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Nice points worb. They'll always be someone who can't understand something fun when they see it.

Really, Slashdotters should use this opportunity to make a celebrity geek of their choosing. Everybody loved it when Andrew Wiles, when told he'd be interviewed, asked, "Who's Barbara Walters?" Let's hoist a similarly worthy individual into the public eye.

In this spirit, I'd like to selflessly (I can't join him) nominate my good friend Sean. As a mathematician and web developer (I think he gave Tanquerey's website a facelift), I think he'd represent us well.

So, Slashdotters, organize and vote! Oh wait, right... I must be new here.

ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/851/final/en/

You can't simultaneously say it is harder to install than firefox AND say that it doesn't have any features Firefox doesn't have. To get 75% of Opera's features in Firefox, you have to install an extension. And unless you already know exactly what extensions you already want, this process takes time (and is annoying as heck, in my opinion).

If you actually want to know what features Opera brings, visit http://opera.com/features/ and look around a bit. Nobody really cares enough (I hope) to waste their time recompiling a list for you.

For me, it really just boils down to the philosophies behind them. Use Firefox if you really care that much about everything being open source or fiddling with your browser. Use Opera if you really don't care and just want something that works with advanced features.

Of course opening your eyes, smiling, and focusing the camera would have helped . . .

Example 1 Example 2 Example 3

Of course opening your eyes, smiling, and focusing the camera would have helped . . .

Example 1 Example 2 Example 3

Of course opening your eyes, smiling, and focusing the camera would have helped . . .

Example 1 Example 2 Example 3

Of course opening your eyes, smiling, and focusing the camera would have helped . . .

Example 1 Example 2 Example 3

"the big banner should just say, "we used to cost money, but now we're free even though many web sites don't display properly,"

"but do note that we invented lots of cool ideas that were adopted by all of our competitors and most people don't know this but most of our core marketing team is in the southern USA area"

"and also we have this mobile browser accelerator that nobody even really uses much because it only works on like ten phones"..."

"and the winner of this contest will be: ideally thin, caucasian and with a hip "opera user look" that the company can deploy in a larger integrated campaign. mark my words: no fat people, burn victims or others in that category of "couldn't work for abercrombie" will win..."

"in fact, my guess is that the winner will be employed by either starbucks or abercrombie, age 22-26, female (tech influencers right now), shoulder length hair that's dark, thin and with a natural look light on cosmetics and wearing only solid colors on the billboard because it will create better contrast with the opera logo..."

They don't like to brag, so this marketing campaign is really unlike Opera to begin with, so my guess is that they'll choose someone who looks decent enough, but probably not someone who could have been a model anyway. Just an average person who doesn't make Opera look really bad.

Basically, this is meant as a "thanks" to the community that's been supporting Opera through all these years. Opera just turned 10, remember.

Oh well, this probably won't get through since bashing Opera seems to be the popular thing to do these days...

http://www.opera.com/swim/

The c't article along with Matsumoto et al's "gummy bear" paper indeed started much of the then-interesting biometric device testing, something which seemingly the makers of the equipment didn't think of themselves. Most biometric devices aimed at the SMB or home markets are of laughable quality, and should never be trusted. Seemingly, nothing has changed suring the past 2-3-4 years. Myself and others did a project on this when I was in college, and we managed to easily make moulds out of play-dough as the referenced article, along with other stuff. c't article in English: http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/11/114/ Matsumoto et al: http://www.lfca.net/Fingerprint-System-Security-Is sues.pdf ours: http://my.opera.com/olekasper/homes/files/attackin g_fingerprint_sensors.pdf

Apparently she can ;)

Mail client with tabs? Opera.

Opera opens everything in tabs, including views of mail folders, e-mail composing windows, etc. They're all saved in session as well.

Opera, now gratis

Opera's been everything I need a browser to be since I was forced back to it in search of an e-mail program, oddly enough-- Thunderbird destroyed a friend's entire e-mail storage (about four months after I installed it for her) and Apple Mail apparently froze but 'sent' some important e-mails of mine without saving a copy anywhere.

Fortunately, Opera got a version (8.5) that actually worked on Mac at about the same time, and Firefox just isn't as good yet. And now ad-free Opera is officially free.

~~~
"The only thing that could make the Bush regime worse would be competence."
write me via my web design contact page.

please read and support independent, noncommercial news:

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Opera's been everything I need a browser to be since I was forced back to it in search of an e-mail program, oddly enough-- Thunderbird destroyed a friend's entire e-mail storage (about four months after I installed it for her) and Apple Mail apparently froze but 'sent' some important e-mails of mine without saving a copy anywhere.

Fortunately, Opera got a version (8.5) that actually worked on Mac at about the same time, and Firefox just isn't as good yet. And now ad-free Opera is officially free.

~~~
"The only thing that could make the Bush regime worse would be competence."
write me via my web design contact page.

please read and support independent, noncommercial news:

• The Narco News Bulletin, reporting on the drug war and democracy from Latin America.
• The NewStandard, original hard news on what matters for real people, daily.

I must be the only person here who has switched to Opera because of Firefox's instability on Windows XP.

you know, it's very sad that after all these years of variouspatches and fixes being availible for people's computers, people still use inferior software more inherently prone to flaw.

That's nothing new for M2 users...

Yeah because really there is no browser that could possibly support all the different linux distributions, Win32 binaries, Mac OSX .app files, hell even FreeBSD builds.

No it would be impossible.

How come a closed source browser has better distro support (as in official builds for each distro) when an open source one cant?

GET SOME PRIORITIES!

I guess it's still in working draft at WhatWG, but as far as getting other guys to support it -- we now have it in Safari 2.0 (the original implementation, IIRC), Firefox 1.5, and the Opera 9 preview.

Or did you mean getting IE to support it?

They'd already more-or-less frozen the rendering engine for 1.5 when Acid2 was released in early April. Remember, this was originally planned for a midsummer release as Firefox 1.1. All the Acid2-related work is going on in Gecko 1.9 which will probably form the basis of Firefox 2.0. (Firefox 1.0 used Gecko 1.7, and Firefox 1.5 uses Gecko 1.8.)

Opera was in similar straits, even though they basically wrote the test -- they were just putting the finishing touches on Opera 8.0, which came out barely a week later. Of course, that means they started a new development cycle just afterward, and in-house versions of Opera are reportedly very close to passing.

Opera 9 and Firefox 2.0 are likely to pass Acid2 along with Safari 2.0.2, iCab 3 (if they ever release a final version), and Konqueror 4.0 (or does 3.5 include the fixes?) IE7 almost certainly will not. IE8? Who knows?

or... don't use IE

"Not to start a flamewar", but why is it that any time that phrase is used, it is followed by something inflammatory? Um, oh yeah inflammatory ... don't blame me - I use the GOOD browser.

Acid2 checks a bunch of relatively obscure cases that had remained unimplemented or incorrectly implemented in every major browser. The intent wasn't to determine a browser's level of CSS support, but to encourage browser vendors to fill in the gaps in their implementations.

At the time it was released, no browser passed it. Since then, Safari, beta versions of iCab, and CVS versions of Konqueror have passed. Opera's in-house development versions are getting very close -- they basically have one bug left. Opera was finalizing the 8.0 release when they developed the test, so they put all the Acid2 effort into 9.0 -- just as Firefox was basically frozen for 1.5, so all of Firefox's Acid2 work is going on in the trunk that will eventually become Firefox 2.0.

It's theoretically possible for one browser to pass Acid2 but actually implement less of CSS than another browser that does not, if the missing features don't impact the rendering of the Acid2 page. Just looking at W3C's CSS Test Suites should give you an idea of how complicated CSS compliance is.

Don't forget Opera Web Browser.

Now, it's free without the ad banner. It's been a good Linux web browser for quite a while.

You can get opera 9 beta here:
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id= 108345

"Opera has never made much profit"

Opera has made plenty enough profit to survive and experience constant growth for many years.

"Internet devices are their niche, and that's what brings in the larger percentage of revenue. And that percentage is increasing. (over 80% now)"

"And how would that work?"

"What they are doing is basically recognizing that they are not going to make money from the desktop browser (while the biggest competitors give it away for free). So they release it for free and get a lot of good PR. And leverage that PR for the internet device markets."

What? Opera has skins, and it's a lot easier to customise out of the box than Firefox is (have a poke about the community site, you might be surprised). I'm pretty sure it has configuration dialogs too :P

Sure, no extensions. Personally I find that the most useful Firefox extensions are the ones that offer functionality that Opera already has, by default, and in a smaller download.

They're both subsets so far -- and unfortunately they're not the same subsets. Opera 8 supports SVG Tiny. Mozilla intends to implement SVG Full eventually, but the current SVG support in Firefox 1.5 is still missing quite a bit.

So some features work in both browsers, some only work in Opera, and some only work in Firefox.

It mentions a new widgets feature. Most chances are that the author is confusing the AJAX SDK opera released not too long ago (http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2005/11/15) to be a new Desktop feature.

Aside of the above, it is a pretty good article. Kudos to my fav. browser maker ;)
/me eagerly awaits Preview 2/Beta 1/votevah!

That doesn't say much about how many of your visitors use Opera, because Opera by default identifies itself as some version of Internet Explorer. See the Opera page .

Check this out. It is a beta release so you will want to watch out for some instabilities. Do not install over your working opera installation.

• Konqueror - includes all of KDE (ugh)
• Konqueror embedded - lacks maintenance
• Firefox - seems to be slow and has issues when run without a window manager
• Dillo - has website layout problems
• and, Opera - seems to be the best choice
  

If they are wondering what Firefox will be implementing, they might as well look here ;-)

... and it just now gets posted on Slashdot?

Why all the fuss about Release Candidate #2... with some minor bug fixes, when Opera released a technical preview of their next generation browser, Opera 9.0/Merlin?

Sometimes I wonder if Mozilla has been putting some of their advertising dollars at work here...

My favourite Firefox extension

Seriously, all the extensions I use for Firefox (must be getting near 2 MB by now) are to try and get Firefox to the same stage Opera is already at.

Tabbrowser preferences, Session saver, Mouse Gestures, etc etc.

Same here.

Also, take a look at my sig.

Oh, and the XBox 360 is going to kick the PS3's ass.

SONY IS EVIL!

It's interesting to note that in the mobile web browser space, Nokia has supported or licensed a number of different players. They've licensed Opera for a long time, they've helped fund Minimo (Mozilla/Gecko), and of course they've just announced their own KHTML-based browser.

They seem to recognize that they're better off with choices -- if KHTML works best on one device, maybe Gecko will work best on another. Maybe Opera will be the best choice in another device, but they don't want to be stuck if, say, Opera's licensing deal becomes prohibitive, or Gecko or KHTML goes off in a completely new direction.

Exactly why CSS has the "handheld" media type. Press SHIFT+F11 in opera to emulate it. Naturally http://opera.com/ looks lovely without the need for a seperate site.

So it's still possible for sites to block access to any browser but IE as they have done in the past?

Opera doesn't even support UNC paths...
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id= 97184&page=1#comment995835

Roaming Profile users beware.

Some browsers will let you just pick up where you left off. I've found it handy when working under Windows.

Wake up, Opera is now add free :)

See it yourself: http://www.opera.com/free/

"Ultra-light hand held clients."

Yes, it supports JavaScript. And of course it reformats normal web pages to fit your smaller screen.

You don't need security patches if you simply uninstall the problematic applications and replace them with better alternatives and installing some top-of-the-line antivirus software. And yes, everyone should use some sort of antivirus, as it's only common courtesy, considering the fact that Linux users are bound to have some friends that use Windows and sometimes communicate via e-mail.
Seriously, even something as simple as a .jpg or .png file can cause serious issues in Windows, so why not have the decency to catch such files and stop them from being spread all over?

"Why" is obvious, like someone up there said. Because I don't friggin' want to see them. Because they take up space on my desktop I'd rather use for, you know, actual productive stuff. Because I don't like the info harvesting and spyware installation attempts (not that they ever succeed, go Opera!).

So, I use Opera and Ad Muncher. They work very well together--Ad Muncher even has some special settings for Opera--and I haven't seen a non-Google ad in years, except when I've deliberately turned of Ad Muncher filtering. Even then, Opera's non-selected popup blocking means I never ever see a popup add.

And while we're at it, I read Consumer Reports (no ads), 2600 (no ads) and MAKE (few ads), and love my DirecTiVo (30-second commercial skip) and XM Radio (72 channels of commercial-free music)

Wrong browser for that joke.

A BitTorrent client built into a browser? That's the craziest thing I've heard since--

Oh, wait, I'm posting this using Opera.

A BitTorrent client built into a browser? That's a great idea!

I think, fortunately, that Opera have prior art.

Actually, it sounds like Opera's old revenue model. And while most site owners didn't mind (or weren't even aware of it), there were indeed a few who objected to that model on exactly those grounds (competing Google ads) and blocked access from Opera users. At least some of them had the sense to stop blocking it after they dropped the ads.