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I see Mozilla news almost daily on Slashdot but where's the Opera news? Every small release of Mozilla however unimportant gets mentioned but not even the biggest Opera news gets mentioned. Opera doesn't even have it's own news Icon here on Slashdot. We should demand more Opera news because Opera 7.2 beta 2 came out today and I must say it's the best Opera ever (much better than that memory hogging vile beast of a pig Mozilla). Although no Linux version of beta 2 is out yet, only Windows, it is still news worthy of being on Slashdot. Here's the news announcement and heres some forums to talk about the new beta.

Mozilla Firebird is an open-source project which offers a basic set of features when you install it from a 6 MB package. It does not have an e-mail client. However, Firebird's strength lies in the way you can install extensions for it. This means that you don't have to put up with too many features that you never use anyway, so you can basically choose what to do.

But Opera is easier to customize because you can drag and drop user interface elements just about anywhere. It also has lots and lots of little things that help you out, such as quick preferences - press F12 for quick access to settings you might change often. Opera's window management ("tabs") is also more mature and flexible than Firebird's. With Opera you can also save sessions, continue where you left off last time, and so on.

But anyway... Mozilla Firebird is a basic, no-nonsense browser which you can install extensions for to make it do what you need. Opera is an intergrated package with everything you might need in one download, but probably some stuff you won't need as well.

Oh, and with Opera, you either have to accept an ad banner in the top right part of the user interface, or you will have to pay to get rid of the ads. Then again, the ads are very well behaved, and Opera doesn't use popup ads - it stays in its corner at all times.

switch to OPERA instead, you insensitive clod! and version 7.2beta1 is out! check it out in at my.opera.com/forums

People have been paying for Opera since the mid-nineties - it was profitable even back then.

Opera is also a 3 MB download, not 6 as you claim.

Nothing to show for it? What about mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, Hotclick, Notes, FastForward, Rewind, M2, quick preferences, etc. All this in a 3 MB package.

And Opera 7 does have an email client. It's called M2.

What specific requirements for a web browser do you need to use Opera? Opera has far more user-oriented features than MSIE. Features that make browsing more efficient and fun.

That must make Opera Kate Moss.

Unfortunately, the author has somewhat misunderstood Opera's role in the browser wars.

The next generation browser wars will not be fought on the desktop - it will be fought on mobile devices, and on embedded devices, a market where Opera doesn't have any competition from either Mozilla, IE or Konqueror/Safari.

Opera have partnerships with Sony Ericsson, which brings their phone to devices like SonyEricsson P800. Furthermore. Opera is also available, and by far the superior alternative for other mobile devices such as Nokia 3650/7650, effectively bringing a sixth-generation browser with full CSS/DOM-support to handhelds.

Unlike the Mozilla project, Konqueror or Apple, Opera has created partnerships and made deals with a lot of companies, as outlined here.

As a desktop browser, Mozilla will remain what it is today: An outsider. The browser is too large, or bloated, if you will, with features noone hardly ever uses (And, yes, that goes for Mozilla Firebird as well) - for many desktop users it's just too complicated, and too slow.

Konqueror will remain a competitive alternative for which platforms it exists - it won't be any better or worse than other alternatives.

As for Safari, it may well become the dominant alternative for Mac users, but being what they are, a minority, Safari will remain a minority browser.

Opera is available for all major desktop platforms, and will compete on equal ground with the other browsers.

As for the behemoth of web-browsing, Internet Explorer; it's days are numbered. Following the statistics for a site like AWStats is interesting reading: The percentage of MSIE users has been decreasing from month to month. Granted, AWStats is a specialty site, mostly interesting to web developers, so it's statistics may be somewhat skewed. Keep in mind though: Web developers are what has made the browser market what it is today, it's web developers that chose to develop for MSIE.

Finally, the author failed to mention the perhaps most important of the browsing competitors of the future: The Aggregator, enabling users to subscribe to XML feeds, instead of visiting a site by traditional means. The aggregator market is a highly diverse market, with products like NNTP//RSS, Amphetadesk, Radio, RssBandit, FeedReader, FeedDemon and a whole bunch of both commercial and homegrown readers. Many of these either utilise some common browser rendering engine, convert content to plaintext, or have a minimal HTML rendering engine.

Opera has a lot of neat features when it comes to finding the goodies on a page. E.g., you can force your own stylesheets on a page, even multiple ("User Mode"). So I have a standard b/w stylesheet that underlines and colors links no matter what the designer intended, and another one to switch off all images (except those that are links).

Also, you can zoom in and out pages: 25% gives a nice "thumbnail" style overview, while 400% should be enough for even the smallest, err, details. Bonus: Images and Flash movies are resized as well, so this is much better than IE's feature. Press "W" to move from headline to headline (assuming the designer actually used H1 and not just f****ng bold). Pressing [ctrl][j] brings up a window that shows all links on the page. Just select those you want and open them in a background window etc. etc.

And just pressing F12 will give you a Popup menu to switch off all that nonsense that often keeps you from reading: GIF animation, background Audio, Java, Popups ...

Also, Opera will allow heavy customization. Almost every element of the UI can be tweaked and moved around. Whether you want a minimalist, near-fullscreen browser or a large set of custom stylesheets, search engines etc. at your fingertips, new keyboard shortcuts or Google Toolbar style Bookmarklets: Just tweak a few INI files.

PS: If it's only highlighting you want: When you're on Windows, the Google Toolbar is very helpful. Also, there's Text Spotlight, which does the same thing system-wide, not only in the browser.

I've been using Opera (in "free with banner-ad" mode) for maybe a couple hundred years now -- don't know how long for real, because I cringe at the thought of using Explorer. I used to have to switch to IE for some work-required sites, but the new version (7.11, aka the "Slurpee" version) has whittled my IE requirements down to just one boneheaded site.

But the best test came when my mother sat down to do a job search using IE. She was immediately assailed by popups, so I helpfully pointed out that you don't get popups with Opera unless you want them. I showed her where to click... and she's hooked. Score one more for the Norwegians!

On the other hand, my wife and 12-year-old daughter don't like Opera. In both cases, I think it's because Opera doesn't have enough security holes, and it interferes with their game downloads. I shudder to think what I might find if I were to install ZoneAlarm...

FWIW, Opera has a special version of their browser, with the ability to render the usual webduhsigners fixed width websites on small screens. Check out Opera's Small-Screen Rendering.

Qoute from the page:

How do we do it?

Opera's Small-Screen Rendering technology enables access to all the content available on the Internet today. Even before this innovation, it was of course possible to browse the Web with Opera. The problem is that most sites are designed with fixed widths that make them hard to navigate on small handheld devices.

As an example, most news sites have a center column where the main article text is located. This column is usually 468 pixels wide (due to the standard ad-banner sizes) and the text is set to fill this width. This means that to read an article, you would have to scroll back and forth for every line of text.

With Small-Screen Rendering?, the page is reformatted to fit inside the screen width and eliminate the need for horizontal scrolling. All the content and functionality is still available, it is only the layout of the page that is changed. This innovation is the key enabler for surfing on a mobile device.

no matter what anyone says Mozilla doesn't perform anything close to how IE does, and yes, I have used both

Then use Opera?

-Placing icons on the desktop that launch ad-filled web pages
-Adding itself as a favorite or a home page to the browser
-Adding shortcuts to the Start Menu

All without permission of the user. Granted, those who are security-aware will have unsigned ActiveX and Scripting capabilities turned off (discussion of this can be found here, but then again, the crowd that is more concerned with these types of exploits will use browsers that are harder to exploit and easier to control, such as Mozilla, Opera, or Communicator. Not that these programs are all exempt from exploitation, but they have proven to be a much smaller target audience.

... I'm going to suggest a commercial product; Opera. Opera has a volume licensing program that may bring licenses down to $1 or below per license. Read more about the Opera Higher Education Program.

M2, the Opera mail client, makes a lot of sense, both from a users perspective, and from the sysadmin perspective, since the user threshold is fairly low: The notion of Access Points means that users mostly will not have to micro-manage their mail - they won't have to learn how to set up filters, since the mail client filters intellegently enough for 99% of users, and support staff won't have to spend hours on end to teach people how to use their mail client.

From a system administrators point of view, Opera also makes a lot of sense, since Opera and M2 is available on multiple platforms, and all mail and settings can be shared between Linux/Windows installations (and other platforms as well, as they become available).

... I'm going to suggest a commercial product; Opera. Opera has a volume licensing program that may bring licenses down to $1 or below per license. Read more about the Opera Higher Education Program.

M2, the Opera mail client, makes a lot of sense, both from a users perspective, and from the sysadmin perspective, since the user threshold is fairly low: The notion of Access Points means that users mostly will not have to micro-manage their mail - they won't have to learn how to set up filters, since the mail client filters intellegently enough for 99% of users, and support staff won't have to spend hours on end to teach people how to use their mail client.

From a system administrators point of view, Opera also makes a lot of sense, since Opera and M2 is available on multiple platforms, and all mail and settings can be shared between Linux/Windows installations (and other platforms as well, as they become available).

What I really want is a button that takes me to the "next" page of a multi-page document, and one that takes me to the "previous" page.

So, either way, users wishing to have tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking, and improved security will find it in the cross-platform browsers Mozilla and Opera.

That's a know bug and there seems to be solutions to it on the Opera support forums. I haven't tried them as I use a Vaio and the wheel works fine.

Anyway:
Opera Forum - a quick search for Thinkpad brings up a few threads discussing it and ways to fix it. YMMV

HTH

Goblin

But MS has a dillema: to use mouse gestures a user has to read the documentation and memorize what action does what, ( it's a power user tool), but I think reading the docs and memorizing cryptic mouse movements is a bit too much to ask from the average IE user!

I wish Opera (and any other browser implementing mouse gestures) would adopt a system similar to that used in some video games with complex manoeuvres: when the user holds down the right mouse button to perform a gesture, arrows should appear around the pointer to indicate which directions perform specific actions, similar to this page.
It should be enabled by default, but able to be removed once the user is familiar with the gestures.

Opera can do 2, although you have to zoom the rest of the page with the image. It can also do 3, by double-clicking on the target word; you can also look up the word in an encyclopedia or translator. It could be argued that it can also do 5, as it's also probably the smallest of all the feature-rich browsers.

www.Opera.com -- Don't tell me that browser innovation is dead. Nowadays I go nuts when I'm on a computer with only IE. Mouse gestures are the second coming of Jesus, I tell ya.

Saw Opera7 on "The Recruit". So even the CIA preferes it.

That was actually Opera version 5 on a mac. u can read the Opera forum thread and see the screenshot.

Cheers,

Saw Opera7 on "The Recruit". So even the CIA preferes it.

That was actually Opera version 5 on a mac. u can read the Opera forum thread and see the screenshot.

Cheers,

I'm afraid I won't be able to view Konqueror as a viable option until it can handle at the bare minimum my daily viewing habits without seriously b0rking the output

I mean unless you are are talking about the market share of the Windows brand.

Tiddly-day. The IE license is a "supplemental EULA" that requires a Windows EULA: "If you do not have a validly licensed copy of a qualifying Microsoft Windows operating system, you agree not to use this software."

Who still sells browser software?

The Big O?

This page not only resizes your browser window, it makes the fuxoring page too small. So I resize it bigger, then click another thumbnail and it again resizes itself too small.

Use Opera. With it's built-in Mouse Gestures feature, you can right-click/drag down and open a new tab. You can also right-click/drag down,drag right to close the window. Handy for some of that crap. Or should I say, one-handy?

Opera.com

Yes, Netscape. And you left out the links for iCab and Opera (not that they re that hard to find...).

They cite competition from Safari as the reason for this decision.

So what's their excuse for dropping IE for Solaris and HP-UX? Competition from HotJava? Hahaha -- that silly little "browser" has been EOL'd (end-of-life'd) by Sun. Or maybe it's the mighty Netscape 7, or Mozilla (both of which are a.k.a. "Solaris-crasher")? No, folks, the answer is . . . Opera! They are afraid of Opera. Or Lynx. One or the other. :)

Funny, in that IE UNIX link above, they left the original meta tags from the release in the page, so a search engine snippet might mislead someone into thinking IE Solaris and HP-UX were just released. Google shows: "Internet Explorer 5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Microsoft Outlook Express are now available on both Solaris and HP-UX.", but once you click through the full page says:

Internet Explorer for UNIX

We sincerely apologize, but Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX are no longer available for download. Visit the Internet Explorer Web site for more information on Internet Explorer.

For Support options, visit the Internet Explorer for UNIX newsgroups at news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.inete xplorer.unix.

Note: Microsoft employees do not monitor these public newsgroups.

Or, search the Microsoft Knowledge base.

yep.

Internet Explorer: Opera

NOT abandoning Mac users as was first reported...

Until IE fully supports the format, it might as well be dead.

Agreed.

Try this, or this instead.

In this case, other sites that covered this week's pair of Microsoft worms first -- and they'll cover next week's first, and so on. ZDNet, eWeek, Infoworld, Reuters, the Register and others covered it first. ZDNet has the bad habit however of sliding stories that reflect badly on MS quickly off the top pages and into obscurity.

Worms like sobig and bugbear only affect products with design flaws. Brian Valentine, senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development, said it best:

Our products just aren't engineered for security.

Opera does all of that - well, okay, it doesn't do Instant messaging, but i don't use that anyway.

But it does have a download agent, a web browser, a mail client and a newsreader all in one.

And its only a 3.7Mb download.

I just tried inverting the colors in Opera, and it's pretty nice. However, black-on-white is still a lot of contrast... maybe grey on black, or yellow (as another poster wrote) would be even smoother.

Browser wars over? One word for you. Opera

As for the "AOL have the priviledge to use IE royalty free for 7 years" well, that just stinks of typical M$hit - AOL use IE, cut out their development costs, M$ get a dependent user base (again) from the people in the position least knowledgable and least likely to realise what crud they are being palmed off with.

What need to be done is concerted education of the legions of newcomers to the .net - yes, okay, I acknowledge that a lot of the masses are VERY annoying, but either they get welcomed to the net by those of us who know what we are doing, or they get assimilated by the GatesBorg collective.

The mass population of the internet has to be won over to break the M$ stranglehold. The few 3l173 H4XX0Rz aren't a significant enough user base to challenge M$.

Hmmm, I seem to have wandered violently off topic. Meh.

I, for one, am glad to see that something is being down about the more unscrupulous internet advertisors.
Of course, using Opera to stop pop-ups and a little bit of control of the windows Hosts files (To block ad sites from even being connected to) means I haven't seen that annoying Ape in months, or any of the "You computer could be infected with a virus/not optimized/my GOD, why aren't you using our POS program???"

The opera-linux mailing list is amazing. (http://list.opera.com/mailman/listinfo/opera-linu x)

There's a couple of developers who are actively on the list. Report a (linux specific) bug, the developer checks it out, and fixes it, usually with only a one day turn around.

Mozilla developers on the other hand, (and most big open source projects, now that I think about it) aren't responsive at all.

File a bug report. They might get around to looking at it. Or not. The problem with scratching itches is that the festering gangrenous wound is ignored while the itch between the shoulder blades has been rubbed until raw. (mozilla/firebird is *still* a bloated dog (and becoming more so), but there's a *TON* of widgets that start the coffee pot based on a mouse gesture).
</fanboy>

Everyone knows that Opera is not spyware. Anyone can verify that as well, if they can be bothered to check the facts before throwing accusations around. They are not trying to hide the ad data at all, so a packet sniffer will show you what is going on.

Keep on trolling dude.

Yeah, I know, I point this out a lot, but I don't think some Mozillaists are giving Opera the credit for the many features that were actually introduced in Opera first, and only later in Mozilla. Mouse gestures is another one.

If you are going to start asking "which features can't be found in Mozilla, so why not just use Mozilla instead", you have to ask yourself who comes up with these features in the first place, and who integrates them all into a small package without having to go through a lot of hassle to get it working. And yes, it is a hassle for my mother to install gestures in Mozilla.

Can we just agree that although many features are shared by Mozilla and Opera, they are still different browsers, especially since the features are often implemented slightly differently in the two browsers? Maybe you like the way Mozilla does it. Maybe that other guy likes the way Opera does it. What's the big deal? Just because someone points out Opera's strengths doesn't mean you have to try to shoot them down. Especially when Opera continues to get new features that other browsers "borrow". Opera is considered the innovator by many.

Oh, and you are underestimating the usefulness of notes. Not only can you make simple notes, but you can have them associated with web pages, like a kind of bookmarks, so when you double-click a note, it opens the page it was created from. You can also insert notes into forms and e-mails with ease. Ever tried doing that with Notepad?

I guess that in Opera's case it is a lot about integration.

circa 2005:
Bob: I bet you use Opera don't you?
Bart: I certainly do. Version 10.0 finally supports CSS style sheets. I bet you don't even know what that is, trendmonkey.


You don't have to wait that long. Opera supports CSS today.
Not very surprising, considering that the CTO at Opera was the guy that proposed CSS in the first place.

circa 2005:
Bob: I bet you use Opera don't you?
Bart: I certainly do. Version 10.0 finally supports CSS style sheets. I bet you don't even know what that is, trendmonkey.


You don't have to wait that long. Opera supports CSS today.
Not very surprising, considering that the CTO at Opera was the guy that proposed CSS in the first place.

Time to buy a student licence and mail the developers, you'd think. ;-)

You don't need to buy a license to report a bug. And you could also try news.opera.no and get some help there.

Looks like the support has improved but there are still some areas that need work.

http://my.opera.com/customize/skins/index.pl?cat=O pera%20style&author=0&perscreen=10&skip=0&search=& show=new

Enjoy! If you don't like those particular skins, they have a lot of other ones, many of which look quite nice. Also, although the button layout and such is different from older versions, it's pretty easy to rearrange them as you like. I don't understand what you mean by "dumbed down the configuration interface," though -- it seems pretty much the same to me..

This is the edition you want: Opera Bork Edition

Notes can't be, but that's not a huge loss in my humble opinion. There are possible better alternatives (notepad, vim, ...)

Mozilla's type ahead sounds far better than fast forward.

Everything else is supported in Mozilla...

To fix this, you have to "rpm -Uvh openmotif21-2.1.30-6.i386.rpm" from one of your Red Hat install CDs (yep, the older openmotif21 RPM is not installed by default on Red Hat 8.0). Sadly, this crucial dependency problem is not mentioned on either the download page or the FAQ, but is buried in their knowledge base here. Hope this helps folks struggling out there...

You haven't used Opera 7, obviously. DOM support is rock solid, and it supports most non-standard javascript as well.

Read the Standard support page to get an idea of Opera's standards support. It's pretty darn great.

Add to that all the neat, neat features (besides mouse gestures and excellent keyboard navigation, they also make the best use of stylesheets and page relations (link rel=next, etc) I've ever seen.) and you got a great goodness.

I can turn off pop ups by simply pressing F12 and clicking "only allow pop ups I open"...sweet.

It's free to download from the Opera web site. Even some guy's computer-illiterate Mom uses it now :)

The only drawback is you have to either ignore the small, inobtrusive advert at the top of the screen (which doesn't actually bother me) or pay $40.

Downside

Pick your poison:

Phoenix/Firebird - blocked
Opera - blocked
Mozilla - blocked
Netscape - blocked
IE - oh thats a feature.

Yet another plus to using Mozilla, or Firebird, or Opera, or... Well, another plus to using anything *other* than IE, actually.

It has been ages since I bought an indy-comic. Partly because there nearest decent comic-store is an hour or so from here - and that seems to cater mainly to the young, inmature section of the market (more tits than in a porno-rag), partly because much of the mainstream norwegian comics are very good (karine haaland, Nemi, Pondus and EON & Wildlife to mention a few), and partly because the web provides me with more under- and overground comics than a sane man can read (Comander Kitty, Fur Will Fly, House of LSD and Kevin & Kell to take the first four on my list of bookmarks).

I don't think that indy-comics printed on dead trees has the importance they had for say, oh, ten to fifteen years ago. The ones that are good will find their way into mainstream magasines (at least this holds true for Norway), the ones that ain't good will die out. That, and the World Wide Wait is the underground printingpress of today; both for comics as well as for writing, art and music.

But as the subject says, that just my 2 cents (by the exchange rate anyway).