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Thought it would be interesting to point out Opera now has support for bittorrent transfers right there in a browser alongside ftp and http transfers. take a look

Opera 8.02!

http://www.opera.com/

It's the FASTEST browser out there, well designed, year in & year out winning the webbrowser performance contests online in most of the categories, and efficient also!

It's also (like FireFox) INCREDIBLY feature-laden, but also the BEST performance-wise...

Buying Opera's ALOT like buying a Ford Mustang 5.0/4.6:

You get an 'instant hotrod' outta the factory, headers + supercharger etc. built in & wins the most street races!

It's NOT free, but it IS worth every penny spent on it imo...

Now, people? Don't get me wrong:

I love FireFox because it's free, and because of the XUL 3rd party addon community around it. BUT, that same "featureset" slows it down (try load a ton of them or the 'heavier' ones, & see what happens to FireFox's ordinarily EXCELLENT performance) and it's a damn fine programming artifact. I've spoken directly to their coders & helped point out a bug & solve it with them on a particular site, and they emailed me RIGHT that day, and also showed @ the website to help fix it and talk with us all (ntcompatible.com):

Talk about SERVICE, personable service. I think FireFox AND Opera? Are browsers built by websurfers FOR websurfers... amateurs too!

Firefox is great also, for the same reason I admire Linux & KDE for - they all show that humanity is NOT just a "greed machine"!

That we CAN pull together & do excellent things for the art & science of it...

Those projects DO show we're not ALL that bad, & things like SETI@Home, FireFox, & yes (even though I am a Win32 man) Linux, & KDE evidence this for me!

Going off track on tangents, time to get back on now:

However, FireFox is imo, heading for the same crap IE hit, not only because of representing a large body of users now, & thus 'greater attack surface area'? BUT, not only that, but this VERY 3rd party community & XUL imo?

Well imo, it "opens the doors" to what has plagued IE in the past via ActiveX, malwares & exploits... time will tell if I am right or wrong here, but I was years ago about "java's impenetrable sandbox" as well as javascript...

Heck, even about adbanners because of scriptbombs in them etc.

(and, like in all browsers? Java holes & javascript as well, which I ALWAYS turn off in ALL browsers, sure I lose the ability to use SOME sites, but so what? I am not rebuilding my system every 4 weeks or so either... I can actually make progress because of this).

NOW, Alot of people may be 'angry' with me here about some of my statements... however, I can reply this:

I have not turned up a bug in ages because of it & other things I do to secure my system, details in next URL, (& takes only 1/2 hour to do with notepad.exe & regedit.exe really):

http://www.avatar.demon.nl/APK.html

(I have done some other posts recently here outlining the details & summary of what that lists, & it's HOW to secure your system, and YES, IE even, against malware/virus/spyware, with some VERY simple techniques that take 1/2 @ most to implement!)

* Convincing enough? GO OPERA! :)

APK

P.S.=> It's less attacked, faster, multiplatform, efficient in memory & totally feature laden... cheap buy imo, for ALL that, & a safer webbrowser that's tweakable as hell! apk

Click on the RED "O" & surf FASTER than IE &/or FireFox:

Opera 8.02 (just released, great stuff)

http://www.opera.com/

Not only is it year in & year out the FASTEST webbrowser out there, it's "multiplatform" too like FireFox!

Opera's also not being hit by as many bugs as they both do (and, they do, since they're used alot more than Opera is & represent a greater 'attack surface' & imo, also because BOTH are extensible via ActiveX controls (IE) OR XUL in FireFox's case). It's sad, because both ideas came in with the best of intentions, only to be largely misused.

To get past them, &/or java/javascript flaws as well, it means effectively partially crippling your browser! I.E.-> The "price of safety" with either!

Now, I have to admit - I love the fact you can extend IE &/or FireFox (especially firefox's community around XUL addons, but they can be malwares or exploits as much as ActiveX or javascript holes can be potentially imo).

Opera may not give you that, but it's WELL DESIGNED & its winning webbrowser performance tests prove that & it's IMPOSSIBLE to argue with results & numbers!

(However... Opera's NOT free, but worth EVERY penny spent on it imo, on performance & features alone vs. FireFox &/or IE!)

* So, bottom-line? CLICK ON THE BIG RED O, instead of the E or the wild animal on fire! :)

APK

Opera has an official torrent for this release available right here.

You can find links to the torrents for this release in the Forum.

This ruling is only about the trademark law involved with linking competitor products to a specific brand name. Like having ads for Acme Tissues triggered by kleenex.com, or ads for Bland Cola triggered at pepsi.com.

This ruling has absolutely nothing to do with the legality of adware in general, or with software being installed without the user's permission. Assuming WhenU was deliberately installed by the user, this ruling clarifies that it's acceptable for WhenU to show ads for other contact places, triggered by 1-800 Contacts's site.

Also, remember that not all adware is malicious and sneaky. Some people actually think highly of Opera. GetRight was one of the first adware programs I knew of. Broadcast TV and radio are "adware" even.

I know this will sound completely nuts to most of you, but even the "evil adware" programs aren't always unwanted. A friend was cleaning up a customer's PC for them. He told them that they had Gator on it, and he was going to remove it because of the bad stuff it did. "But how will I remember all my passwords?" Yes, someone actually used Gator on purpose. I can't say whether or not they specifically installed it, or if it came as a "value added bonus" with some other program. But for that user, it really did add value. Along these same lines, it's very possible that someone could actually want WhenU's software on their PC, letting them know of all the great deals they could be getting.

I've got several links for you:

Kick Firefox to the curb
Kick Opera to the curb
Kick Maxthon to the curb

How could I not know of Firefox and have it installed when I post on Slashdot (Firefox usage up .03% vs IE!)? Really now... I was just using IE at the time, and found it hilarious that Slashdot would link to a site that would attempt to install malware on a user's computer.

(Besides, with SP2, Mouse gestures and program grouping on Windows XP, and privoxy for blocking in-line ads, IE is useable)

-Tezkah
(Posting A/C for O/T)

What other browsers (non-IE) do / have done don't matter to the unwashed masses of internet abusers.

And yes, I am an Opera fan.

Opera had RSS in a 7.5 beta in April 2004. 7.5 final with RSS was released in May 2004.

Opera had RSS in a 7.5 beta in April 2004. 7.5 final with RSS was released in May 2004.

Google is your friend: http://www.opera.com/swim/

Is what ever happened to their "one million download challenge", which promised that the CEO would swim from Norway to the USA? There was briefly mention of it on their site, but now... nothing.

Meh... I guess I shouldn't have expected much...

No problem, just download the free version: http://opera.com/download. It has a 34 pixel high banner at the top which shows contextual Google ads. And Google is still considered "good" even by Slashdot readers, no?

Opera is adware. It is software that is supported by means of advertising within the product. It may not be "gator" adware, but the entire application itself is adware. Just as a product which is completely free is freeware and a product which is free to demo, but costs to keep is shareware.

For more on this, please see Opera's website where it says OPERA IS ADWARE 52 words into the document.

There was a pretty visible incident last year some time where MSN.com was rendering badly in Opera. When Opera tried to find out why, it turned out to be that MSN was serving up a different (broken) stylesheet to Opera as it was to IE. Telling Opera to identify itself as IE made MSN.com render correctly because it fetched the stylesheet typically served to IE.

See this description of the event

Some people say it was intentional on MSN's part to make Opera users believe that Opera was sub-standard. Certainly, of all sites, MSN.com is probably the most likely to convince users of this; most users use MSN.com as their home page since that's the default, and they'll want Opera to behave the same way. Users trying out alternate browsers for the first time would be immediately put off by their favorite sites rendering so poorly in the opposing browsers, and as far as the user's concerned, it's the browser's fault since it looks just fine in IE.

You know where to leave your feedback about this incident.

"I'd only be able to work around that if they identified themselves to my web server correctly."

Hergee berger snooger Bork!

Oh, sorry, didn't our browser render that comment correctly?

Breaking your site for particular browser is just as stupid as you think it is

They had a mechanical failure. Read all about it here:
http://www.opera.com/swim/

He wimped out. http://www.opera.com/swim/&e=10384

News note: Opera has recently announced a security patch to bring Opera to 8.01. This was to fix three holes (A, B, C) announced at the time, as well as one announced later.

The Macintosh version 8.0 has also been recently released, so that they can enjoy modern Opera as well.

News note: Opera has recently announced a security patch to bring Opera to 8.01. This was to fix three holes (A, B, C) announced at the time, as well as one announced later.

The Macintosh version 8.0 has also been recently released, so that they can enjoy modern Opera as well.

Microsoft sent Opera a version of the MSN web page that made it look broken, and it was proven that this was to discredit Opera: some links about it.

However, this was a long time ago, and newer versions will identify as Opera (I think)

I think the "who actually uses it" argument is a good one. As a web developer I have installed IE6, Fx1.1 and O8 and I test on all. I think Opera 8 is a great browser, especially since it's the first to support native SVG rendering, but my regular browser is still Firefox, as I find the ads in O8 at the top distracting.

Of course, this little snippet from Opera isn't a response to the enormous success of Firefox at all, is it? Opera is envious of how Firefox became the darling of the internet community and threads like this prove that they still don't understand why (hint: clean, crisp interface and a lot of word of mouth)

It's odd that the CEO of a for-profit company whines that they don't have a not-for-profit "sugar-daddy" like MoFo. Who funds MoFo? Isn't it a not-for-profit company (I'm not sure if AOL still does any funding there)?

It's also odd that they are whining about setting the user string agent to IE's when they are doing it to themselves.

Like we're going to believe a guy who couldn't even swim the Atlantic.

These are just wild claims at the moment. If he believes that the numbers are overrated, then he needs to look into the data collection methods used. Which I'm not certain why he'd do that anyway. A user who isn't using IE is a user who's more open to alternatives. Inflated FireFox numbers could help adoption of BOTH browsers.

I'm sure everyone who has read the article noticed a gaggle of double-underlined words.

This sounds like very bad news for Opera. As I understand it, Opera's business was mainly to sell a browser to manufacturers of Internet enabled devices, of which the most important one seems phones, of which the most important manufacturer is probably Nokia.

Sure, they also sell the browser to regular users (and I have happily paid for it 2 or 3 times), and they also have an advertisement-supported version, but I guess the main revenue was expected to come from companies like Nokia.

Even though I now mostly use Firefox, I would be very sad if Opera eventually disappeared.

THIS should be perfect for mobile web browsing.

Most definitely works for me, at least.

Now that's the dumbest thing I've heard today, especially for software that commands less than 10% of the market. Give me a break.

Actually it isn't dumb--it is completely true. You alluded to one of the main reasons some sites are still broser-specific--they have decided that the cost of changing their legacy, non-compliant code is more than the cost of lost potential business from ten percent of the market. In essence, they in fact do NOT want your business because they have deemed you do not have enough to offer them as a customer for the perceived effort it takes to cater to your needs.

Weather.com has worked fine in all production versions of Firefox. Of course your theory that sites (other than MS-owned) would "deliberatly" write code to break a browser is downright asinine. WTF would they do that?

I too am puzzled about the original poster's experience with weather.com--perhaps it is becasue he uses an old release, or maybe it is the presence or lack of certain plug-ins, or an overall configuration problem. It doesn't mean you have to be insulting. As far as his "asinine" theory goes, it has been proven to happen. In some cases it is sneaky, and in other cases it is very deliberate (a stupid move IMHO, where a site sniffs your broswer and displays a "sorry you aren't running IE--buhbye" page).

Broser sabotage is done to compel users to another browser, either because (as in the case I refence here) said company has a vested interest in the success of a specific browser, or (in the case of a lot of intranet/private sites) tech support wants to ensure a homogenous client operating environment.

Seriously, remove your lips from the crack pipe every once in a while and get a grip on reality.

Seriously, remove the cactus from your rectum and learn to relax...you might find a little insight in what people say, even when it doesn't seem to make sense.

And word to the shortsighted designers out there who STILL make public sites that break standards and rely on platform-specific behaviour: you are doing a disservice to all who use the internet. It doesn't matter if a new PC is $3000, $300 or $30, if it requires more care and feeding than an exotic pet and spftware does not behave with a reasonable degree of consistency from one machine to the next, then PCs will NEVER reach their portential. Consumers do not need a monopoly, but they DO need software developers of all stripes to play by the same rules (USE THE STANDARDS PEOPLE!).

Also, don't count on MS and IE being dominant forever--the machines on the leading edge of the ultra-low-cost market have Linux factory-installed, and even if some form of IE remains the dominant browser, MS has shifted efforts to security at the expense of compatibility (it had to becasue its platform has been flawed from the start). I expect that IE7 or possibly whatever the equivalent of IE8 will be will break more than a few IE6 sites just like XP SP2 broke a number of applications.

Well, Opera CAN be run in such a mode.

However, the reason they do this has little to do with network access (except on Opera) - they've hit dial-up speeds (and beyond), after all. It has to do with the fact that the J2ME devices have limited RAM, and can't hold a large page.

Nokia ships lots of phones with Opera as a web browser. See http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/products/

If Nokia is serious with their own KHTML-based browser for their phones, it could be major financial blow for Opera Software.

This is a blow for the Opera for Mobile product, it seems to me. I wonder how usable this new browser is without a proxying component like the one used by the Reqwireless WebViewer or even the BlackBerry's built-in browser?

If I remember correctly, the broken sheet could be obtained by leaving out only the "opera" part (by changung it to "oprah") in the agent-string yielded the correct sheet. As far as I remember the opera engineers experimented with this to prove their point, but honestly I don't care enough to dig up more than one link... http://my.opera.com/community/dev/discussion/openw eb/20030206/
To me this is proof enough of either malintent or incompetence, really :-)

Well, that could be because the flaw was fixed in Opera 7.52.

This might be a better indication of how Opera handles security. Other browsers also have a good record.

As opposed to say, this or that old browser.

Seriously, the problem is that this was (supposed to be) killed in a previous version of the Gecko browsers. It should not have revived itself.
The following browsers are not affected:
* Mozilla Firefox 0.9 and later
* Mozilla 1.7
* Opera 7.52
* Netscape 7.2
* Camino 0.8 (build 2004062308)
Source Secunia

At least in Opera, dead bugs stay dead.

Bullshit.

I paid for my computer, my internet access, and my browser (Opera).

If they need to pay the bills, they can charge me. If it's worth it, I'll buy it.

But once their content gets on to my computer, for all practical purposes (with few limitations), it's my content. I can save it, filter it, block it, etc. however I want to.

Opera is making excellent progress with Acid2. Only a few more lines to go. They are treading softly with regression testing.

I've often thought that Apache could do similar things. If after there was a big security hole found in Apache, they put out a non-vulnerable version that broke IE browsing, but didn't affect Firefox, it could force a lot of people over. Of course, it would have to be done carefully like other companies do it - The Opera/MSN debarcle so people didn't notice.

And what is this about?:
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 10 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Again, I have no idea why you think Opera just supported javascript or CSS in version 7. I'm reading the changelogs for version 5 (the one I started with, released in december of 2000) and it supports base javascript + new versions of javascript plus CSS2...

http://www.opera.com/windows/changelogs/500-512/in dex.dml

When did Gecko come out? About that same time IIRC. I'm sorry, but to claim NS4 as having much to do with gecko - the entire thing was rewritten from scratch - that's why it took 4 years to get anything out.

Oh, btw - Opera 5 was when they introduced mouse guestures. So your last sentence is dead wrong.

I'm also not getting the relevance of this discussion. So, I'll stop now. But I hate to see misinformation posted.

In the end, what browser you use depends on what you want. If Free in all it's permutations is important to you, you've only got one choice I know of on Windows (though that's an oxymoron right there), some Mozilla dereviant.

If function is important to you, you have to determine if Opera's features now - vs FF's reimplementation some time in the future - is worth it to you.

I think Opera has an opportunity to court those disaffected Seamonky users now that their product of choice has been EOLed.

This may actually be a good for users still on Win2k. They might just get / be forced to use a better browser... :-)

Although IE will be left unsecure, system admins can easily fix/workaround this by installing FireFox or Opera. Thus; no problem. And at the end of the day; the user gets a better browser...

Microsoft may unintentionally just help with the adoption of browsers from their rivals with this decision!

What is the status with other web browsers Safari, Konqueror, Opera thay have little market share and say. Are thay ready?

Well, let's start with Firefox. Exactly what great, utterly innovative features did it come up with? No, seriously?

Tabbed browsing? I do believe that Opera had it first.

Gestures? Ditto, Opera was the first, and copied it from Black and White, which debatably got the idea from PDAs, starting with Apple's Newton if I'm not mistaken. Was _any_ along that chain open source? Nope.

Anything else? I'm already drawing blanks here. Skins? Nope, it's not a Firefox invention, sorry. Plugins? ActiveX. A half-arsed popup-blocking that worked only because noone bothered circumventing it for the benefit of 1% of the market? Nope, Opera had that too, and there were a ton of IE plugins that did the same. What's utterly innovative about Firefox that I'm missing?

I thought the _whole_ idea of Firefox was to be "just a browser". I.e., just to render HTML, something that they did _not_ pioneer or invent. Mind you, I actually like that idea. But utterly original and innovative it _ain't_.

Well, ok, maybe Firefox was the wrong example. So let's look at other "original" and "innovative" OSS stuff.

BitTorrent? Need I point out that file sharing was pioneered by Napster? Yep, another app that copied a closed source product.

OpenOffice? Need I point out that the vast majority of work was originally called StarOffice and was a closed source product? And its innovations are...? Reverse-engineering MS's file formats? (Which just makes the point about reverse-engineering.) The interface? Nope, I seem to remember closed source publishing packages (e.g., Ventura Publisher) with a very similar interface long before Star Office ever existed. So the great innovation is...? Let's face it Star Office and then Open Office have been officially struggling to copy MS Office for as long as I can remember.

PHP? Yet another clone of MS's ASP. Yes, MS did invent that kind of server-side inline scripting. (Yes, I know they're supposed to never have invented anything. Sorry 'bout letting reality get in the way of that.)

MySQL? Need I point out who and from what corporation invented SQL? Hint: it starts with I and ends with BM. Wasn't an open source project. Sorry. And MySQL consistently got features only by the time everyone else got them. E.g., took them a while to support XA transactions too. Kinda doesn't really count as innovative.

OK, I could go on for a few more pages, but you can tell that I'm drawing blanks already. Everything I can think of is either a blatant clone of a closed source product, or a former closed source product that's being given away by some corporation (IBM, Sun, Novell, whatever) as their way to fight MS.

Speaking of which, how many of those do make a revenue from support? Exactly what neat profit does Sun make from supporting Open Office? Last I've heard, it was losing money hand over fist with it.

This site best viewed in a Browser That Works Better than Internet Explorer.

"you're telling me that web designers go out of their way to send Opera bad data"

If you want to quit being an ass and actually getting informed, read the blog, and look at the example, MSNBC. It clearly singles out Opera, and the only reason why the menus don't work is that it specifically detects Opera and then sends it code that isn't working. This can easily be verified by anyone. So there is no excuse for being an asshole and insinuating that I or Opera employees are lying when stating this simple fact.

"I've already addressed my issues with Opera's rendering in another post. To recap, Opera's two options are like Papa Bear's porridge (epileptic on methamphetamine) and Mama Bear's porridge (glacial) to me, little Goldilocks. Firefox and IE both seem to be "Just Right" as far as page rendering goes, not that I'm trying to say anything positive about IE."

"Sitting in front of Opera I found key combinations sometimes did very different things. Why? Just to be different?"

"Opera wasn't developed in a vacuum of the days before web browsers. There was not and is not a good reason for those differences."

"NONE of the Opera-based blockers have the wonderful right-click and >poof simplicity of Adblock."

"Can I also mention the default Opera bookmarks for a second?"

"As far as other Opera "features", I think the best thing to say is that with Firefox, I don't have to take anything I don't want."

"Nevermind that you're apparently the kind of arrogant asshole who thinks he can determine someone's "true self" from a couple of lines of text"

"I don't know what you've "heard somewhere else", but I'm guessing it's coming from professional web developers like myself who have just about had it with trying to support Opera's broken Javascript/DOM implementation."

"There is no concerted effort to undermine Opera by sending it broken code -- why would there be, when you can break it simply by trying to execute simple scripts that run without a hiccup under everything from IE to Firefox to OmniWeb?"

"is there something about small, underdog platforms that ctually breeds paranoia and delusions of widespread malignant conspiracy amongst their partisans, or do they just somehow attract the mentally unstable?"

"If Opera had a true Adblock equivilent (regex capable would be nice) it would be enough for me to switch."

http://nontroppo.org/wiki/BlockAdvertisements

http://nontroppo.org/wiki/OperaAdblock

"Even better if it had the extensibility Firefox does"

"And the reason FF has plugins is precisely to keep the base code small and more manageable. Remember Opera's been out much longer than FF (something getting to a decade now?), so they've got the code base and methods in place to implement all those things inside the code, Firefox is what, less than a year or two in age? Give'em a break!"

"They still beat out opera in marketshare."

"So please, spare me the "it's better because it's got everything builtin""

"locking users with only a given set of builtin features is not a good idea"

"I'm not trying to flamebait, but I seriously doubt that a company that's developped a product for a decade and got spooned by a new OSS product in less than 2 years in marketshare has so many things to its advantage."

Also, your comment is illogical and irrational. By your logic, MSIE must be the best browser with lots of advantages since it has 90% market share...

"Opera 8 reached, what, a tad over a million downloads?"

"That's less than a tenth of the firefox 1.0 downloads."

"Opera has some hellaciously cool ideas, but it's flat-out buggier than the Firefox project, which, while still imperfect, is much more responsive to bug reports and seems to exhibit an overall higher level of competence in its code."

"DHTML in particular is practically unusable in Opera thanks to the poor quality of its Javascript interpreter."

"Add to that the ease with which non-trivial extensions (many of which duplicate Opera's hellaciously cool ideas) can be added to Firefox, and I see no reason whatsoever to use Opera in any but the most specialized environment"

Extensions are nice, but face it, they are not the same as native features that are tightly integrated into a better whole.

How about this answer from Opera on the question? (Search for Gates or MicroSoft - it's question four if you want to scroll down.)

I have seen an unbiased comparison (grin) that presents some of this in a tabularised form.

I realise that many people say "b-b-b-but extensions let you pretend you've got Opera!" and that's nice, but with the real thing you don't have to go and find the dang extensions.

For me, Opera is the best browser. There are things that could be improved with it. (Which means that there is a future for Opera.) There are still web sites that (stupidly, unnecessarily) deny access to Opera. [Don't get me started on that.] But, all-in-all Opera is my default browser.

(Disclaimer: I use a filtering proxy with all my browsers ...)