make web tools Live/Bing/Hotmail work best with their browser - influencing users of those tools to almost be forced to to use IE.

They've already been bitten by that one. They blocked all browsers except IE from accessing MSN.com. After two days of people making noise about it they let everyone view MSN again.

Did they learn? No. Less than two years later they served a stylesheet to Opera (and only to Opera, other browsers received a working stylesheet and IE had its own) that deliberately broke the display of the page. They served Opera the IE stylesheet, which displayed fine, after some more complaints.

Was that enough for them? No, they tried again with hotmail. They sent Opera an incomplete javascript file that was missing a required function to empty the junk e-mail. Other browsers were sent a different javascript file.

I don't think they'd dare try again with how closely the EU is monitoring them now.

(And Linux won't install my Netscape ISP's Web Accelerator software - so that's not an option either.)

You could give Opera 10 a try. They have a new feature called Opera Turbo, which I think does the same thing, i.e. compresses web pages on a server before sending them to you.

Right.

When Firefox runs on my mobile, call me.

I may be wrong, but I believe that Windows Explorer is capable of functioning as an FTP client. If you enter ftp://ftp.opera.com in the address bar, you should go to the Opera FTP site, from where you can download Opera. It's a bit difficult to tell where Windows Explorer ends and Internet Explorer starts, so it may be in the IE part.

But since they are insignificant in the browser market

Opera is only insignificant in U.S. and Asia. It's much more noticeable in Europe in general, and very prominent in Eastern Europe and especially in ex-USSR / CIS countries, topping at about 40% there (and yes, it does overtake Firefox there). Which is still a fairly large market - you might not care about it, but for a lot of companies, it would be silly to ignore it.

"Until Fairly recently" - as in 4 years ago.

security fix here

Doesn't Opera 9 work on Windows 2000?
Yes, yes it does.
Even Windows 95.

If you get rid of IE6 like this, you are forcing people to upgrade also to Win7!!! Remember, there is no Internet Explorer 7 for Win2k, All of us who have stayed away from Win XP and and Vista due to its dumb activation code will have to upgrade to Win7, because Mozilla is not always the answer.

Nobody is forcing you to upgrade to Windows 7, Opera runs mighty fine not only on Win2k but on win9x versions too without a huge memory leak...

You should consider using that instead of some crappy 8 years old browser that doesn't support something essential as PNG transparency.

A quadcore PC could easily host a blog or a facebook account. Indeed, I would be the next killer application would be a desktop app that lets you do what facebook does, except that you own your data, and the core web service is really only a directory to enable peer to peer communications.

The concept of Opera Unite (web server in a browser), could be a possible means of making this kind of thing a reality. I've been thinking that as more people become angered by the control of YouTube, Facebook, etc, over what you can do with the services (like posting a home made video with copyrighted music in the background), solutions like this might become popular.

Opera Unite: http://unite.opera.com/

Me neither.

What Google s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has to fear more than anything else is that heâ(TM)ll awake one day to learn that the Google search engine suddenly doesn t work on any Windows computers: something happened overnight and what worked yesterday doesnâ(TM)t work today. It would have to be an act of deliberate sabotage on Microsoft s part and blatantly illegal, but that doesnâ(TM)t mean it couldn t happen. Microsoft would claim ignorance and innocence and take days, weeks or months to reverse the effect, during which time Google would have lost billions.

Does he _really_ think Microsoft would do that?

Bork bork bork, Opera bork, bork bork bork borkbork.

I have no good explanation, only some guesswork. Computers came to the Soviet bloc later, and weren't even luxury items, but were only available at universities and at some workplaces. Because of that, a certain hacker-like mentality arose around them - quite similar to what happened in the West a decade or two earlier, but this time it was an epoch of PC already, and therefore the knowledge and skills were centered around that. The result is that CIS and Eastern Europe have an abnormally high concentration of DOS/Windows power users, who aren't afraid to mess with their system - and who historically prefer browsers other than IE for obvious reasons. Opera in particular was so successful because it was there (and more stable and feature complete) before Mozilla, and because the fact that it was then a commercial, for-pay product was entirely irrelevant in a software culture where using licensed software is considered eccentric.

One of the Opera guys had a market analysis of their market share recently, with essentially the same results as what GP describes for CIS and Eastern Europe (there's more there if you care to follow the links deeper). And Here is a map that shows the distribution visually (it's an interactive SVG, and Firefox screws it up, so you'll need Opera or Chrome to view it properly - but for the most part it just shows that the more eastern the country, the higher the Opera usage, peaking at ~50%).

In general, you can assume that wherever Opera is popular, so is Firefox (though it's interesting that Opera actually overtakes Firefox in Russia).

I have no good explanation, only some guesswork. Computers came to the Soviet bloc later, and weren't even luxury items, but were only available at universities and at some workplaces. Because of that, a certain hacker-like mentality arose around them - quite similar to what happened in the West a decade or two earlier, but this time it was an epoch of PC already, and therefore the knowledge and skills were centered around that. The result is that CIS and Eastern Europe have an abnormally high concentration of DOS/Windows power users, who aren't afraid to mess with their system - and who historically prefer browsers other than IE for obvious reasons. Opera in particular was so successful because it was there (and more stable and feature complete) before Mozilla, and because the fact that it was then a commercial, for-pay product was entirely irrelevant in a software culture where using licensed software is considered eccentric.

One of the Opera guys had a market analysis of their market share recently, with essentially the same results as what GP describes for CIS and Eastern Europe (there's more there if you care to follow the links deeper). And Here is a map that shows the distribution visually (it's an interactive SVG, and Firefox screws it up, so you'll need Opera or Chrome to view it properly - but for the most part it just shows that the more eastern the country, the higher the Opera usage, peaking at ~50%).

In general, you can assume that wherever Opera is popular, so is Firefox (though it's interesting that Opera actually overtakes Firefox in Russia).

Once again the problem here is too tight integration with other part's of the OS. Yeah, IE is the most used browser and as such a major target for exploits, but some separation from other parts of OS wouldn't do any harm. Or atleast make it optional to use such; You won't be automatically affected by Flash or PDF exploits if you choosed not to install those. Just another reason to use alternate browsers like Opera or Firefox, seeing it only affects IE users.

That being said, you dont need admin priviledges for some malware to do its job, botnets and such easily run within user priviledges aswell. Funnily, this issue is exactly the same in Linux and Mac OS too, which their users always seem to forget and go about how malware couldn't get the admin rights. They dont need it.

The fun thing is, there always seem to come exploits for IE and Firefox. Very rarely for Opera. That makes me think they've made some good fundamental decisions on design and programming and know how to secure code from exploits, specially because they have major marketshare (better than IE actually) in CIS countries like Russia and Ukraine and you would be thinking the local hackers would be trying to break it apart and exploit every possible thing on it. Hats off to them, really.

With these ages, isolating browser from the OS and even virtualizing it in its own environment that's cleaned when browser is closed starts to be a must, and I dont really see why they aren't doing it already. It would save people from so many trouble, and wouldn't affect performance at all.

Once again the problem here is too tight integration with other part's of the OS. Yeah, IE is the most used browser and as such a major target for exploits, but some separation from other parts of OS wouldn't do any harm. Or atleast make it optional to use such; You won't be automatically affected by Flash or PDF exploits if you choosed not to install those. Just another reason to use alternate browsers like Opera or Firefox, seeing it only affects IE users.

That being said, you dont need admin priviledges for some malware to do its job, botnets and such easily run within user priviledges aswell. Funnily, this issue is exactly the same in Linux and Mac OS too, which their users always seem to forget and go about how malware couldn't get the admin rights. They dont need it.

The fun thing is, there always seem to come exploits for IE and Firefox. Very rarely for Opera. That makes me think they've made some good fundamental decisions on design and programming and know how to secure code from exploits, specially because they have major marketshare (better than IE actually) in CIS countries like Russia and Ukraine and you would be thinking the local hackers would be trying to break it apart and exploit every possible thing on it. Hats off to them, really.

With these ages, isolating browser from the OS and even virtualizing it in its own environment that's cleaned when browser is closed starts to be a must, and I dont really see why they aren't doing it already. It would save people from so many trouble, and wouldn't affect performance at all.

Yes, that is why strong is wrong .

You show me a better protection from JS and other plugins and I'll install it. But you can't, because there isn't anything in NoScript's league.

Here you go

I've been following the back-and-forth on Chris Messina's blog post, and notice that he's responded to the response with some backtracking, and also good points as well: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2009/06/17/responding-to-unite-misconceptions (search for "factoryjoe"). If you don't mind, I'd rather let others who know more judge his comments fully, but he does bring up how some of the documentation on the Unite website pages is quite misleading, one example being on the proxy issue.

As for TFA we're here for, I truly believe that misleading comparisons and misleading benchmarks serve to confuse rather than inform. There is nothing about owning your own data and all the positives of Unite in TFA -- at all.

TFA's comparison is like comparing performance of MS Access to Oracle. Imagine you didn't know exactly what Access was when reading those comparisons (such as any newcomer to Unite vs Apache+PHP). This hypothetical comparison of two completely different softwares that store data would imply that Access is an equivalent to Oracle. In the end, the reader wouldn't be thinking that "nothing beats [Access]'s ease of use for most people", but would be left confused as to what Access is.

My point with all this is to show that TFA is terribly misleading, and when you already have to deal with articles like Mr. Messina's, which don't grasp the full potential of Unite, why support another article which merely confuses matters further?

If you look back to the original parent I responded to, he is a perfect example of someone who is confused and believes that Apache and Unite do the same thing.

Regarding proxies and Unite, let's just quote the Opera Unite offical website, "Opera Unite uses a proxy between the server and its clients"

Hey, quote mining! Just like Creationists! The proxy is just a fallback in case UPnP fails, as the FAQ clearly states. But I guess you prefer to whine like a little crybaby instead of educating yourself about the facts.

This guy has a set of opera keybindings which resemble vim. Works pretty well too. The only thing missing would be form field editing with vim bindings.

And the fact that he missed the obvious cool name of "vimoperator" ;)

However, on a desktop, general purpose computer, you might want to, say, for instance, try out Opera's new beta...Here, you're stuck.

Really. So these don't work or exist?

I stopped reading there, considering you didn't even get THAT right. Sure, repositories have issues occasionally, I agree, but it's not a travesty that you're making it out to be. Ubuntu has the PPA stuff going on, where developers can make Peronal Repositories for users to download software. I wish they'd make these easier to access, but it's not like it's hard now.

I'm surprised to see that people are still linking to this. It's basically full of errors, and was written in rage over all the hype Unite was getting. He was angry about how people just repeated Opera's claims blindly. Kind of like you are blindly referring to his blog post even though it turns out that the post is too inaccurate to really be used for anything.

You really should read some of the comments on the page you are linking to, in order to see people correcting all the misconceptions. For example the misconception that everything goes through a proxy, as you claim it does. Furthermore Chris's comments where fun until Haavard took him down a notch on his own blog, resulting in Chris himself posting on Haavard's blog with a massively different tone.

Latest public Firefox: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.5rc2/win32/en-US/ (7.9 MB, a hefty 1.2 MB bigger than even Opera's bloated MSI, and 2.4 MB bigger than the classic installer)

And you were saying again?

Latest public Firefox: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.5rc2/win32/en-US/ (7.9 MB, a hefty 1.2 MB bigger than even Opera's bloated MSI, and 2.4 MB bigger than the classic installer)

And you were saying again?

It's much easier to set up and use (how much hacking and customization will you need to do in order to set up music streaming?), and will have lots of services doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things, such as controlling an RC car.

Really weird. I got the one from here here and that version simply didn't have the Unite stuff. Anyway, thanks for your help. Works now.

And I wonder how the RIAA will detect music-sharing on your private friendsbased network.

Well, as for "private", the Unite introduction shows "privileged access" (password protected) requests going over HTTP, not HTTPS; so even assuming, for the sake of argument, that connections from the local web server to the proxy server are secured somehow, those from the proxy server to the client who is accessing them aren't, so the RIAA's strategy of putting pressure on ISPs to be piracy cops would seem to quite applicable.

I don't know what you're doing wrong, because everything works fine in 9.04 for me. Did you download the correct version from here?

A more thoughtful take on the subject can be found here:

I'm surprised to see that people are still linking to this. It's basically full of errors, and was written in rage over all the hype Unite was getting. He was angry about how people just repeated Opera's claims blindly. Kind of like you are blindly referring to his blog post even though it turns out that the post is too inaccurate to really be used for anything.

You really should read some of the comments on the page you are linking to, in order to see people correcting all the misconceptions. For example the misconception that everything goes through a proxy, as you claim it does. Furthermore Chris's comments where fun until Haavard took him down a notch on his own blog, resulting in Chris himself posting on Haavard's blog with a massively different tone.

For Windows versions, the current 'release' version of Opera (9.64) is 5.4MB. The beta (10.00b1) is 6.6MB. Firefox 3.0.11 is 7MB.

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/ http://www.opera.com/download/get.pl?id=32022 http://www.opera.com/browser/download/?ver=10.00b1

For Windows versions, the current 'release' version of Opera (9.64) is 5.4MB. The beta (10.00b1) is 6.6MB. Firefox 3.0.11 is 7MB.

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/ http://www.opera.com/download/get.pl?id=32022 http://www.opera.com/browser/download/?ver=10.00b1

No it isn't. That's something so easy to verify i can't beleive you're at +4 right now.

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
http://unite.opera.com/

Opera Unite is a 40% larger download than Firefox.

I don't think that's the point. This ArseBook of yours would be controlled from a central place, just like every other site out there.

From the Opera website:

The interaction is all done via a central Opera Unite server â" Opera Unite uses a proxy between the server and its clients (found at operaunite.com) to avoid the need for any special firewall configuration.

So there's still a central point of failure.

That's because RIM won't let Opera improve it.