Slashdot Mirror
4th 'Technology Preview' Of Opera For Linux
drnomad writes "Finally after months of waiting, the Norwegian company Opera has announced their 4th technology preview of Opera for linux available for download. " They've got a good list of what's going on - as well as a Deb of the preview.
I'm still waiting for Mozilla to kill anything...well, except itself. It's good at that.
I do like the product, though. I like it a lot better than Mozilla, in fact. I find it much more accessible, for one thing. I like the interface better, and hey, if the pre-release is going to crash, at least I didn't have to waste a lot of time or disk space mucking about with it. Can't say that about Mozilla. It crashes all the time, even when I sacrifice all those megabytes to it.
I had hoped that when Netscape went open source it would get leaned down to something usable, but I don't see that happening. After 3 years, there's still no usable version. I have small hope that it will ever be anything but a development resource for kiosk manufacturers.
Opera, on the other has a lot of potential for actual users. I just wish they'd focus more on their Linux market. I would certainly pay money for a good quality Linux browser, since none currently exists.
I actually think this whole Open Source thing is getting in the way of development of good software for the platform. Nobody wants to commit resources to develop for a market that won't pay for the goods. If the only way to make money of a product is thru support, where's the incentive to develop a quality product? Hell, that's the M$ business model. Produce buggy software, hype it till it sells, then charge the real bucks to make it usable.
"The Internet is made of cats."
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault
#0 0x80d9521 in XtRemoveTimeOut ()
#1 0x0 in ?? ()
Anyone have an idea?
I have qt-2.1.0
Cuz I'm pulling a massive 158 bytes/sec over my 256K link...
Is there a mirror anywhere? (Not that the answer's likely to be "yes" or anything).
--
Peter
Netscape Navigator 4.08 for windows under wine runs very well. Even does Flash and SSL :) But has some problems with Java. u may need to run as root to get some stuff working.
"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age." -Robert Frost
Heh! Opera for Mac was *originally* scheduled to be released sometime in 1997 IIRC. It is years and years behind its initial release date.
I haven't wanted anything to do with Opera since their first Mac fiasco (and there have been several).
--
Posted with Mozilla
It really puzzles the mind how Mozilla advocates can be so sanguine about its future performance despite all available data. Data: nightly builds are about 3X slower and 2X bigger than Netscape on my machine. Let's face it: there is absolutely no proof that Mozilla will be anything but bloated and slow. There is no rational reason to believe that Mozilla will be small and fast. Just throwing the magic word "optimize" will not cut it: it is not like Opera will not do their own optimizing. Even in its buggy state, Opera has proven one thing that Mozilla has yet to do: it can be small and fast. That alone will ensure its popularity as it has when it battled Netscape and IE on Windows. In Linux-land, by contrast, the competition is mediocre, as long as you do not count long-unfulfilled promises and wishful "clear opinions".
Who the hell cares? The first thing I do when I get a browser is find some way of disabling as much of that garbage as possible. Java, Javascript and DHTML (god, I hate that), all go out the window. It prevents annoying and stupid website designers from making your life miserable ("gee, maybe the user *wants* a window to pop up here, even if they don't middle-click"..."hey, rollover highlighting would allow users to actually find the links in the imagemap that I designed so poorly that no one would otherwise find them"..."Our site would benefit from little stars rotating around the mouse cursor!") That's one of the best things about Opera -- you can disable almost every features of the browers on a feature-by-feature basis.
I freaking wish people would just let HTML be HTML. I *like* reading HTML. It's easy to use, and you can configure the browser so that it looks however the client wants. Instead, we have to deal with a big, ugly morass of disgusting pages that should have been just rendered to PDFs....
Lynx is going too far, at least for me. But I'd actually much rather have a *less* "full-featured" graphical browser, if it gives the remote designers less control over how I view their web pages. Opera's not open-source, but it *does* do that (or at least it lets me disable enough features to do that).
Just install w3-mode.el and you can web browse in emacs.
One of our real hardcore emacs users wanted it set as his default shell on our unix boxes!
Emacs... Is there anything it can't do?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
You cannot simply bolt DOM support onto your browser as just another feature.
If you don't support the DOM, then you're simply dealing with static documents that are loaded once and don't change after that. If you want to support the DOM, then you have to deal with dynamic documents that can change in arbitrary ways after they're loaded. That means you need to support *incremental* parsing, styling, layout and rendering (as well as provide all the DOM glue and so on). It means that you get to rewrite your browser engine, basically, and it's a LOT harder than the static case.
IE and Mozilla have tackled this problem. As far as I know, other browsers have not.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I used it about three years ago, when I couldn't put linux on my computer at work. IE and netscape were too slow, because the machine was only a 486 running winders (yuck!)
Opera saved a lot of time for me. It was very simple, small, and ran pretty fast. I even got it for cheap because I'm a poor university student. I have not tried out version 4 yet for linux, but it may have some promise. IMHO, wait for it to mature.
In the meantime, don't complain because it lacks this or that feature. Opera was designed from the beginning to be very fast and light. If you want all your plugins and special standards, go use your dinosaurs. (that's what I do). I put up with netscape 4.72 on linux, and it's not too slow or instable. I'll wait for netscape 6.
Or go use Emacs, it does everything.
Or, screw it, just use lynx. What use are pictures on the web?
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
I don't get why they don't get it...
:)
1) They ask that you don't send bug reports to them
2) Bunch of bugs but no source to analyze or fix
3) FreeBSD problems with ld, no output displayed so that perhaps a BSD guru could help them with it
4) using a alpha version of a widget library to develop GUI alpha aoftware, with the library statically linked
5) and a newsgroup to post in about it
Anyone see anything horribly contradictory here?
Kind of defeats the "release early, release often" approach they seem to be taking, eh?
Reminds me of BBS programmers for DOS that kept releasing more and more bugs but wouldn't DARE let the source out because they were afraid someone else would steal it. Of course they failed to say that their BBS was a modified version of another BBS with the source already opened.
I love opera, but this has to be the most whacked development model I've seen in a while.
-Erik-
come on man... i like trying to get first post too but try and put some substance in it, eh?
--
DeCSS source code!
you must amputate to email me.
--
you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
OK, one more time:
This is rms. [www.gnu.org]
This is rms on drugs. [The lamer on /.]
Any questions?
------
------
You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
DHTML based on W3C standards (XML, DOM2, CSS2) is incredibly powerful. You can build all kinds of stuff with it: plain Web pages, presentations, interactive Web pages, games, application user interfaces, whatever.
Of course it can be abused. So what? Indeed, it is useful to have some control over what gets displayed; DHTML browsers can give you that just as Opera can. Mozilla supports user style sheets, for example, in which you can override anything you want.
> Instead, we have to deal with a big, ugly morass > of disgusting pages that should have been just > rendered to PDFs....
PDF has almost nothing in common with DHTML. Hint: the D stands for Dynamic.
DHTML can be abused, but it can also be used for amazingly cool things. You will want a DHTML browser sooner or later.
The Seven Stages of Denial
1) The Yawn (Moz=0%, Opr=0%)
Mozilla will be released before Opera does. Why would anyone want to use Opera when a Free browser is available?
2) The Snub (Moz=0%, Opr=0%)
I've tried Opera and I tell you that M37 beats it to hell and back. Just wait till Mozilla is released in a month or so.
3) The Announcement (Moz=0%, Opr=2%)
Okay, Mozilla is released. Everyone can stop using Opera now. Finally we have a Free browser. Did you hear me? You can stop now.
4) The Promise (Moz=1%, Opr=5%)
Just wait until 2.0 comes out and Mozilla is only a 5Meg download. In the meantime, we support 57 standards to their meager 54.
5) The Smuggery (Moz=2%, Opr=7%)
Our distro doesn't include Opera! Unlike those evil corporate and commercial distributions, we only include Mozilla (and Gnuzilla beta). See how good and pure we are?
6) The Panic (Moz=2%, Opr=9%)
Don't use Opera! You are only being dominated and enslaved by the corporate masters. Use Mozilla and be free! Opera is evil, Mozilla is good. We will free you. Don't be fooled by their 100% standards compliance, it's a trick!
7) The Plea (Moz=3%, Opr=12%)
Why do you want to trade your freedom and morality for a lightweight, fast and crashproof browser? Sure, our browser is bloated, slow and takes down your entire system on a daily basis, but it will give you freedom, joy and eternal justice. Just try us. Please, before it's too late.
Epilogue (Moz=2%, Opr=16%)
Stupid people, they got what they wanted. I hope they're satisfied.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I like the MD interface. Instead of minimizing or closing all my netscape windows one at a time, I minimize or closeone window, and it all goes away. This is really nice if you've hit a site with many popup windows, and want to get rid of them all at once. A nice side-effect is that all popup windows have a full set of controls, unlike in Netscape.
Opera is the browser worth paying for.
> Opera will be able to display the most fancy,
> hyped up pages around..in due time.
Yeah, once they've rewritten it to support dynamic documents. And then we'll need to reevaluate how fast and light it is.
In fact, the open source, standards compliant and free *anythings* that have won dominant marketshare are pretty rare. Apache, Perl, BIND, and that's all that I can think of.
(I know, I know, don't feed the trolls.)
Apache. Perl. PHP. Python. BIND. BSD's TCP/IP stack. sendmail. Linux (most popular Internet server OS by host count). Various FTP server programs. XFree. GCC. You get the idea.
But really, those are just products. Open Source is a process. So how about:
- HTTP
- HTML
- E-Mail
- The Web
- The Internet
To this day, Open Source methods design, run, and maintain the Internet.
Without Open Source, 95% of the computer users in the world would be stuck with MS Exchange and thinking about how nice it would be if they could send email to people at other companies.
Get with it.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Well,
I don't. It's got one of the least intuitive user interfaces (UIs) I've seen, if not the worst. As light as it might be, it's a head-twister when you try to figure it out.
Trian
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
I'm not seeing this--I use WebWasher under Win32 and Junkbuster under Linux and just loaded Yahoo. Do you know of any other pages that actually refuse to load with images turned off or ads blocked? I heard of one (in Wired, I think) site that had lame short stories that it wouldn't show the user if s/he blocked the ads, but that's it.
A superior product will cover a multitude of sins even being proprietary.
Ah, but let's examine the problems that come along with proprietary software, shall we? It's more than a philosophical issue.
You're using the browser. It breaks. You submit a bug report. You wait six months for a fix. You pay for the new version. Sound familiar?
Or, you're using it, and you really wish the interface looked like this, or the program would do this. Well, I suppose you can ask them to add the feature. Maybe they will. Real soon now.
And let's not forget that ol' lock-in factor. Maybe they use a proprietary, undocumented format for your bookmark file. And you have hundreds of them. Want to try another browser? Well, you can always type them all in by hand...
------
------
You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
Like what? (dives under desk)
Let's see:
Will Opera for Linux do any of this? We'll see. Will Mozilla? We'll see. Right now, neither of them is ready for prime time.
Netscape isn't making many friends with the 4.x series.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
I try to make it a point to not use 'integrated' apps. I like the idea of having a familiar interface between applications, I don't like applications that 'integrate'. StarOffice is one of the worst for this. Please, just let me open the word processor and not the entire StarOffice beast! Opera people: offer them if you want, but keep them separate! It won't be small and light if it does 200 things that can be done with other apps.
ARACHNE - the multimedia internet suite for DOS by dedicated Czech software developer Michael Polak, is now available in alpha for Linux.
Still sounds like a true alpha (he says it is guaranteed to crash, and since you must run the alpha as root, it can cause real problems), so don't try it on a production machine. But once it reaches the functionality of the DOS version you will be very impressed what you can do on a old 386 with 8 Meg of RAM. I expect this could become the OS/Browser combination of choice for a lot of schools and kiosk systems. By the way, the download is only 570k!
Requires SVGAlib, and kernel 2.12 or higher.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
People will pay for a browser because it's stable. Because it's standards compliant. Because it's fast. Because it's small and takes up few resources. Because it doesn't automatically shove portals and newsreaders, email programs, media suites, channel content or anything else down your throat. Oh, and because it's features aren't being dictated by a uber-corporation that could give a fick what you really want cause their advertisers/investors want you to have some inane crap that leads you to them. Free does not necessitate better.
Did you note the 4.0a. Do you know what a means? Could it be an alpha release? "We at Opera have decided to refer to this version as a technology preview since the term Alpha states by its nature that it has not been released from our local offices. " Wowee who woulda thunk it? In alpha state, you don't try to conquer the competition, you try to get working software. Another note: Yet again more proof that everyone in the world reads slashdot. "opera -page='www.slashdot.org'"
Its a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field...
http://www.opera.com/new.html lists the improvements in the current beta for Windows (4.0b5), and JavaScript 1.3 and ECMAScript are mentioned. I'm not sure if they mean "Netscape's JavaScript 1.3 object model" when they say JS v1.3 though. Since they separate ECMAScript and JavaScript it wouldn't surprise me if they do.
Support for the W3C DOM level 1 (and 2) is non-existant in the Windows beta as far as I've been able to tell (from doing simple tests).
They're aware of the problem though, several Opera users (including myself) are keeping an eye on these features and bug the Opera staff whenever possible.
Somewhere down the line Opera will have JavaScript/ECMAScript and DOM-support. How far down the line it seems that nobody knows though.
As if RMS would ever utter the phrase 'closed source'. Sheesh :-)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Speaking personally I'm going to drop Netscape/Mozilla like a hot potato as soon as Opera enters Beta. I use it when I can when forced to use Windows and it's far better than anything the other big ones (IE + Moz) can show. I have no real reason to believe that Mozilla will ever deliver what Opera has and fit on a floppy so I can take it on-site with me.
Even if it didn't fit (compressed) onto a floppy it's ease of use, speed, memory use etc are very good.
The only thing I'm not happy with in Opera is their insistance that a browser is something that you use to read your email with, but that's an error repeated in all the graphical browsers.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The compactness also comes from excluding or having only half-baked implementations of some important modern web standards.
Two crashes is better than one!
That's windows for you.
:)
Hey, I wrote my lame web page using XEmacs.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
It has some nice features, like erase cookies on exit, supports all kinds of encryptions, and navigation is much improved.
However when you toggle it to not load images, the whole page format goes goofy. And an increasing number of sites, such as Yahoo, won't even load if you use any kind of ad/image/ blocker.
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Java is already in an optional module which is not even included in the default distribution.
Mail and news are already optional modules that just happen to be bundled in the default distribution. They are never loaded into memory if you don't use them. I agree that someone should produce a Mozilla-browser distribution that includes the minimum modules required for browsing; it would be very easy to do. I'm sure someone will do it sooner or later.
The entire UI is built out of Javascript and DHTML, so you can't lose those without writing your own native UI. Some people are actually doing that, just using the Gecko browser widget in their own applications (Eazel). You still can't remove DHTML capability from Gecko though (or at least it wouldn't profit you much if you did). The reason is that the big cost of DHTML is supporting "incremental everything" --- on the fly dynamic parsing, re-styling, re-layout and re-rendering as the document changes underneath you. That's not a feature you can just add or remove, that's a fundamental design principle.
There is a lot of work to be done on reducing Mozilla's footprint. I'm sure it can be made much lighter than it currently is. A lot of people are interested in putting it to work in small devices, so I'm sure this work will be done.
> Now, now. You'll never beat Microsoft if that's your attitude. ;-)
Winky-thing noted; but just because some people might take you seriously I feel the urge to chime in.
If we're going to beat Microsoft (and who really cares at this point if we do, but that's different flamebait) we won't do it by playing their game; they already own it. Unix-like systems have thrived thus far not on integration between components, but on flexibility that can be made to serve the purpose of integration. Everybody understands i/o redirection, for example, and that's one thing that makes all these command line tools so startlingly powerful in the hands of somebody who has taken the time to learn them well enough to manage their own "integration".
We need a complete, stable browser _badly_; if Opera can be made embeddable, or if it has good support for some form of IPC (haven't begun to look at it yet myself, my download's stalled at 44%), then so much the better, but the closest competetor right now doesn't have those features and also doesn't work very well.
Let KDE and GNOME finish up being compatible with each other, and then let's start asking for compatibility from arbitrary applications.
-m
> I want support for the real standard, not the > browser's own personal "new standard"
With Mozilla, that's exactly what you get: the best support for W3C standards. Check out any of the 3rd party test sites, e.g. http://www.richinstyle.com
Look at the new stuff that's being added right now: SVG, MNG, XSL, MathML, and more. All true, open, non-Netscape standards. (How many of those are even being worked on for Opera?) And where's Opera's DOM1/DOM2 support?
> The most recent versions of Mozilla are just
> about catching up with the early v3.x versions
> of Opera in terms of funcionality
In the UI, perhaps. In terms of standards support, however, Mozilla is already far head of any Opera version.
heh heh... I'm using it right now. Not as bad
as I thought it would be... but it's really
lame that I gotta run it as root.
Since I can't get into X though (trying to
install 4.0 right now... w/o success), it's
nice to have. I just wish they would open the
source for it. But judging from the
developers mailing list they are afraid some
big company is going to steal it if they did
that. Oh well.
Much better than opera.
why, oh why use an MDI interface for a web browser?
My boss is rather short and squarish-looking, so when he comes down the hallway from his office to mine he is easily hidden by the 5' tall cubicle walls. I have absolutely no warning that he is coming until his rotund, sweaty face appears (usually angrily) in my doorway. Upon which time I generally find myself frantically clicking x's to close the 6-8 browser windows I have open. Usually I fail miserably, and have to make up some excuse for why I am reading Slashdot when the TPS reports are late.
If I had only one x to click, I could much more easily maintain the illusion that I actually work, at least some small percentage of the time...
Rev Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
Emacs should stick to being an editor since it's a shit browser. If you want a proper open source browser try Mozilla. It might not be GPL but it's as good as.
Here you go (in case the opera site is still /.ed).
Mozilla is a kick-ass browser in the making. As it stands it's still memory intensive, but it's fast, skinnable, extensible and standards compliant. The memory and performance issues are a pain, but development has so far focussed on features. Now Mozilla is feature complete (just about), the footprint will be addressed once M16 is out. Expect M17/M18 to have significantly smaller memory requirements.
Current v4 betas are still very rough. DO NOT DOWNLOAD the Win beta5!! B5 suffers from a licensing SNAFU. They are in the midst of a major restructuring their Java support. Scripting is half baked and unusable after a tear down / rebuild. CSS is very good but not finished. V4 is a work in progress that I'm pretty hopeful about.
My take on Opera is that they are positioning themselves for non-PC devices and platforms. Linux and EPOC ports, as well as their XML and WAP support are evidence of this strategy. It's an interesting strategy.
NS2 worked fine in that environment, at least to the extent that running anything on Win3.1 was fine. Javascript had just emerged, and leaked memory badly enough to crash on the standard scrolling-banner decoration , but otherwise the stuff ran blazingly fast given the 14.4 modem feeding it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm tired of the Linux version of Netscape crashing all the time!
I pulled down this TP of Opera a few days ago, and was quite impressed by how much better it runs than TP3. I think this is a lot closer to being my everyday browser than is the Mozilla offering, and they've still managed to keep the package under 1MB. This partly stems from the fact that they havent tried to cram an email reader, newsreader and HTML editor into Opera. A wise choice, and I hope they are not thinking of straying from that approach.
Just do File:Quit from any Mozilla window. This will close all windows and exit. Also I think the shortcut to close the current window is ALT-W, at least to quit it's ALT-Q. I don't see how that's any more difficult than in Opera..
while a lot of new standards are a bit silly (Active-X and about ten different imcompatable implementations of JavaScript come to mind), but Opera 3.x had problems with things Netscape/IE 3 could do. Opera 3.x's idea of CSS implementation was a joke; instead of waiting for their CSS technology to mature, they released the buggiest implementation I've ever seen and, yes, it's even worse than Netscape 4.x's. At least Netscape is smart enough to ignore elements it doesn't understand, leaving the layout readable, but Opera likes to destroy the presented layout. Try specifying proportional table widths in CSS and see how Opera 3.x "interprets" it. Opera 4.x promises to fix these bugs, and the betas I tried were very promising, but how long does it really take to make a stable HTML 4 implementation? I mean the standard's been out for three years (well, since the original 4.0 draft, at least).
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
The following is Darren Starr's posting to the Opera newsgroup. Among the goals, he states that making Opera friendly with the various window managers is among theirt current tasks:
.plan files for the developers. In these plans we'll make all
- -------------------------
--Begin Quote --
Well, it's been a while since I've talked in the news group. I've really
preferred to try and keep things as quiet as possible while making the
"Feature Complete" landmark. We've been doing a whole lot of work on the
project and we're getting dangerously close to beta 1. Beta 1 will
sybolize the point in time where we'll ask the users to start slamming
the bug reporting system so we can work out every little detail in the
product. In order to reach the Beta 1 point, the goals that need to be
met by the development team are as follows :
- Implement 100% of the features to be in the final version
- Increase stability (as much as possible, but that's really the
beta test thing)
- Create packages for all major packaging systems
- Organize packages or links to packages for Qt 2.1
- Setup a web server specifically for the "Opera for Linux Project"
- Make the browser friendly with a few window managers, Gnome and
KDE then others
- Get Opera to work with several e-mail packages
- Port to big endian systems (image decoders are a little rough)
- Create documentation
- IMPLEMENT THE DANG OPERA 4.0 FOR LINUX SPLASH SCREEN (about box
too)
To make all this happen, we're going to get the Opera for Linxu web
server up and running over the next week. The page will initially be
really rough. The reasoning is, it will be handled by the development
team directly (this cuts down on the need to get one of our web
developers to assist every time we need a change). The server will be
named http://linux.opera.no and should be updated very regularly. We
also will begin to make builds ready within 15 days of each other.
Possibly more often is possible.
We're now beginning to implement a rough make system that will generate
compact executables and packages. Once this system is fully functional,
we hope to generate files for the following :
Redhat 6.X RPM & Tarball (x86, Alpha, Sparc)
Suse 6.X RPM & Tarball (x86)
Debian 2.1 DEB & Tarball (x86)
This of course is only a very partial list, but it will grow with time.
The last point that I've always found fun is, we're going to start
making
kinds of crazy remarks and comments and we'll talk about what we're
working on. Some of the guys aren't interested, but at least the leaders
on the project will contribute to this. I'm sure that I will.
I guess for now, it's best to leave what has been said at that and we'll
say more on the new web site.
Thanks for being a great group of users and testers!
Darren
P.S. - Currently I receive in excess of 400 new e-mails a day (strictly
from this project) and I work very hard to take care of as many as
possible, however my primary goal at all times is making this project
successful. So please do not e-mail me directly unless it is of critical
importance. We'll have a bug reporting e-mail address in place soon.
We'll even get a wishlist4.1@linux.opera.no mailing address setup.
-----------------------------------------------
Darren R. Starr - Lead Developer of Opera for Linux
Opera Software A.S.
dstarr@opera.com
-- End Qoute --
I'm running it just fine from CorelLinux, which is Debian-based. I had a lot of trouble with the .deb that they've posted, and fell back to the tarball. Are your qtlib's the right version (2.1)?
Now, now. You'll never beat Microsoft if that's your attitude.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
However fast, small, and standards-compliant browser Opera might be, the company still has phenomenal trouble porting (or rather, "rewriting" it) for non-Wintel platforms.
I was mailed an invitation to beta-test the Macintosh version of Opera. The message is dated December 23, 1999. I've lost my faith and switched to IE 5, which is a surprisingly good browser on the Mac.
The Linux version also has a long way to go, and this item strikes me as particularly scary:
Egads.
Have a look at the relative size of your Mozilla and this so called "bloated browser". The Opera that I downloaded was about 900K. I cant remember how big the last Mozilla nightly build was, but it was no less than 7MB!! It should be harpooned for blubber.
Quality software is a niche, I agree.
As a full fledged desktop browser it will always lag behind Mozilla or IE, in regard to such things as 3rd party support and support of new web standards.
It led the way in CSS support and HTML4. Opera also doesn't try to engulf and extend the "standard" the way the other two have, and that's fine by me. I want support for the real standard, not the browser's own personal "new standard". 3rd party support on Windoze for Opera is actually quite good, better than 3rd party support for Netscape/Mozilla on Linux.
In the long run I expect derivatives of Mozilla to kill of Opera once and for all,
On what planet? Mozilla is a dead duck, kept alive only by the lack of a decent competition. Opera's closed-source nature will keep Mozzy alive but not through any superiority of functionality. Once a decent open-source option comes along it's goodbye, big guy.
The most recent versions of Mozilla are just about catching up with the early v3.x versions of Opera in terms of funcionality and still with a huge memory footprint as the price.
Eazel's Nautilus in the long run
That's a very long run indeed, given the state Nautilus is in (not even given an Alpha release yet).
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I downloaded the previous version of Opera for Linux, which was pretty Stable (at least, it didn't crash too much on me). Too bad though a whole lot of websites are written in a HTML look-a-like. That causes that Opera doesn't always render a page too well. Keep up the good work, Opera!
Hmmmm, Opera has been around for a while. Since before the time Mozilla was open source. And if you looked at it, you would see the style and navigation is totally different than Mozilla, OR IE. Seems like you are just trying to spread some FUD. I'll take my burger medium-well, without FUD, please.... :)
here
/.ed). I found the response at opera.no to be much better.
opera.com is dreadfully slow (prolly
--
E_NOSIG
I think you can still use the .deb provided by Opera. You'll just have to install the latest libqt2.1 .deb package too. It is still in Incoming, i.e. not officially part of unstable (woody) yet, but it'll be soon. It should work with potato (Debian 2.2) too. Get it here:
I am downloading it for myself right now. I hope it works. :-)
Anthony Fok
(One of the 500+ Debian developers)
$35? Got fucking raped man.
Which, I guess, is as good a reason as any to never use Netscape's browser.
Remember, kids, it's only premarital if you plan on getting married.
There isn't a mirror at linuxapps (at least, I couldn't find it). Opera said there was.
Sorry.
--
E_NOSIG
#0 0x401b6d91 in QFontDatabasePrivate::families () from /usr/lib/libqt.so.2 /usr/lib/libqt.so.2 /usr/lib/libqt.so.2 /lib/libc.so.6
(gdb) bt
#0 0x401b6d91 in QFontDatabasePrivate::families () from
#1 0x404bc514 in QPrintDialog virtual table () from
#2 0x80d8836 in XtRemoveTimeOut ()
#3 0x40608a05 in __libc_start_main () from
I have no idea. Stuff that I compile myself always works, though...
yep. on my box, netscape's crashes approximatly after 1-3 hours of use, at least for every 4.xx releases. And what i really *hate* is when it 'captures' the mouse pointer (when the arrow is horizontally mirrored). In that case, if it doesn't what to release it after 2-3 minutes, the only solution i know is CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE. I'm not always happy to do that.
Dude...get a clue. This is not Richard M. Stallman of the FSF. This is some lame troll.
------
------
You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
The thing about that is that Opera doesn't necessarily work. It's notable that netscape has the fastest javascript implementation too, and with more and more client-side javascript popping up everywhere, it's making more and more of a difference.
On windows, Netscape sucks. Badly. It crashes out at least ten times as frequently as IE and it has that annoying habit of redrawing the entire page when you resize the window. IE's display engine is far more efficient than Netscape's.
When I load opera, I feel like I've clicked into an irc client. It comes up with a trillion little windows and some lame-looking subpanes or something, and then it fails to display pages properly. I mean, tables suck, they're a bad kludge, there HAS to be some better way to do tables, but if Netscape and IE can both get them right (Hell, lynx does a decent job displaying the data in tables) then you'd think Opera might be able to take a stab at it.
The only thing that might get me to use Opera would be if it had COMPLETE CSS support (And I'm talking about small caps and everything, no screwing around) as well as a fast javascript/jscript implementation, Java with JIT, refreshed the page in the same way as IE, and was better about downloading things than IE. It'd also have to have a smart FTP client.
Mind you, I have none of that now (Except for JIT), but there's no point in switching to a COMMERCIAL product if it doesn't fulfill your desires (Insert comment about Natalie Portman swimming in Hot Grits here). IE is free. Netscape is free. Opera is not free. Hence, Opera has to be better than both of them in every conceivable way to draw me in.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
wanna bet?
>wget -c http://www.hardware.no/download/opera.tar.bz2
>bzcat mv/opera.tar.bz2 | tar xv
>opera
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
I think the flamefest going on here over the best browser underscores an important point: there is no clear best choice for a web browser for Linux.
Mozilla? Bloated. Netscape? Bloated and proprietary. Opera or Arachne? Proprietary. Lynx? Nice and fast, open source, but no graphics. Konqeror? Dunno, never tried it. Probably several others I've never even heard of.
But clearly, if there were one good choice, there would be some degree of consensus. We don't see flamewars about the best C compiler for Linux. It's gcc. Period.
Clearly, there is a crying need for a web browser that is GPLed, graphical, small, fast, and robust. There ain't no such animal yet. We need to build one.
------
------
You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
Is that music B, Game Boy music C, or NES music C? I know NES music A is "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, and Game Boy music A is a Russian folk song "the pedlars".
Oh, and you can get lots of remixes of "the pedlars" on Napster: search for song title: tetris.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Unfortunately, our information about where to find the libraries for Qt 2.1 has been somewhat lacking, but we are in the works of fixing that glitch on the web pages.
And for those that wonder; yes we are planning to release RPMs as well. It's just that the DEB archiving happened to be finished first (which partly is because I'm a Debian developer myself).
Note: I am an Opera Software employee, but the opinion expressed here are my own
I haven't used Opera lately (since I started hosting my bookmarks remotely via Netscape's wonderful roaming feature) but it is small: The last Windows version I tried fit on a floppy disk, and it's really a pretty good basic browser. It lacks some of the frills, but it's both small AND fast. Mozilla has some impressive aspects, but (like the Gnome stuff it is becoming increasingly tied to) it's a pig. I'm leaning toward Konqueror for my routine Linux browser, but I guess I'll have to give this new Opera a try...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
A stated on the Opera page;
"Opera crashes a bit more now than the previous version"
and indeed...it does.
I think this is a great step forward, but there's long way to go yet.
Ah, fuck it
Opera will have a problem trying to win against the likes of Mozilla. While Opera is certainly lighter, but I don't see how a closed source and commercial browser can win out against an open source, standards compliant and free browser.
People just don't know how to read anymore!
I read your message very well. And I don't think you considered my points very well. You certainly ignored my main point, i.e., that this Internet thing we're all using right now was and continues to be developed using Open Source methods.
I said *dominant* marketshare. Last time I looked Linux, XFree and gcc were not the market leaders.
Well, I guess it depends on how you define your market.
Linux: As I said, Linux is the most popular OS for hosts permanently connected to the Internet (i.e., static IPs). This seems a reasonable metric to me. Not the only one, by any means, but reasonable and useful.
XFree: Easily the most popular X server software available. Sure, XFree doesn't have the market-share of Microsoft in the area of desktop OSes. But it also doesn't have the market-share of Ford in the area of automobiles. (Point being: XFree is neither a desktop OS or nor a car.)
GCC: Easily the most popular cross-platform compiler available. Why "cross-platform"? Because to me, a compiler that is tailored to a particular platform isn't the same thing. It would make sense that Sun can make the best compiler for Suns and Microsoft can make the best compiler for Windows [1]. But I don't want to write code that only works on one platform. Look at shops who have heterogenous networks, and GCC is almost always the compiler in use.
Footnote #1: Interestingly enough, I've heard arguments that neither Sun nor Microsoft makes the best compiler for their own platforms. But that is another story.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
In general, you'll get no argument from me on most of your points here, but my conclusions are differnt. I don't think M$ sux because it's proprietary, I think it sux because it's bad software. That does not mean proprietary software is inherently bad. I mentioned Solaris as an example. Opera is another example...
The real question in my mind is why people who can write good software (I'm talking about Opera, and Netscape -- the original Netscape was good software, I *bought* a copy) refuse to support robust operating systems.
I see two possible answers: 1) they've pegged the demographic as a bunch of geeks who won't pay money for software, and proceeded to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy, or 2) M$ is buying them off.
I don't think you can reasonably claim that the Open Source application products that are available for Linux are particularly less buggy that M$ products. They *are* better supported, and you *can* fix them yourself if you have time, but they definitely crash plenty. Especially Netscape.
If you've never had Netscape crash a Linux box, I can only assume you've never run Netscape on Linux. Netscape is the only Linux product I've seen that will lock up the entire box (not just the X session) if it gets away from you. It has to be kill -9'd regularly. Bad HTML or Javascript shouldn't be able to crash the app, let alone crash X, or lock up the box.
"The Internet is made of cats."
There is a consumer market for commercial *nix software. I am part of it. It is that market that scares M$ to death, not the Open Source advocates. The *nix consumer software market represents competion with M$. The Open Source "market" is a small demograhpic that everyone is working very hard to make go away. There are not enough people out there who buy anything (including software) based on quality (as opposed to hype) to make an impact on any corp that spends more than a few billion a year on marketing...
"The Internet is made of cats."
You do not know how many times that I have been reduced to tears by Netscape 4.7 for linux. It crashes a dozen times a day, easy. I get no better preformance from the Mozilla builds, but hey, they are pre-beta, so I cant complain about that. I WILL EASILY PAY $40 FOR A BROWSER THAT WORKS. After my trusty XFMail, Netscape is the application that I use most, and it does not fit the bill. It would be great if Opera were free, but its not, but in the meantime, I will support good software.
Potato is frozen, and Qt2.1 came out after Potato got frozen. Get this instead:
And then do this (potentially risky):
It works for me! :-)
Anthony Fok
One of 500+ Debian developers
It segfaults when I try to use it, and yes I have installed the QT libraries.
It needs QT 2.1 (apt-get install libqt2.1) which has no install candidate in potato, try adding the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://kde.tdyc.com/ potato kde kde2 contrib rkrusty
/Lasse
Yes, i've been playing with this gizmo under DOS. I was amazed to discover that you CAN set up the whole internet thingie under such a lowly system as DOS, and check that, with TCP stack ported from BSD :) Absolutely lovely.<br>But, at the time of this playing (couple of months ago), Arachne was a bit slow, buggy at many places and a bit unreliable. The most annoying feature was the 60Hz refresh rate on my 120Hz capable monitor, but so is with the graphics under DOS. <br>Have to check what all Linux version offers, but if such problems are going to be sorted out, it could be the killer app I wait for :) Many speed issues could be solved with multitaskig linux offers but dos doesn't. <br>Oh yes, not to forgot, this Michael Polak guy is really a productive machine ^^
I prefer the MDI over having different sized netscape popup windows, and have to find the close buttons on all of them.
Because there are some people who don't have 256Mb ram to spend on Mozilla thingie. :)
Really, i use Opera day to day on a 486/66 with 16Mb ram and it works fast enough, even with 5-10 pages open. Now try that with Mozilla thingie.
No, as soon as the archive manager(s) have a chance to check in the new files. That's why these packages are stuck in Incoming.
qt2.1 (and its binary packages libqt2.1 and libqt2.1-dev) are new packages, so they require manual editing to the Debian package list before they are taken in. Note that qt2.0 has been in Debian for some time now, and is used by packages like licq and qcad.
Now, if only KDE would contact the authors of non-KDE-originated GPL'ed code and ask them to add the exception clause...
Anthony
I think it's good that Opera is making progress,
mainly because Netscape is so unstable.
Anything (Mozilla, Konqueror or Opera) which could
replace it, would be great for me.
However looking at the progress the various
programs make, wouldn't konqueror be the best
choice for Linux? It's license seems to be the
"most free" of the web browser with the required
features. (Not that it is sufficiently stable
for daily use, either.)
Program terminated with signal 11
So the leading karma wh0re on /. was killed along with Opera?
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is not only lame. This is very rude.
Just a note: he doesn't use web.
I have an alter-ego at Red Dwarf. Don't remind me that coward.
How a few manage people get excited about Opera is above me, it is doomed to be niche product, who migth have a chance to be popular in a few embeded devices etc. As a full fledged desktop browser it will always lag behind Mozilla or IE, in regard to such things as 3rd party support and support of new web standards.
Opera is small-time on the windows plattform and will be small-time on Linux.
In the long run I expect derivatives of Mozilla to kill of Opera once and for all, even on embeded devices.
For those pointing to the memory footprint of Mozilla, it is my clear opinion that this will become smaller as the Mozilla team starts to optimize the code. In addition to that I would expect the large majority of Linux users to just use Mozilla as a rendering engine for Eazel's Nautilus in the long run.
It's interesting comparing Opera's progress with Mozilla's. By the looks of things (and I must admit that I haven't tried Opera recently) Mozilla is better at rendering standard HTML + CSS than Opera.
Now it looks possible that Mozilla will be released before Opera on Linux.
Why would anyone want to use Opera if Mozilla is available?