Slashdot Mirror

IE 7 still did not correctly implement the box model, positioning, all CSS1, all CSS2, or any CSS3. The same IE-specific parsing bugs for CSS are in place in IE 7.

At this point, you have to ask; is it that the people at Microsoft are incapable of producing a specs-compliant rendering engine (when every one else in the world can?), that they are roped by backwards compatibility, or that they think people will see IE 6 + tabs as "good enough"?

It's to the point where every site I make has 2 code paths: not IE, and the IE-specific overrides (up to an additional 20kb per page!).

Of course not nearly as fun as having half naked chicks in awe of your massive girth from above, as they appear to have in austrailia.

What I meant was a footer that will always be at the bottom of a page "in dependance of the content" (as I mentioned). That means, it's at the bottom of a viewport until the content gets larger, which would then push down the footer accordingly.

One possible way of addressing this is to use float: bottom. This construct is described in the recently published CSS3 module: Generated Content for Paged Media. In the draft, it only applies to paged media, but it seems quite intuitive that it has the effect you describe in continous media. What do you think?

Cheers,

-h&kon

Why doesn't CSS allow web designers to specify styles per user agent?

Why didn't the W3C provide a compliance test to allow browser developers to determine if they were implementing CSS properly?

Why does CSS order content according to "top-down left-right" page flow?

Does the W3C consider CSS to be a success, given the number of people that have to resort to browser hacks to use it?

Lie recommends people download Larabie's "Goodfish" familyrabie's "Goodfish" family

Goodfish's primary distribution site (myfonts.com) also wants you to register

Goodfish is only licensed for 1-5 users to use the fonts

Goodfish faces many of the same practical problems Microsoft's Corefonts families doincomplete sets of glyphs for certain sets of characters making the font families not so useful or downright useless for some users.

In your own followup message you stated that you perhaps had mixed up horizontal and vertical and that your question was about vertical placement of content. You may have seen that I answered another question about vertical placement. The www-style mailing list is a good place for posting concrete proposals, I'd be interested in seeing yours there once the vertical/horizontal issue has been sorted out.

Cheers,

-h&kon

I think that this is needless confusion, and the answer given by Håkon appears to be flippant.

Why not just create a specific server-side language which is browser agnostic and plan for it to be implimented by a specific date, starting over and making it the web 'standard' with several stages in its implimentation?

Having used both Firefox and Opera, I would say Opera is far more customisable. Some stuff cannot be customised by GUI, but can be customised by editing the INI file direct. Not knowing what all those extensions do, but the ones I do recognise, opera does them already, without the need for Extensions (Greasemonkey is just Opera's UserJS). Can Firefox do this? http://people.opera.com/rijk/opera/dndbuttons.html and drag some buttons onto your toolbars, Like InIE or InFireFox

I thought the cost was absolutely nominal. I paid a student fee for mine (20 bucks) and the address bar searches, caching of web pages, pop-up blocker and mouse gestures were worth every penny of that twenty dollars. I see your point though. value added over IE is subjective. And I threw the wrong link your way before (well- not as good as this one) http://opera.com/download/

Seriously though, with opera 9 finally out, who cares about firefox. Opera is wayy faster in linux. If only it had extensions like firefox, it'd be perfect.

Well, in *my* post I never asked at all why you wouldn't use Opera. I asked why you wouldn't pay for a browser.\

Opera is not cross platform? That has to be the sillest thing I've ever heard.

I'd like to disagree with your first comment too. But I'm not a web designer and only go off what what I've heard- so I'll yield to you on that.

And finally, since no one else has said this, Howcome you're here! :-)

Opera doesnt suffer from the runaway memory issues some people report with Firefox

I use the "Joergs Safrad" skin and really enjoy it. There are a few variants so take a look to see what you like best. http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/auth or/?id=lachralle

Appearantly the same everywhere.
Check out Opera's FTP site for the tarballs, etc.

Here: ftp://get.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/900/final/en/i 386/

Get it in tar.gz, or, better yet, tar.bz2 (tar.gz needs to be depreciated for that -- actually, it's about time people started using something better like 7-Zip as the standard already...)

Opera 9 is no longer in beta status btw. That link takes you to the final. You should be able to get the beta on that ftp as well, but, I see no reason why you would want to since the final has solved some of the problems in the beta (in fact, I know of no problems so far in the final, though I guess there must be one or two since no one can release a peice of software without bugs sneaking in.)

They made a mistake on the download page, but, so what? Your typical user doesn't want it in tar.gz/tar.bz2 format. They LIKE having a nice simple little package that installs with minimal effort on their part getting things set up. Even many of the more advanced users who are able to set the thing up the hard way themselves often enjoy the convenience of a nice proper DEB package, or even a RPM (ok, I know people don't like RPMs, but, there's a reason they still use them today.)

I notice that one can no longer download Opera in .tar.gz format.

Try it for youself: Opera Download Page Link

You can click their "Download this package in TAR.GZ format" checkbox all you want, but you won't get it.

Thanks, Opera.

Check out his PhD thesis: http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/#h-64

Perhaps you would prefer the guy in the leather hat.
http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/security/

I mean, will it use shared libraries _and_ be able to deal with foreign characters

Yes, depending on your distro. They have shared builds for many Linux distros including versions of Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Xandros (for some reason the download page always defaults to Xandros on my Fedora box), SuSE, Ubuntu, and more, plus the static builds in .deb, .rpm, and .tar.gz form.

And at least on Fedora Core, it has no problems (that I've noticed) with international characters.

http://people.opera.com/howcome/

"how come" is how he describes it, it wasn't an invention of the /. folks.

If you have an issue with how he pronounces his name, you can take it up with him:

http://people.opera.com/howcome/
or
howcome@opera.com

To be fair, "how come" is how he describes it on his website, and he even uses the email address howcome@opera.com. That wasn't an editorial or something by the editors.

I'll agree with you wholeheartedly that the default UI in Opera sucks since they switched to that god-awful skin. I'm not really sure what posessed them to do it. Fortunately, though, they retained the option to switch back to a native interface from the skin settings, which you can get at by right-clicking on any toolbar and selecting "Customize Toolbars" and then picking the Skin tab. (I'm sure there's a much more intuitive way to get there, but my menu is currently a bit screwed due to my using a custom menu from Opera 7 on my new Opera 9 install!)

What you see there depends on your OS, but for example on Windows Opera ships with a "Windows Native" skin which uses native widgets. Note that despite being called a "skin" this really is native rendering, not just a bunch of bitmaps that look a bit like Windows's default widgets. I personally use a third-party custom skin called Minimalist Native which has much simpler buttons that I find much more pleasing.

"I'd even pay good money for it. I think they'd increase their market share significantly - much more than by adding a BT client really.

I don't think Opera will stop you paying for their web browser, but Opera has been free as in beer, and free of application-internal advertisements for quite a while now. I bought it before that, but I still don't feel the least bit cheated. Odd. I'm usually much more niggardly than this.

"Why we're going free" from the Opera webpage.

My serious sympathies to you ... the imcompetent Winblows user who can't figure it out on your own ... so I couldn't remember it off the top of my head? ... my bad ... I looked it up for you ... it's actually ... To disable pop-ups in Opera, go to Tools >>>> Quick Preferences>>>> Block all pop-ups.

If you need any more help, Opera has Tech Support ... I have to get back to work now.

Reading changelogs such as these should strike fear into the hearts of the Firefox developers, while that they squander so foolishly their hard-earned market share. If it wasn't for Opera, Joe Clickit wouldn't have reason to think FF was so poorly cobbled together.

Firefox, while it started with good intentions has become thick around the midriff. It's memory useage is embarassing, and I use Linux which is apparently the build target Firefox is most optomised for. How long can we be told we're sick of being told they're imagining FF's gushing memory leaks.. Why does an open-source application fall so miserably behind a closed-source competitor? The trend is the inverse.

Speaking of features, does anyone else have a problem with the models Opera selected to include in their marketing? Who are these idiots? It looks more like a bad Gwen Stefani video more than uber browser.

The canvas extension in question is the opera-2dgame context. Some of what it features is:

• setPixel and getPixel
• point in path-detection, using checkCollision
• canvas update locking

There is work underway to get a similar API for the canvas into the specification.

Disclaimer: I am the author of the mentioned blog post detailing the opera-2dgame context.

Anyway, my favourite new feature in Opera 9 has to be the 'create search' function to easily create new search engines for Opera to use (and to use in the search dropdown). I'd explain how to use it (exceedingly simple), but a good overview is perhaps here

Ok, first off, the DL for OSX was simple and quick, total time to install and relaunch was less than 1 min. Can't beat that... Features, it is pretty extensive, I don't necessarily care for integrated BitTorrent clients in my browser, yet it is forethinking of Opera to include it since BT seems to be the #1 traffic on the Net by about 4:1 ratio. Now for the weird part, who are these "lifestyle" models they have photoed for the browser's new help and information? The Features shows two girls, looking like they are college crack whores gotten at the 9.0 release party's rave. :) Just some thought here, maybe Opera could actually consult a professional modeling agency for its photo shoots.

Ok, first off, the DL for OSX was simple and quick, total time to install and relaunch was less than 1 min. Can't beat that... Features, it is pretty extensive, I don't necessarily care for integrated BitTorrent clients in my browser, yet it is forethinking of Opera to include it since BT seems to be the #1 traffic on the Net by about 4:1 ratio. Now for the weird part, who are these "lifestyle" models they have photoed for the browser's new help and information? The Features shows two girls, looking like they are college crack whores gotten at the 9.0 release party's rave. :) Just some thought here, maybe Opera could actually consult a professional modeling agency for its photo shoots.

Has their CEO reached the US yet since their last release? http://www.opera.com/swim/

if Pocket Internet Explorer on a PDA was anything more than a toy, I wouldn't need it at all

Have you tried Opera for Pocket PC?

Dan East

What about Opera for Windows Mobile?

So, Opera 9.0 wins that round then? At least, last I checked Bit Torrent was a P2P protocol...

As far as I can tell, Opera still supports all the way back to Windows 95, and has no intention of dropping said support anytime soon. Once Firefox drops Windows 98 support, you should try Opera for those boxes.

it may seem useless. Maybe because it's not such a great idea, of maybe because nobody has found good applications for it yet.

Personally, the next big thing I might be working on isn't 3D web, nor going batshit crazy about AJAX (I'm not saying I'll totally avoid it either), but I rather XHTML+Voice. It sounded boring and not such a great idea - until I've tried it.

The only reason why I haven't spent much time on it is because of very poor browser support. The only browser I know that uses it is Opera - and last I checked, it wasn't installed by default (talk about very f'n low browser share... a small portion of the already very low number of opera users - like, 3 people?) Well, that, and that it wouldn't be easy to localize (there are only english voices available for Opera AFAIK).

Check out the examples. I'm not much of an Opera fanboy myself (nothing against it, just not my preffered browser), but it's worth downloading it just to try that alone. Much richer web "experience" - it blew me away. It uses very simple markup too. And you can even voice-enable your javascript.

XHTML+Voice with some AJAX thrown in... Would make some killer web apps.

http://my.opera.com/community/dev/voice/

Opera (which is Wii's wee browser) has support for 3d canvas in internal builds.

OS/2 = Modern Amiga.

The OS has a more modern (actually, very Windows NT-like... I wonder why... (NT was ripped off of OS/2)) architecture than AmigaOS, but it's got the shrinking fanatic following that refuses to admit that the OS is dead.

I was playing with eCS (repackaged OS/2 Warp 4.5) the other day, and I felt like I had been plunged back into the Bad Old Days of DOS and Windows 3.1...

But at least there was a modern browser to play with (I couldn't get a recent version of Opera running under Odin, though - partially because the LiveCD makes installing that stuff difficult...)

BTW, anyone else having crashing problems with the new Slashdot style in Opera 9?

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id= 137224 is a thread on it...

2. sometimes the modules don't go in very well. they cause frequent crashes.

3. and as we all know about tabs, opera was there first!

* lon3st4r *

Fast, small footprint, low resource use. More customisable than any other browser I've tried, stable, secure, free. And did I mention it is fast?

Get it here:

http://www.opera.com/download/linux/

Actually Opera does outline security issues which were fixed in each new incremental version: Opera Changelogs

Nope... It is only ment for W3C compliant browsers...

--

Get a real browser here FireFox or here Opera

The Opera Mini J2ME thing which is an amazing innovation

http://mini.opera.com/

now has "download support". Thanks to it and my laziness to turn on computer to check something like Slashdot costed me 50 euros for a month!

The GPRS price of course. I don't blame my cell network or Opera. I blame my laziness :) In fact, Opera Mini SAVES money by compressing the stuff server side.

If I was a network operator, I would donate millions to Opera ASA to improve their browser so I can make billions ;)

Opera for S60 is kind of their main product they make money from. It looks like they lack publicity somehow in USA or wherever you are?

http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/products/s60/

As I don't have a S60 handset now, I didn't see the Nokia product. I had 7650 (s60) handset with ~3MB of RAM and it was running Opera fine. That made me say "wow". As reports coming that the open source product can't run on such devices, my "wow" continues.

If they wanted to hedge their bets, they could begin developing a S60 based web browser.

Opera got its start as a phone company spin off. It's still a reasonably small company, and might be nimble enough to navigate the changes from open source software and adapt their business model accordingly.

the K.I.S.S. principle

Keep It Simple Stupid

there's also the other KISS principle: i'd rather kiss off the entire opera user base (small as it is) than bend over backwards coding so much extra for their sake

thems the breaks

none of have infinite time and patience

besides, i would be surprised if opera isn't eyeing support for xslt, especially as xml and xhtml use only grows over time. imagine opera not supporting css? same issue in the xml world

sorry opera aficionados. i have mad respect for your browser, but not much time or patience to put in much more effort for your sake. but xslt support isn't really an esoteric demand on my part. and opera knows that. and it only gets more and more necessary as xml + client side xslt grows in popularity, as the wonderful speed-increasing, flexibility-enabling, and server-sparing tech it is

Anyhoo, the ACID2-compliant versions of Opera and Safari are beta releases and not displayed on their main download pages. Opera's download page displays Opera 8.5.4. Safari's download page displays Safari 1.2. IMO, I don't think ACID2 compliance is something to brag about if your compliant browser isn't stable enough for release.