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Opera has had your bookmark-homepage idea for some time... It's called speed dial.

Also, Opera 9.5 (still in beta, has a few bugs but http://my.opera.com/desktopteam has more info) has a new thing called Opera Link which lets you synchronize bookmarks, speed dial, and your personal bar (like a bookmarks shortcut bar that holds other things as well) across any Opera 9.5+ browser anywhere, and gives you http://link.opera.com/ to access your bookmarks from any browser.

I've been using 9.5 at work since alpha and it is looking to be one sweet release. At home I still use the stable 9.2x branch which doesn't have Link but does have Speed Dial.

I only have Firefox around these days for the sites that don't always play nice with Opera, which are actually very very few. And I know Opera isn't open source, but they're very community-friendly and their development team is easily accessible and responsive to bugs and they produce packages for just about every major Linux distribution, as well as Mac, Windows, Solars (sparc and intel), QNX, BeOS, FreeBSD and OS/2.

the only problem I have with Opera is the "lack" of support for Flash for Opera on Linux

i certainly hope they fixed the memory leak "features"

but its too late for me i already jumped the boat

Opera's Haarvard suggests that it's about Silverlight, and Microsoft trying to close the web. Mozilla, Opera and others are pushing to extend open web technologies, but Microsoft is saying, wait, the web doesn't need to be extended at all! Well, except with Silverlight and WPF...

I just recently discovered Opera Show... http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/operashow/ wish this would have taken off. It's pretty cool.

The truth of the matter is that vinyl records are crap compared to CD's in every measurable way - distortion, dynamic range, frequency response, signal to noise ratio, you name it.

The only problem is the advantages have been nulled by the mastering. In the loudness war, distortion, dynamic range, frequency response, signal to noise ratio and you name it has been reduced below the 70db range of a record. There is no advantage to a CD recording with it's 96 DB dynamic range when the mastering has killed the dynamic range.
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/05/16/loudness-war-music-over-compression-demonstrated-on-youtube/
http://my.opera.com/swerfot/blog/2007/08/26/loudness-war

It is a shame to go to an obsolete limited dynamic range format to get better dynamic range.

It's true that a digital recording can never contain the amount of data in a vinyl groove, but who is saying that all the data in a vinyl groove is more of an accurate representation of all the data extant in the original sound wave than a digitally sampled recording?

The kicker for me showing a total lack of understanding of the technology is the popularity of USB turntables. They can't keep them in stock. Quick, someone show me any analog signal in a USB specification.. Analog is better.. Analog is king, Here use this USB turntable to enjoy your analog sound. What are they smoking? Nothing out the USB port of a turntable is analog in any shape or form. Who has a better low noise analog to digital converter, a consumer grade turntable or a CD mastering house?

Analog is king only because the mastering house slaughtered the conversion in the loudness war. If you check the links, the youtube link provides the best summary with an example of the problem which can be heard and seen.

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/05/16/loudness-war-music-over-compression-demonstrated-on-youtube/
http://my.opera.com/swerfot/blog/2007/08/26/loudness-war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=55892

CDs are on the way out because the music on them is crap. Finding a decent recording in the pile of crap is why many simply avoid the contaminated format. USB turntables, even though you don't get analog, you also don't get the over compression, which is why the ability to play better source material is so popular. Analog has nothing to do with this argument. Destruction of the sound on compact discs in mastering is the problem.

and my PS3 has a $500 Blu-ray player, $249 media server, $109 wireless adaptor, $67 Upscaling DVD player, a $65 60GB 2.5" harddrive, a $30 bluetooth adapter, a $23 multi flash card reader, a $5 web browser, and a game console for free. It's amazing everyone doesn't have one. That's well over $1000 in value for only $600... no, $400!

Question, if I sit on it, can I claim an another $25 value as a butt warmer?

The other way around (adding Vista to a Linux Box) is slightly more complicated:

http://my.opera.com/djfake/blog/dell-preloaded-with-ubuntu

Or you could buy an Intel Mac and use boot camp, that's ea$y enough too! c

You're thinking of either the desktop version of Opera, or Opera Mini, both of which are free. The GP was talking about Opera Mobile, which does indeed cost US $24.

Is it done on a server before it hits your phone or does the phone change the html?
If it is done on the phone just use the opera browser for your mobile phone instead of the build in browser. http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/

I think it rocks.

And why have a white list. Why not get the sites targeting the mobile market to use meta data much like the meta data used for search engines.

meta name="transformhtmlforbetterviewingsuage" content="nochange"

to me to have a white list is not very good. Imagine if all the mobile suppliers use this technology and all have a white list. bad idea. People develop there sites so they are displayed the way they want it to be. I would be pissed as well if someone changed the way my site looked especially if I made it especially for mobile phones.

You mean your browser doesn't have any kind of password management, with a master key?

Unfortunately Apple's Keychain won't let me conveniently access my saved passwords if I'm logged in via SSH (it can be done from the command line, but it pops up a GUI confirmation dialog, unless you do that once and then click "Always Allow" for each password you'll want to access later), and there doesn't appear to be a search feature like there is in the GUI (although it shouldn't be hard to write one). But other than that, it sounds like exactly what you're looking for. You can set it to require your master password after you haven't used it for a few minutes, and every time the computer wakes from sleep. I think KDE has something similar that works with Konqueror. Firefox's password manager isn't bad either, and works on all platforms Firefox runs on (although it's not shared with other applications, unfortunately - bug 386533). Opera calls theirs the Wand.

I'm surprised you would trust your bank to manage your passwords, but I guess if you've had your head buried in the sand long enough not to know about browser password management, you probably haven't heard about all the financial institutions getting hacked and their members' account information leaking all over the Internet. Banks have centuries of experience with physical security and decades of experience with internal network security, but Internet security is still relatively new to them.

Opera 9.23 sucks a bit, memory-wise. Try the 9.5 beta from this page, but beware, it's still got some issues. I've currently got 18 pages open, of widely varying complexity (anywhere from a 1996 or so page to slashdot's new discussion system), and it's using 88 megs at the moment. It's been running for approximately 4:45 hours, and in this time it's used 6:50 minutes of CPU time. On Windows things might be different.
For a browser to use 120 megs isn't unusual at all. Once I've had about 70 tabs open in Opera 9.something, and it used something between 150 and 200 megs, I think. But this isn't really a problem, because I've got 384 megs of RAM. And if I've got 70 pages open, chances are that the browser is my primary app at that moment.
BTW, what other app do you use that sucks 250-300 megs? I think you should lay it off or look into alternatives to that one, unless it really does work with extremely large datasets. (Just guessing here, is it Adobe Photoshop?) I think that browsers, as they are one of the most important tools in my job, can justify using quite some memory. I'm sure that they're important to you too, so you probably shouldn't say something like "tacking on an additional 120."

I've purchased two Dell computers recently, one preloaded with Ubuntu, another with Vista. I've configured both to dual boot. Here's as difficult as it was to do: http://my.opera.com/djfake/blog/ Is it that difficult to add MP3 support to Ubuntu? No. Flash? No. It takes a few commands and a few minutes. Ubuntu 7.04 has come a long way. Sure, it can still go further in terms of usability, and yes, the whole "restricted drivers" is something that prevents it from reaching the masses. But, call an apple an apple. Dell's Ubuntu machines were not "preinstalled with an OS" the same way an Apple is with Mac OS X or a PC is with Windows whatever.

Walt's definition of an "average computer user" is someone that can operate a toaster. In my experience with sysadmin and helpdesk, "the average user" would enjoy a far better experience with ANY computer, if they took the time to think of it "beyond a toaster". It's really not that difficult, and one great thing about Linux is that it's perfect for learning computing basics. c

Yep. You solved that one.

http://www.mozilla.org/

http://www.opera.com/

There are more.

And they can all be installed by drag/drop into a home directory.

Nice shooting, soldier!

qz

The opera browser already has screen reader support
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/07/27/screen-reader-support

Reposted with formatting...

I just got modded a troll.

Please try Firebug and Opera Developer Tools and then make up your own mind.

Firebug has a cool feature that lets you click on any element on the page, which shows you its position in the DOM, the associated styles and which style sheet they came from. You can edit any part of the document or the style sheet and see the changes in real time.

In Opera Developer Tools, you have to click on each node in the DOM down to the element you want, using only the tag name and its id. This takes six to ten clicks on most documents and you're doing it blind unless you know the page structure intimately. Once you get there all the properties are read-only.

Firebug also has a full debugger for JavaScript, including the ability to set breakpoints and step thru JavaScript source code, all without making any modifications to the web site (i.e. you can do it on any site, you don't need write access to the web server). There is no equivalent feature for Opera.

Yes, I'm spoiled by Firebug, but that doesn't make me a troll.

I just got modded a troll. Please try Firebug and Opera Developer Tools and then make up your own mind. Firebug has a cool feature that lets you click on any element on the page, which shows you its position in the DOM, the associated styles and which style sheet they came from. You can edit any part of the document or the style sheet and see the changes in real time. In Opera Developer Tools, you have to click on each node in the DOM down to the element you want, using only the tag name and its id. This takes six to ten clicks on most documents and you're doing it blind unless you know the page structure intimately. Once you get there all the properties are read-only. Firebug also has a full debugger for JavaScript, including the ability to set breakpoints and step thru JavaScript source code, all without making any modifications to the web site (i.e. you can do it on any site, you don't need write access to the web server). There is no equivalent feature for Opera. Yes, I'm spoiled by Firebug, but that doesn't make me a troll.

While I understand that opera gets more money from yahoo by making it the default search engine in the built-in search bar. At least users to change it to something else, come on even IE7 let you do that.

If you are living before September 20, 2005, I guess. Versions released since then have been ad free. http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2005/09/20/

I used Firefox for about 4 years, and installed Opera this summer to do some testing on it.

Since then, I've used Opera for browsing and Firefox for web development. There's just no comparison between the two. And now that one of the other responses to this post has pointed me at this, I may not use Firefox for anything other than testing in Firefox.

Of course, I'm one of those sufferers of the Firefox bug that causes it to use ridiculous amounts of memory. I've got a Firefox window open with Gmail (alas, Gmail breaks in Opera for me when composing mail), and it's consuming 180MB. I've got 2 opera windows open with about 15 tabs in one, including a few large Slashdot discussions, and it's consuming 120MB. So for me, there was no question when choosing between the two for everyday use.

--Jeremy

Closed source is not to be trusted. Private companies are not to be trusted. Opera is not to be trusted. They may be on the straight and narrow now, but their methods and philosophy can and probably will change at the drop of a hat, contract or lawsuit.

Fortunately they are just making a web browser, and you can easily switch to a different browser if Opera's philosophy changes. They are nowhere near a monopoly position in the market, and choosing to use Opera will not give them that position or damage competition. They are strong supporters of interoperability - look at the changelog and see how many changes were based on standards (CSS2, CSS3, HTML5, DOM3, SVG) and matching the behaviour of other browsers, compared to any proprietary new features. They are supporters of open formats too - they've been experimenting with Ogg Theora (and proposing the new feature to a standardisation group before taking it beyond the experimental stage). There is no vendor lock-in here, so the danger that they will move in the wrong direction in the future does not translate into a danger that you or your data will suffer because of it. In the meantime, you can benefit from its technical superiority.

Closed source is not to be trusted. Private companies are not to be trusted. Opera is not to be trusted. They may be on the straight and narrow now, but their methods and philosophy can and probably will change at the drop of a hat, contract or lawsuit.

Fortunately they are just making a web browser, and you can easily switch to a different browser if Opera's philosophy changes. They are nowhere near a monopoly position in the market, and choosing to use Opera will not give them that position or damage competition. They are strong supporters of interoperability - look at the changelog and see how many changes were based on standards (CSS2, CSS3, HTML5, DOM3, SVG) and matching the behaviour of other browsers, compared to any proprietary new features. They are supporters of open formats too - they've been experimenting with Ogg Theora (and proposing the new feature to a standardisation group before taking it beyond the experimental stage). There is no vendor lock-in here, so the danger that they will move in the wrong direction in the future does not translate into a danger that you or your data will suffer because of it. In the meantime, you can benefit from its technical superiority.

Then how is it supported?

They have deals with search engines, like Google and Yahoo, to get placement as the default engines in the toolbar, in Speed Dial, and in Opera Mini. (I think these days it's Yahoo in all 3.) Same kind of deal that Firefox has with Google, really.

Plus there are the versions for devices (Nintendo DS, etc.), which they still charge for, either directly or through licensing deals with device manufacturers and mobile carriers. So they pull in revenue from that.

This article is a year out of date, but still informative: Opera making big profits from free software.

The funny thing about Opera is that it is stable (Firefox crashes on me irregularly and recently decided to delete my profile; Opera has never crashed. Ever.), portable (Here's the list, and this doesn't even include the mobile versions), can block ads (has its on inbuilt adblocker, which while weaker than firefox's, well, I just use a massive HOSTS file anyways), and, well, a quick google search revealed at least 3 ways to synchronize bookmarks on Opera.

And the benifits of "open source software", while they may be real, seem to have instead caused firefox to have a massive memory footprint and become incredibly inefficient at rendering pages.

I love Firefox, don't get me wrong, but Opera is a better browser, plain and simple.

Actually, just wait a few months and Opera 9.5 will be out with a brand-new, OS-X-ified interface (on OS X).

I like Opera, modo, foobar2000, VLC Media Player, 7zip, Pidgin, Process Explorer, uTorrent, TCPView, Foxit Reader, and WinDirStat.

and continue the flamewar from below to boot...

Opera.

Opera does have equivalents of many must-have extensions. Some are missing (IETab), some are better integrated (gestures), some are almost-but-not-quite (web dev tools unfortunately).

That sums it up: http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/2006/07/04/top-150-p opular-firefox-extensions-and-opera

Out of 113 most popular Fx extensions: 38 are built-in, 38 are not possible, rest can be added by tweaking/hacking/configuring something.

Opera does run in Linux, download it here

Opera was one the last major browser that didn't support client-side XSL transformation. With the upgrade, Opera added the support, which in my view is more important than some milliseconds.

Unfortunately, they didn't bother implementing the whole of the standard: they don't have support for the document() function, which is pretty much essential to any non-trivial XSLT application.

I just set up my IMAP just to check, only to find that sadly, no. Looking forward to it, though.

Opera supports Server Sent Events.

I'm afraid. I hope that some day there will be X11 mail clients available that aren't simply clones of a clone of Outlook.

If you want a mail client that's nothing like Outlook for X11, give Opera's mail client a try.

Opera needs a spell check like Firefox!

This post was spell-checked with the Opera spell checker. You have to install GNU Aspell separately (except on OS X where it Just Works(TM)), and the interface is rather mediocre, but it gets the job done.

I like Firefox's spell checker better; it's one of the (very) few areas where Firefox is better than Opera.

Opera does have a spell check in it. You right click on the text box and select "Check spelling". http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/opera/spell check/index.dml

You can grab it here:
http://snapshot.opera.com/

Kestrel has 64-bit builds. See here: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/08/31/fo cus-areas-during-kestrel-development

I'll second this. The zoom feature of Opera is one of the few ingenious Opera features that haven't been copied by other browsers yet. Everything is increased in size smoothly, even Flash elements. Just get some reasonably high-resolution monitors for the machines (1600 horizontal), and run at 200% default zoom, then you can have blind people browsing the web. Another poster mentioned that only the content is zoomed, and not the application itself, but you will probably want to hide or disable most of the application interface (menu bar, tabs) using kiosk mode http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/kiosk/ anyway. You can set the images in the address bar to large size, and then the only remaining issue (which I admit may be somewhat significant) is the size of the address field, which is still small. It is possible this can be configured using themes, but I don't know.

http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/kiosk/

Designed to be used at public terminals. Bonus points for installing it on Linux.

Found a -claim- to have support BUT no followup was ever registered:
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?i d=1959825

I personally use Safari because it's faster than Firefox on my MacBook. (I still use Firefox for web dev thanks to Firebug and some invaluable others.) But Opera has my deep respect nonetheless, and I was pleasantly surprised when I saw it was adopted as the Wii's browser.

As for speed—I think Opera has been the fastest for a long, long time. I remember friends raving about how fast Opera was back in the late 90s, and any time I've heard Opera mentioned since then, "speed" has been one of the leading reasons why.

It's no surprise then, that I found this article on Efficient Javascript on Opera's dev site. It's interesting to see this type of article, and I really wish Mozilla's dev site would have more "best practices" instead of just references. Moz's references are great, but most articles that require writing aren't as well written as they might be. The Efficient Javascript article is a wonderful example to follow IMO; should be a benchmark for others.

I personally use Safari because it's faster than Firefox on my MacBook. (I still use Firefox for web dev thanks to Firebug and some invaluable others.) But Opera has my deep respect nonetheless, and I was pleasantly surprised when I saw it was adopted as the Wii's browser.

As for speed—I think Opera has been the fastest for a long, long time. I remember friends raving about how fast Opera was back in the late 90s, and any time I've heard Opera mentioned since then, "speed" has been one of the leading reasons why.

It's no surprise then, that I found this article on Efficient Javascript on Opera's dev site. It's interesting to see this type of article, and I really wish Mozilla's dev site would have more "best practices" instead of just references. Moz's references are great, but most articles that require writing aren't as well written as they might be. The Efficient Javascript article is a wonderful example to follow IMO; should be a benchmark for others.

What's interesting here is that a lot of the comments are focussed on Opera as the desktop browser - this is somewhat missing the point of Opera's business model.

Fact 1) you didn't completely stop using Opera if you have a Wii or PS3, a number of mobile phones http://www.opera.com/b2b/ or god help you, an internet fridge, or have used pretty much any of those commercial internet kiosks you find in airports/hotels. Here's where their real focus lies.
Fact 2) if you use multiple desktop OS's and like the idea of having a standard browser experience across all of them, perhaps you should look at Opera's desktop browser again.
Not-Quite-a-Fact 3) if you use a Windows mobile device and like me, you think that Pocket IE is a highly unpolished turd, you'd probably do well to load Opera's mobile browser and check out the differences.

Sure it's great for your computer, but I only have WinXP Home AMD Sempron laptop with 1 GB RAM and integrated graphics card, that takes part of that 1 GB RAM.

When I was using Firefox, adding all extensions I used (AdBlock Plus, Filterset.G, Tab Mix Plus, FoxMarks, Html Validator, CustomizeGoogle, Netcraft Toolbar) and browsing with lots of tabs open ment that often Firefox toke processor usage to 100% and much of RAM, and I had to kill it and restart. When FoxMarks updated bookmarks to/from server, that slowed down firefox too. Firefox/Tab Mix Plus recovering from crashes didn't allways work.

Opera has nice widget "Stay Secure"
http://widgets.opera.com/widget/4495
Currently it shows that according to Secunia browsers have security holes:
- IE has 10
- Firefox has 6
- Opera has 0
- Safari has 3
- Konqueror has 2
so I've changed my 2 pc:s browser to Opera.

Opera uses less memory when showing big web pages, showing same big pages in Firefox or IE freezed computer, I read that from somewere, maybe subpage/forum of opera.com. Using Opera feels faster for me than Firefox.

I also need to test web pages and sites in different browsers because I'm a web developer, and having browsers ad-free is great for me. For some other users it can be less important.

Many programs include IE for viewing internal html documents, or some program can launch IE at random site, so I like the added security of ad-free IE and any other program. Ad Muncher blocks many spyware, adware and dialer installers too.

For computers that I install for friends and customers, I don't get Ad Muncher for them, usually I just install Firefox with AdBlock Plus and Filterset.G, or Opera with free filters. But for my own use it's good and worth the small price.

Are you saying that Opera runs on BeOS?

The parent post is clearly comparing Opera to BeOS (not sure in what terms -- design, perhaps? technically impressive, but not wildly popular?), but as it happens, you can actually find an old version of Opera for BeOS.