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Opera 5 Free... If You Want Commercials
Many of you wrote in to note that the latest version of Opera is now free... except for the
part that it runs commercials while you browse. (The option still
exists to buy the commercial free version if you like). The Linux
version is still in a 4.x beta, and I'm unsure if this advertising thing will also be applied to the other platform. What do you guys think of ads in your software? Is it worth giving up your privacy for a free binary, or paying fifty bucks for the binary? Personally, I'll stick to mozilla.
I won't pay for Opera. And I won't use the version with ads. In my opinion, the issue is more than about being cost free. It is about free, as in freedom. Already available to me is an open source browser in the form of Mozilla. No ads and no fees. I agree that Mozilla is bloated. However, much work is being done to reduce bloat in it. I also demand the right to use a browser that doesn't require Gnome or KDE libraries. Mozilla offers that also. But if you want a browser that is even more streamed down than Mozilla, check out Skipstone. It is a work in progress but is going to be good!
http://www.muhri.net/skipstone/
He was agreeing with the previous comment that he would stick to Mozilla because he didn't have the option of using Konqoeror. He then proceeded to explain why he didn't have that option and was left with Mozilla.
I run it on a P200 at home. It is far from painful. Indeed, I do most of my browsing with the Lizard. Try grabbing a recent nightly build and gave it a try.
The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants. - Albert Camus
Not so much for this free version, which I appreciate, but for BeOS version 3.64 or whatever. BeOS software is the only software I actually spend money on.
I hear that Wagner, the BeIA (embedded) version of Opera is rather robust and feature-filled. QNX Voyager is nice, but does anyone actually *use* QNX?
You Linux cats should be happy that you are even getting the option of a free Opera browser. AFAIK, BeOS won't be getting 5.0 for a long time... Unless you would get off of your high horses and actually look at what BeOS has to offer... A free, top-notch OS that is EASY to set-up, and a joy to use. Sort of like the Amiga was...
BeOS has Apache, Mozilla, etc. etc, more or less POSIX-compliancy. Every Linux tool could be migrated over to BeOS in a year or so. Oh well, that would only make computing fun again...
Oh yeah, the new BeOS networking upgrade is in beta, with near NetBSD/*nix performance. I expect BeOS to eventually outperform NetBSD...just like Be's OpenGL beta generally outperforms Linux and Windows...
Oh yeah, Be stock is a steal at $2.00...
Get my free Hitchhiker's Guide Tribute Novella:
Yes. Under the Debug menu, there is an option for install PSM (Personal Security Manager).
Anybody notice the Netscape e-mail client already does this? I open it and it puts a new ad before it fetches the mail. The nice thing is it also adds value by also giving a news headline with it. Does Opera provide any information or just advertisements to ignore?
The truth shall set you free!
Do tell, How does one manage to do this? I'd love to be rid of those flashing, RAM hogging, ugly things.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Would it really be so hard to find a few amusing banners to place where the others had been? You could even get clever about it, and use the banner advert space to display entries from your bookmarks which you hadn't visisted in a while.
Come on - turn this into a plus and have a bit of fun with it, people.
Actually, I am entirely in favour of Opera producing an independent implementation of the W3C recommendations. Multiple implementations (open source or not) are good things.
However Opera fans don't seem to admit that Opera are competing with Mozilla (and friends) and IE/Mac to be the best standards compliant browser. And, at the moment, they aren't winning.
Having said that, I wish them success in the future. It's going to be very useful to occasional web developers to snag a free copy and test their pages against it.
The search feature next to the address bar goes through affiliate programs of the search engines. For example google pays 1 cent per search. This is a pretty good way for opera to make money. I was using opera the last 15 minutes and I think I made about 5-6 searches.
The search box is very conveniently placed, and having google as default search is a plus. I don't need to type www.google.com, and this saves me a lot of time considering how many google searches I make every day.
Unfortunately neither mozila's nor IE's search features are as friendly as opera. In IE It is faster to type "google.com" and make a search than using IE's search bar.
You know... I used to love /., but more and more it's turning into a forum for wacko's on the fringe of life who complain and bitch about idiotic shit.
The comment that advertisements will somehow whittle away at our privacy is moronic. Do you expect everything in left to be free? Do you expect that companies should just fall over themselves to offer you high quality software for free? Do you think you are the only person on this planet? Of course you do, you 60's reject.
My advice? Stop your whining and bitching and get over it. Opera is a quality piece of software, much more so than, Mozzilla, the biggest piece of bug ridden vaporware to come out in some time. Mozzilla is nothing compared to *real* open source projects who actually work and provide usable quality software. For those of us who can't afford to help pay the *enormous* costs of software development, we are given a choice to be able to still use the product in return for viewing ads. But you would rather whine like a little child and prefer to use and promote an unusable alternative.
I liked you and /. better before your heads started staying up your asses.
You don't give up any privacy; you can easily check that the browser doesn't tell the Opera people anything (tcpdump, anyone?). What you do give up, however, wethever you pay or not, is freedom. You don't have the freedom to give your friend a copy, and even more important, you don't have the freedom to fixe bugs for yourself, but have to wait for the Opera people to fix them. This has nothing to do with privacy, whatsoever... <Mode type=RMS>Go get a free browser, like conqueror or mozilla</Mode>
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
If you are using something other than Linux or Windows, you'll have to wait a few weeks until PSM is integrated into the Mozilla source tree. It builds on Mac now, so the build systems are being merged and Mozilla nightlies will come with PSM by default.
By adding "giving up privacy" to the text the mass medias know they will increase the fuel on the flames burning in the minds of the masses on subjects they have little to no understanding (both the media and the masses). The medias know this simply because they built the bonfire before fanning the flames. The same uninformed masses feel they are "well informed" on subjects, because the mass medias tell them they are regardless of level of knowledge or understanding the mass medias possess on any given subject.
Throwing in buzzwords like "privacy" links completely unrelated stories together in the minds of the masses and increase following of various medias. This linkage of unrelated stories makes the unrelated issues one big issue in the minds of the masses. Sensationalizing of the medias sells. Retracting incorrect information after the fact, be it four days later in the least viewed spaces of the newspaper or 3am on news channels makes it legally unchallengeable and morally acceptable to the reporters involved in an escalating and alarming trend to sell the story to as many people as possible and get the story right sometime later when no one is paying attention.
The mass population does not care if the story is right, as long as it gives them something to be irate about and the mass medias are more than happy to cater to those needs. The damage being done by the mass medias is of no concern to them. In fact, they depend on the same damage they are instigating. The damage being done will continue to feed the mass media's sources for more stories to intentionally slant to feed the masses. The loop does not seem to have any logical end, which will ensure the mass medias an ever-increasing market share and the investors an ever increasing income each year.
Slashdot is caught in an uncomfortable position. Its viewership among those searching for "a fringe hobbyist site" (thanks Gurlia) has been dropping at a rate that should alarm the maintainers of the site. Its viewership among the panicky mass population is not growing fast enough. On one hand, Slashdot can respect its roots and cater to a few thousand users. On the other hand, it can push itself into the limelight, race on a daily basis to the story with the highest levels of controversy among the mass population (with the intention of getting stories right at some later date) and cater to millions of users. Financially, the decision is simple.
Well, I'm using it now. I've been using it for 10 minutes, and I've already stopped noticing the ad (singular) which they display. There's no requirement to put any personal data in, and the browser is still smaller, faster, and more stable than IE or netscape.
It's not that annoying. Besides - It saves me a lot of money. (Pay once for Windoze, once for Linux... how much do I owe them again?)
For the first time in my life, I do not think adware = spyware. I had my serious doubts.
On the opera newsgroups, you can always read comments from some of the Opera employees. They have also (as someone already have pointed out) documented the advertising model.
Opera's main advantage is the bloat factor. It's virtually non-existent, both downloadwise (without Java support it's just 2MB.
Memory footprint is another, just check these numbers on a win2k pro installation: netscp6.exe
Mem usage : 18680K
Peak mem usage : 24404K
VM Size : 23260K
The same numbers from Opera 4.02 are:
opera.exeMem usage : 3736K
Peak mem usage : 3864K
VM Size : 1412K
These are with just the browser up, and no pages yet loaded for any of them.
Opera claims that this latest version is even better, when memory footprint is regarded. However, I haven't had the time to check out the mem-footprint for O5 yet.
I think I'll live with Opera for a long time still.
So far - Opera is the only stable browser I know of that selectively lets me disregard cookies, both based on cookie usage, and server filters.
The only problem I can see with Opera, from a developers perspective, is the DOM and Javascript implementation, which I have found little documentation on yet
http://virtuelvis.com/
I'm not sure if this advertisement-concept is known to the Linux people out there, but a lot of win32 software that is advertisement supported ships with spyware, profided by advertisement agencies as Radiate.com. This spyware is installed on the win32 machine together with the ad-supported software and it collects data of the user and transmits this data to a radiate server.
This spyware even sits on your computer when you've already deinstalled the sponsored program. You have to use software like Ad-Aware to remove al kinds of installed spyware and registry modifications done by his spyware.
It's not clear to me what kind of data this spyware collects, but it's both a privacy and security violation that a piece of software is able to sit on your machine to collect private data.
As long as it's not clear what kind of ad-software Opera uses for their version 5 browser, I would be very careful. Ad-supported software is more than just a banner on a web page.
For more information on spyware, have a look at: Spychecker or ZDNet.
Arleo
Faulty research on my part, you *can* buy a license to disable the adverts. So what does it matter then? Either pay and put up with it (or whine about it not being GPLd), or put your hand in your pocket and be free of ads :)
Before anyone says it should be GPL or else etc... Opera Software are probably a bunch of guys who don't have any other job to make money. So support em durnit!
Might have something to do with having enough RAM to not have the thing swapping all the time.
Too bad the ads can't be obscured though, I find animtated ads distracting if nothing else.
Icebox
I dare you to tell me that Opera doesn't desperately need some anti-aliasin' lovin'.
I thought the idea was that we'd put up sites to hawk our wares, with product reviews by trusted individuals, register our pages with search engines and let people find us when they want us.
Instead we're cluttering up the screens and lives of people with constant noise trying desperately to catch the attention of people (and not making sales anyway.)
Advertising is the wrong application of internet technology. It is fundamentally irritating, annoying, expensive and a futile waste of resources.
In [cyber]space no one can hear you scream. No matter what you're screaming.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
--
> commercial software companies shouldn't be demonized for having a different business model.
Of course not. Commercial software companies should be demonized for pushing "intellectual propertry" at the expense of intellectual freedom, and for censoring their critics with copyright law, and for covering mathematical algorithms with patent law, and for sueing anyone who gets in their precious way.
Commercial software companies should be demonized for all sorts of more reasons, but not because of their different business model. Even Red Hat writes software and sells it. That's perfectly respectable.
Since when is the comment system a tool for picking apart every editorial attached to the stories, and not the stories themselves? If you visit /. regularly, then you know that the humans who run it have opinions, and don't spend half their day convulsing over what is and what isn't precise, and what is and what isn't the proper grammer to use. Yes, they could do better - but they're doing a lot more than most of the whiners who complain. Stop presuming that taco et al have some sort of debt to you which they have to repay by having your opinion on everything.... just chill out. It's only a website, and opinions are just that - opinions.
Distributing ad-supported software is entirely different from ad-supported hardware.
The cost in distributing (via the 'Net) an additional copy of a piece of software is so close to zero, it's not worth counting.
Distributing hardware is much different. Someone has to pay for each additional pieces of hardware in the first place. Moving atoms around costs big money compared to bits.
Doesn't Eudora now come in an ad-supported or pay-for-it-and-get-no-ads versions? Anyone have figures on how well that's going?
...j
(who last week paid £5 to get rid of the ads in the DigiGuide software)
Actually, Mozilla isn't slow. You just have to have enough memory that it can run without swapping. On my machine, that point was reached at about 192MB. The fact that it's too slow to be usable on a 64MB machine is not a good sign for its long term viability, though.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Yep, on very neat addition (borrowed from konqueror, I think):
:)
:(
You enter g searchword into the adress field and it will search google for searchword. Same with a searchword for altavista etc. I just haven't found out yet how to configure this to add your own searching needs (i.e. dict.leo.org).
That is certainly not big enough a feature to call it 5.0, but at least they don't changed it to Opera 2001
But: The betas for Linux have this nice "Personal Toolbar" that netscape has since 4.0, which is the best part of netscape after all. I hoped so very much that they will add it to Opera 5.0, but nothing happened
Well, I would be perfectly happy with advertising in programs, if they are not "annoying" and they aren't in the way (nagware). Like, let's say I could get a 500$ program for free, with advertising - then I would gladly take it. Also, it is easy to blank over banners if needed
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
Actually I find that running it on my 400MHz machine is painful. At best. That's when it's not crashing or getting confused by frames.
Do tell, How does one manage to do this? I'd love to be rid of those flashing, RAM hogging, ugly things.
Well, first of all, I've only done this in recent version of AIM for Windows. Go to the AIM folder and look for a file named aim.odl. Open it up and search for "advert". There are several locations in the file where something reffers to advert. Comment out the line, or the whole group if that is all that is in the group. Save the file and restart AIM. The ads should be gone now.
At least until someone figures out how to use a hex editor and turn them off =)
I am !amused.
What do you advertise to someone who wants stuff for free?
Mozilla is all fine and dandy provided you have the serious hardware required to run it. Try running it on something like a Pentium 200. Its painful. At best. There has been a lot of talk in the Opera newsgroups (in which I'm a regular) about the adware version, without much real consenus on it. We do have some details on the adware implementation itself though. Here is the protocol they are using. We have information from Tollef (who works at Opera) about what information is logged by the ad server, apparently all it tracks is which ads have been shown to which client, and whatever personal information (which is totally optional) was put in by the user. It doesn't log IP addresses, email addresses, or anything of that nature. I haven't had a chance to download the browser yet, since it came out at 1am in my time zone. I do know that I should be able to use it without getting a system upgrade, which is more then I can say for shit like Mozilla.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
If Opera would be true to its name, it would be showing us unwanted Pavarotti and friends. We could do with a bit of extra classical music now, couldn't we? Or is it going to show adds for the Pavarotti CD?
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
I'd used opera 4.02(?) untill the 30 day limit was up, but find it difficult to shell out $50 for any piece of software, let alone one that I can get a comparable piece for free (IE in this case)...on seeing the /. article I downloaded 5.0, and after a couple hours use, the banner ad has not changed once...it's a 468x60 pixel decent looking logo that simply says "Opera 5 opera software"...I'm running at 1152x864 rez, and the space that it takes up would have simply been wasted gray area otherwise. If you ask me, it's a decent deal for a great browser.
What do you guys think of ads in your software? Is it worth giving up your privacy for a free binary, or paying fifty bucks for the binary?
Oh come on! How does having to view ads while browsing violate your privacy? Besides, if you don't like it, don't use it. Its really that simple!
If that comment was addressed to me, I concede the point and thank whomever downmodded my post. Good call.
Another thing Opera has over Mozilla, though admittedly non-vital, is its easy and extensive configurability, part of which is the way you can override a document's own settings with your own.
The only fault I am able to find with Opera is the frequent JavaScript/JScript errors it produces, due generally to two things:
I've rambled long enough. Time to go outside and shoot BBs at the neighbors' dogs.
--
--
Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
In order to get (partial) DOM support into Internet Explorer, Microsoft had to rewrite the rendering engine.
In order to get DOM support into Mozilla, Netscape had to rewrite the rendering engine from scratch. (The first attempt at kludging the proprietary Layers-DOM onto NN4 resulted in a crashy memory sieve.)
So, I always wonder about these alternative browsers like Opera and Konquerer that claim to be "working on" DOM support. It seems to me that it's a little more difficult than just taking a passible HTML3.2 renderer and hacking a DOM parser on the side. Instead, you have to have an entirely different model which to parse information against, and you still have to get the display parts right.
It's a messy business, and one that probably requires more than just a patch from Hans and Frans of the University of Kronenberg. If anyone has gotten DOM support without a major overhaul, it would be interesting to hear about it.
i'd use anything that isn't netscape or IE... and i'd pay for it, if after trying it out i find that it suits my likes and needs. iCab is now my default browser and it is in beta, it has been in beta for a long while now and i've used it since its advent, and i am looking forward to rewarding www.icab.de by buying the first pay-version of iCab after using their betas for more than year (i think it has been that long), sure i have IE and netscape on my machine but they only get used when absolutely necessary (Flash content, SSL, etc) and that is NOT often... viz: often it is that less is more and simple is beautiful. i despise MS (IE is the only MSware on my machine) and have had a strong dislike for netscape for quite some time now, so i welcome the opportunity to dump them both and will pay for the privilege!
It's all a matter of how much you trust this company and the software they're giving you. Personally, I'm a bit paranoid so I don't trust any of them to do the right thing, and hence I'll be sticking with Mozilla or Dillo or Konquerer for now.
Anonymous Cowards: Proving daily that human beings are innately jerks.
Opera's great too if you like that kind of thing. For the first time we have a free, viable browser. Why should anyone have to maon about that? Nobody is forcing you to use it.
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
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I find this approach only works if your web browsing tasks are separate from your other desktop tasks, especially if you're just randomly browsing around for entertainment. This isn't the case for me - web pages can be part of work.
I'm much more likely to have one browser on one desktop with some APIs in I need to view whilst working in a text editor window, a couple more browsers up on time-wasting sites (like /. of course...) and likely another one I tucked away on some other subject I'll get around to later. This, my usual manner of working, just isn't convenient in MDI. To me the only real advantage of MDI is being able to combine two documents into one 'work area' for a task you're working on - something I don't find applies on the web.
True, the crowded taskbar under Windows 9x/NT is a problem when you have lots of windows open, but I take that more as a design flaw of the taskbar than of SDI. It looks like MS are addressing this one in Whistler.
--
This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
Personally, I use Webwasher to filter my ads. It uses a proxy based system and catches 90% of banner ads.
Cheers!
On my Alpha XP1000 (600 Mhz) running Tru64 5.1, mozilla runs without any real slowness. And with Aphrodite, it even looks pretty nice. [smile]
I agree that it does crash more than Netscape 4.76, though. And no support for the JVM (yet) on Tru64. [sigh]
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
I'll stick with Konqueror!
Have you noticed that hardly anyone bothers to post memory consumption numbers? Galeon is supposed to be a "light weight" alternative to Mozilla. Apart from the fact that any browser is "light weight" compared to Mozilla, Galeon is still not that small. I've seen "top" figures indicating something to the order of 30MB for Galeon: about the same as Mozilla at that time. I have no idea how to quantify Konqueror's memory footprint, due to KDE's heavy use of shared memory. As for the other browsers, as far as I know, Opera for Linux is still champ in the memory footprint category.
I feel for you. I just quit watching TV when it got too bad. You know something? I don't miss it.
I'll still rent a movie now and then, but I don't watch TV, and I don't see near so many ads.
The only thing slow about Netscape6/Mozilla that I've noticed is startup time. Page rendering is nice and snappy on everything from a PII-233 laptop to a PIII-700 at work.
At least it's better than Netscape 4.7, which is dog slow on a P133, and just as dog slow on that PIII-700. It's the software that no CPU can conquer (probably ridden with delay loops to prevent race conditions in it's crappy code.)
i dont want to sound nasty. but the need to earn some money to continue doing a great job. after all they are a company. aren't they. an hey, doesn't slashdot have some ads on top of pages? ;)
> At the risk of being moderated down ...
This is an old old trick to be moderated up. Let's see what is _really_ in your post.
> by mozilla utopians
So you talk about free software. Why are you throwing IE in your example then ?
> It's less bloated than Mozilla
Right.
> It's faster than Mozilla
Right.
> It believes in things called standards
Hard to say that Mozilla don't beleive in standard. Very hard.
Hence your argument boils down to: "I prefer Opera because it is faster and less bloated than Mozilla".
I don't see why you would be moderated down for this. I don't see why you get a 4:Insightful either...
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
remembering your last pages is bad in some cases, pr0n as a autoloading page might just piss your life-partner off, or scar your kids forever if you like a certian .cx site that keeps popping up around here
Read my plan to save the Bengals
The GNU project was originally about providing a free operating system, the basic software needed to use a computer. RMS wrote in the GNU Manifesto:
Linux is still competing with Windows for the desktop and the 31 flavors of proprietary Unix for the server. The availability of certain proprietary apps. (Microsoft Office, FrameMaker, Diablo II) on Windows represents a competitive advantage. We can nullify that advantage by convincing the manufacturer to port it or by providing a similar app. (free or proprietary). In the long run, free software will compete at an equal level with Office and FrameMaker, although I'm not convinced about Diablo II.That said, I think free software is on its way to having the browser covered, so the availability of Opera on Linux doesn't add much to the platform.
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Giving up one's privacy for the sake of getting to and from the grocery store;
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Giving up one's privacy to let light stream into your house through the window;
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Giving up one's privacy to go to the hospital and have that broken leg set in a cast;
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Giving up one's privacy by walking across the street to greet your new neighbor;
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Giving up one's privacy to enjoy a night at the bar with a group of good friends...
Granted, using Opera is your choice so none of this is being inflicted upon you without your "consent," but if we're going to talk about issues of privacy let's not say you can't have privacy if you leave your house...If...when you do this the GPS unit that's part of your car transmits your whereabouts to a central data warehouse.
If...this light provided enough illumination for the webcams in your house to send meaningful images to the central data warehouse.
If...when you went to the hospital your medical records were updated and sent to the central data warehouse. (Oh wait...isn't that already happening? Nah, couldn't be....)
If...you provide your new neighbor an exhaustive list of everything you do, where you go, what you buy, who your friends are, your income (gasp!), etc.
If...again your location would be beamed to a central data warehouse, along with the list of drinks you bought, and hey, just for good measure they'll collect what you're wearing and who you talked to.
As soon as Opera starts collecting my personal information, they loose a lot of their advantages over the other browsers. That causes me to believe they will not do this.
You sicken me and disgust me, People whine about the lack of good software, it is your likes who are to be blamed!!!! Opera is a freaking decent browser, and damn cheap too, By giving it away for free, they earn some revenue through ads, by blocking those ads you are denying them revenue, if you are so freaking inclined to use their browser, PAY FOR IT. If they don't make money, they will close shop. Junkbuster is good when webpages are streaming ads at you, I installed it, but I realize that most of the pages are use earn their revenue through ad, so I removed it, Ignoring the ads is now second nature to me, I browse pages with ads, my favorite sites earns a few bucks, and remains online!
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Here are some informal Mozilla snappiness results:
- Pentium 90: Boot does not complete
- K6/266: Painful
- Dual Xeon 600 w/512 megs of ram: Not snappy
- PIII 933 with 256 megs of ram: Quite snappy (except for loading of course)
Thus, let it be known: The minimum system configuration for Mozilla is a PIII-933 with 256 megs of ram.So why your towelhead mom choke down my load?
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
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He's really just making shit up. I can almost guarantee that he hasn't even used Opera 5, or looked at the ad protocol (which I posted in an earlier comment), or even watched it with a packet sniffer.
He's assuming adware = spyware, and making general assumptions from there.
He also wants to stick with Mozilla, which is a bloated PoS thats about as fast as as the flow of a frozen river. But thats ok.
The bottom line here is that he's saying things as if they're true without having a fucking clue of what he's talking about. That goes beyond what can reasonably be tolerated into something thats rediculous. And the comments here should correct things that are so obviously wrong.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Is there any quicker way to get modded up than to start off a post with,
"I'm probably going to get modded down for this, but.... [insert righteous-sounding, semi-controversial statement here]"
I don't think there is a quicker way. Damn, I'm probably going to get modded down for this.....hehehe
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
I cannot seem to find any documentation on this. Does anyone know? Thanks.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I shelled out $300 (after rebate) plus $10/month for Tivo so I can stop watching commercials. Given that they are about 1/3 of broadcast television and I watch 6-8 hours per week, I think it's a good investment. I've gotten pretty darn good at that 60X fast-forward, which compresses two minutes of commercials to two seconds. Interestingly, I have to concentrate so hard, I can't help but notice which company logos flash on the screen, which is more attention than I used to pay to ads.
However AFAIK, Tivo's business model does not involve compensating the networks for lost advertising viewership. Nonetheless, I think we're witnessing the beginning of what will become standard practice: free access to media with lots of ads or pay for access with much fewer ads. No matter how you cut it, though, I think you'll see ads no matter how much you pay. Shell out $8 for a movie ticket and you still see commercials, followed by previews, followed by increasingly obvious product placements within the feature.
Opera is a great browser. I'm using 4.02 (for Windows, shhh!) to write this reply right now. It has a number of features that I love, like the MDI interface, zooming web pages, and the fact that if it crashes, it doesn't necessarily take Windows with it. I also like that when I re-open Opera, it remembers the last web pages I had open (a-la multiple default home pages).
/., K5 and my RC5 stats are in another folder. I want to check out the latest gaming news for the games I play? That's the folder with Planet Unreal, Counter-Strike.net, Asheron's Call Vault and Crossroads of Dereth is for.
Ya forgot another cool feature. "Open all folder items" on the bookmark list. I've not organized my bookmarks into things I want to remember and things I open on a daily basis. I've bookmarked all the comics I want to read from UComics and Comics.com. Hit that button, boom, 20 open pages.
Though I dislike the MDI interface in general I've grown to like it in Opera and there is no way I'm giving up the ability to open dozens of sites with a click.
-- Grey d'Miyu, not just another pretty color.
Thanks Dog!
Ditto, I am appauld at such stupid statements Taco makes from time to time, if he posted that comment under an unknown nick in the comment, would he not be moderated to Troll? Another thing that amuses me is how such a rich kid like him can be so frugal to use an inferior software just because it is open source than to fork over $50 for a decent software. Long live Opera!
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Opera5 + Ads versus Mozilla + Modern Mozillium theme? No contest! Can't wait for the XRender conversion of Mozilla/Gtk+, sweet! Go Keithp!!!
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
I've got the karma to spare, so mod me down.
We all know that advertising is one big expense for many corporations (particularly dot-coms). Smart business people would want to find every way to reduce this as much as possible, yet still maximize exposure of the company to the public. Perhaps the best way to do it is to have companies compensate for referrals. In this case here, a user can download Opera 5, pay for the software, and as an option, choose to refer X users for a full refund of the purchase price. I'm sure somewhere, your personal information is collected, but smart people would only trust their personal info to corporations who do not misuse it.
By ignoring those ads you are denying them revenue! You really need to click on each one to make sure the sites get paid.
The likes of Getright and Eudora only have adverts if you don't want to pay. If you want rid of the banners, you pay them a couple of bucks and they give you a code to get rid of them. I can't see why Opera don't seem to do this! In principle I don't mind banners. Not all software authors are nice enough to go GPL and give everything away - some would like to make money. That's fair enough, we all need to make it somehow! But why not let us pay to have them removed? They will make far more from me paying them to remove the ads than they will ever get from me clicking them :)
According to the press release, Opera has experimental support for DOM. Then again, Netscape and IE don't exactly have sterling support for DOM, either.
I can't speak for the majority of linux users, but it irritates me to no end to see this bee-line mentality on 'open source or nothing'. The open source factor is but one of many features that brings linux to its ultimate goal: flexibility. Whether that's flexibility on price, functionality, look'n'feel, hacking, or any facet of any given linux distribution, it all ends up being the same thing.
Linux is by no means a church or religion. It's a decision. For some, they like to make it a statement. For others, it's the only OS they can mold to fit them instead of vice versa. For others all it is is a 'free ride' and people love and fight for free stuff. Whatever the reason, the bottom line is the same. People are discovering they can make things work the way they want.. and they love it.
So Opera is closed source. Big deal. Ideals inclusive, the flexibility of the linux OS allows you to chose another browser. It's about time that linux users in general stopped fearing closed source software. If open source is 'better' in whatever way you perceive it, keep using it. Contribute to it. Make it your religion if you like. But whatever you do, don't deny or reject added flexibility (in browser choice, et al) to the OS of choice.
Mozilla already has better standards support than Opera. 1 out of 3 and counting...
And Waldherr has blocklists and a modified version that looks better in Windows and can do the 1x1 pixel substitution.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The primary advantage of using Opera is it's lightweightedness and clean interface. Adding annoying flashing banners would hurt both of these advantages. I see no reason to run this browser in windows when there are free high functional alternatives... I'd commit fratricide for a decent browser in Linux that didn't cost 50 dollars, isn't totally archaic, unstable, and ugly (like netscape 4.x) and doesn't take 3 days to load and while doing so eat all my memory (like netscape 6 and mozilla.) I've tried every browser out there for Linux, and I'm yet to fine the one. I currently switch between netscape 4.x, mozilla, links, and konqueror depending on my needs (and available resources.) I still hold high hopes for Opera, and perhaps if I win the lottery when the final version comes out...
Or perhaps I'm just too damn picky. Or perhaps all browsers for Linux suck. On the rare occasion I boot into Windows and launch a browser such as IE or Mozilla, I'm amazed at how superior these are in speed to anything in Linux running on the same machine. That depresses me. *sigh*
Just to note, you link to Junk Busters with the .org domain. It should be .com
.com, not a non-profit .org
The website you mentioned clearly states:
- We are a for-profit
Many people assume that because we don't charge consumers for our services or software that we must be a non-profit, but we're not. We fund our operations from consulting and services to businesses. We choose work that we think benefits both ethical businesses and consumer privacy.
The proper link is http://www.junkbusters.com/
This browser model represents a defeat of all the potential of the web and programable machines in general. By using it, you accept that you have no ability to control your machine and what you chose to view on the web. Free alternatives are available and better.
People seem to talk about bandwith as if they owned it. Let me assure you that they do not! The only bandwith you truly own is your own private network.
The web is a public resource and those advert packets, which may or may not make a living for someone else, get in the way of my packets. I have a cable modem, but I browse with the images and java script off and I refuse cookies that are not returned to the original site. If I want to see a picture, I can request it. One day, I might look into junkbusters.org. It's not a speed issue to me, it's a resource issue for everyone else. Why should I request that stupid flycast crap if I don't have to? I am no more interested in a banner add than I am in a phone call at 6PM from the carpet cleaning company. You should not have to suffer for me to be annoyed by things I don't want. Responsibly use public resources and please yourself at the same time.
Essentially, the web is a pull medium and push stuff has no place on it. If you want to see a Ford add, goto ford.com. Pelease do not accept or support the notion that you must look at an advert to support content on the web. It's just not so. People will make that information available to you for their own good, and if you don't need it that's their problem. You own a programable machine, make it serve you.
Stand up for your rights now. Do not use browsers that do not allow you to chose what content you wish to recieve. Realize that you have as much right to broadcast as does ford, just as you have the right to say what you want and publish as many books as you care to pay for. Never let the day come when someone could plausibly argue that bandwith is limited and comercial concerns have a greater right to it than you do because of a greater demand for comercial content. No one really wants to look at a banner add, and no one really has to!
OK, I'm loosing coherency. Back to fluids I go.
>>Actually I find that running it on my 400MHz
>>machine is painful. At best. That's when it's
>> not crashing or getting confused by frames
When software is written by amateurs who think that they are programmers, then the fallacy that more eyes to look at the code leads to better code is exposed, as a bunch of amateurs looking at the code doesn't create a better product.
Hate M$oft all you want, but IE beats the hell out of netscape and previous versions of Opera. I haven't looked at the newest version of Opera yet, so I will withold judgement on its quality.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
What's the difference between having ads in your browser and having ads in your web pages?
;)
Not all sites have ads, to be sure, but enough do (e.g. Slashdot) that they're pretty hard to avoid. I blackhole doubleclick.net, etc., but that doesn't always work because certain domains (e.g. akamaitech.net) also provide content I *do* want to see. So (sigh) I don't really know how ads can be avoided.
At least if they're in the browser itself, presumably I may be able to scootch it around on my desktop in such a way that I know they'll get covered up...
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
As would I. I don't run KDE to run Konqueror. I know it's good, but I won't be leaving Window Maker or worse, running WM and KDE at the same time.
I've slandered Mozilla too much already and won't be doing it this time. I can just hope it gets better, because Linux needs an UI independent, modern browser.
You don't need to leave WindowMaker to run Konqueror, you just need to have kdelibs and qt2.2 installed. I'm typing this in in Konqueror running under WindowMaker right now, with no other KDEness in sight.
Noodles asked me to make a correction,
s/privacy/virginity/
s/car/bed/
s/to work/a dildo/
s/buses/porn/
s/ads/tits/
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
NT
I've been doing some online shopping with Mozilla. Make sure you install the PSM (Personal Security Manager), found under the DEBUG Menu as "Install PSM". Works very well!
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
K-meleon (on Windows), and Galeon or GTKGecko (on *nix) are both nice browsers using the standout Gecko rendering component without any of the sluggishness of Mozilla.
This move by Opera towards ads reminds me a lot of programs such as Eudora light and CuteFTP. Both of these companies have been successful in ads market and I'm sure Opera will be too.
The question is: does the Opera browser ignore it's own proxy settings when the proxy resides on the same box?
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
What happens is Opera asks you on close whether you want to save the state of your browsing. So if you're visiting a certain goatse site...
Hey now that you mention it, there is a small box on the top of my page. I guss junkbuster destroyed that little piece of advertising.
I'm still waiting for a browser that finds advertising in a page and replaces that with it's own. That would be realy fun (the legal battles alone).
DIE advertisers DIE!
> Is there any quicker way to get modded up than to start off a post with,
> "I'm probably going to get modded down for this, but.... [insert righteous-sounding, semi-controversial statement here]"
Yes. Using "at the risk of being moderated down..." as the _title_.
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Do you look at the ads? I seldom do much more than glance, if that, in newspapers and web sites. On TV I usually go out and do something else during the commercials. Ads in free software don't bother me because I don't pay any attention to them.
AFCArchive, here is your logic ... argue it.
t all/fus/head-pound/tweak time that you have to invest). So why the hell is Microsoft Word $1,000?
StarOffice is free, Applixware is free, Koffice is free (well, not when it comes to the compile/build/configure/reconfigure/delete/re-ins
Microsoft's move is equivalent to treason in the word processing world. You don't charge for something that other companies provide for free. That's like a hoe charging for $20 for a hj, when you got your own hand and lotions at home.
After seeing this story, I hope that People who make good software and charge for it when there are inferior free store make it onto www.fuckedcompany.com
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
I take it you're refering to the Windows version? AFAICS the Linux version (4.0 beta) has nothing to recommend it above Galeon 0.8 or Konqueror 1.9.8 - anyone care to differ?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Yeppers.
/ acp.html )used for the banners.
I also posted the protocol spec URL earlier on in the thread (and here it is again http://www.myopera.com/people/howcome/2000/opera5
There has been extensive discussion of this in the Opera newsgroups, and I think we may finally have most of it pinned down.
Bottom line: Taco assumed without actually checking at all.
Of course, lets ignore the banner at the top of slashdot, which is from doubleclick today, which is far better at violating my privacy then Opera is. But I guess hypocracy and stories that aren't full of FUD and Bullshit are just the norm around here, eh?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
the model of 'free with ads' is, i think, best epitomized by Eudora, the email program i've used on every computer that i couldn't use elm or pine on (i.e. Macs)
Eudora, for as long as i can remember, has come in two flavors: a free, bare bones 'lite' version and a commercial, full featured 'pro' version. i think this is based on the original authors' licence to qualcomm requiring that the program be free, at least in some form
the lite version is usable, and even the older lite clients still beat any other free email client i've used with a big STiK.
the last couple of revisions have added a third layer to the lite/pro (free/paid) strategy, that being a 'sponsored' version. the sponsored version includes all the features of the Pro version, but is free. the 'sponsorship' comes in the form of a small floating ad pane that is as unintrusive as a 100x100 (or thereabouts) pixel floating window can be. and the best thing is that the different versions of the program are all in one binary.
for 40 bucks i can get a serial number to get rid of the window, or, since i'm a cheapskate, i can put up with the ads. or i can click one preference option and get rid of the ads, and 'downgrade' to the free/ad-free version of the program. most of the ads are for the commercial version of eudora anyway...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Also, the shown add simply is too big.
A small add I could accept, but this one is taking away too much screen estate.
I might buy it, because apart from that opera is a nice browser, but I won't use the free version with adds.
Um, treason against whom? You don't have to buy Opera. Windows users, on the other hand, do have to buy IE.
I don't see the value of Opera, but I don't wish the company ill will.
Damn right! I personally find MDI unsuitable for anything at all, but it's uniquely horrible for web browsing. Running two Operas simultaneously doesn't seem to work, either.
--
This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
Filed a bug on it yet? Hrm... the answer to that appears to be no. You could have done it in the time it took to whine to /. In the meantime, though, someone has done it for you... click here.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
The version they have for BeOS looks very promising. I personally think it rivals Netpositive in many aspects, and may even top it. Now, I could see paying for it. But on a Win system with quite a few other browsers that are freely available? I think not.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
If I recall correctly, the Junkbuster proxy does not work as a transparent proxy but rather, requires that the users configure their browsers to use the Junkbuster proxy manually. I haven't installed Opera yet to verify this but I'm guessing that it pays no attention to the proxy server settings when fetching its banner ads.
/bannerad.php?userid=AB34C2D7F HTTP/1.1
This behaviour is similar to the popular windows bannerware program, Napigator. Napigator gives you no options to choose a proxy and thus, no way to disable the banner ads. However, there is a way around it. I installed AdZapper on my firewall box and configured ip-filter to send all outbound port 80 connections through the AdZapper proxy. This "transparency" required a patch to AdZapper, and the author (Adam Feuer) sent it to me. Now that I had a transparent banner ad filter running, it was time to figure out how to filter the banner ads out of the application. For this, I used tcpdump (see the manpage for the exact options) to snoop all outbound connections from the machine running Napigator. I logged all of the traffic to a file and was able to find an outbound connection to an http server that had something similar to this:
GET
So, I wrote a quick Zaplet to block this banner ad fetch. Presto, no more ads in Napigator.
There are, of course, ethical obligations when using free software and you should certainly take these in mind before blocking Opera's ads.
Think of the screen real estate you're just giving away. How much did you pay for that monitor? And how much of that is wasted because it's displaying junk ads that you're just ignoring anyway, on top of the junk ads that are already displayed on the web page you're surfing to?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I have been using daily builds off and on for about six months. For the last two months I have used mozilla on a daily basis and find it to be quite responsive and relatively crashfree compared to NN4.x Other than some problems with poorly written javascript code, I have not had many pages fail to render correctly.
As for platforms, I have used with varying levels of success:
Amd K6-200 - slow startup, slow response but not too much worse than NN4.x
Amd K6-2 350 - Only marginally faster than 200 mhz machine
Amd Athlon 750 - other than startup time, very fast and stable.
Amd Duron 650 - Fast and responsive.
These machines had between 96MB and 256MB of memory so that obviously has some impact.
But now that they've sold out to privacy invaders, I no longer trust either the "free" or "ad-sponsored" binary.
Pity. The reason I liked Opera so much was because (image autoload toggle, java/javashit toggle, no "My Nutscrape" or "Shopping" portal icons eating toolbar space) it took pains to avoid the smeggin' ads.
Now they're spyware. Fuck 'em.
It is your choice to use the program.
Second, I don't expect everyone to read the source code, but it is too easy to hide things if there isn't at least the option of doing so. Allowing others to see the source that they're using is more analogous to walking around with hands in sight vs stuffing them into pockets. It's not guaranteed that the person with their hands in their pockets is holding a gun (nor is it guaranteed that person with hands exposed isn't), but the likelihood is much greater.
The only way that I would know the Linux kernel doesn't violate my privacy is by examining it and compiling it myself. Something that is easily done. I don't have to trust anyone on that score. I choose to trust the developers for the most part (though I have poked around). The point is that I can make an informed choice about trust. In the case of non-free software, if I don't trust the author (and in this case, I don't), my only option is to not use the software. They have no way of building a trust relationship with me.
I don't understand why the need to say "which I assume you're running, you must be 1337". I do run the Linux kernel, and the Hurd kernel, and occasionally the FreeBSD kernel. I don't consider myself "1337". Must you bring up script-kiddie speak in order to avoid the issue? Your antics in attempting to change this from a logical discussion to an emotional response are discouraging. You don't quite prove the rule, but you do come close...
Anonymous Cowards: Proving daily that human beings are innately jerks.
I'm really tired of people who have never tried to write a web page before lecture people on how browsers like Opera support "standards" and browsers like IE do not. While it's true that IE supports a number of nonstandard extensions to HTML, it does a vastly better job of supporting official HTML than anything else out there, and hardly anyone will acknowledge the fact simply because Microsoft built the browser. If you were to take IE 5.5, find a way to make it into a standalone application, put somebody else's name on it, and with no other changes, distribute it as a new web browser, everyone would be hailing it as the greatest and purest application ever written. But since it's written by Microsoft, it's instead evil incarnate. I have a website (see the link in my info) that uses standard, if advanced HTML: CSS Level 1/2, with absolute positioning and block-level elements that are pushed around by JavaScript. No IE-specific tags or IE-specific anything, unless you consider decent rendering of standard HTML and CSS to be IE-specific [which in my experience they are]. The pages render peachy-keen in IE, but Netscape's rendering (even in the latest Mozilla milestone build) is hopeless: CSS block-level elements don't display at all, or may display very strangely depending on how much text is in them. On some pages, the block-level elements work fine, but on other pages that use the exact same style sheets and document structure, but have different amounts of text, the elements don't display at all, or everything displays at once jumbled on top of each other. I've tried and tried to hack around Netscape's bugs to make the pages render correctly, but I've about given up. I don't even want to know about Opera; a friend of mine who is using a build of 4.0 for BeOS (he works at Be) says it pretty much craps out on the site.
-----
I use squid with adzapper. It's great
I'll just keep using IE. I see no ads and it never crashes on me like that Netscrape always figures a way to do. Sure, it's bloated, but I swear much less while I'm using it and the wife appreciates that. =)
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I tried Opera, but I didn't like the way it opened new web pages as windows within one large window. I much prefer having each web page as a separate window on the desktop as I like to have multiple pages open at once mixed in with windows from other applications. Can Opera 5.0 do this?
:-( Updating IE has no effect. I am forced to use Netscape with its inferior UI.
So unfortunately I am stuck with IE or Netscape, both with their own problems. I have 4 PCs with IE of which only one copy works properly. On my main dev machine IE "View source" does nothing, which makes it useless for a server-side programmer
And none of the browsers progressively renders tables any more! This means that if the whole page is one big table then you get a pregnant pause before the whole page is blapped to your screen at once. Damn I miss my Acorn.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
all kind of ad sucks, but it all boils down to this simple truth, will you pay for the software if you liked it? if you would, you can get it without ads in other words, quit whining.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Just because they're not taking down IP addresses and other private info today is no guarantee they won't change that EULA and start taking them down tomorrow. This is now the CueCat Web Browser.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Hopefully, the final last gasp will be to open source it, thinking that somehow it will help them. I believe its written with qt, so it might be less of a mess than mozilla is and easier for open source programmers to work with, which, if I remember correctly, was a major complaint about mozilla and why its taking so long.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Registered users of v4.0 do not have to pay to upgrade to v5.0. See: http://www.opera.com/press/opera5_4questions.html
Yeah, I really hate it when that popup ad jumps in front of the pr0n I'm drooling at.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Worst browser, ever. Rest assured that within seconds I was on the internet registering my disgust with millions of people.
I am so fucking sick of every goddamn thing in a this backassward society being focus on fucking buying or selling shit
Does every fucker with swinging balls or jiggling tits have to try and convince me the most important fucking thing in the whole fucking world is buying some feckless piece of shit they squeezed out of their asshole?
Godfuckingdammit I'm going to put an irimi nage on the next dipshit that treats me like a walking cash machine.
Fuck Bush, fuck Cheney, fuck Gore, fuck Greenspan, fuck Gates, fuck the whole recording industry, fuck Apple, fuck GM, fuck the oil companies, fuck OPEC, fuck NATO, fuck religion, fuck the whole retarded, greedy lot.
Whew, that feels better.
(Yes, I know, my nick is spelled wrong. Who ever said Paks could spell, anyway?)
Who ever said paks could spell, anyway?
Dude, this year's Ford Fiesta is cheaper than last year's and it has a CD player as standard. By your logic this means that Ford pays you for the CD player. Sober up.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I don't like ads. I am actually considering buying a copy of opera, because it's so fast and slim compared to netscape 4.7 which i run now. I also like the fact that it formats cleanly too.
Does anybody know if the ads mean that it needs to be able to "phone home" to run? I would like to be able to use the browser on machines that are connected only to my inside lan and have no outside connectivity... I think writing software that phones home should be punishable by death...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Opera's giving away their browser (in addition to a paid version). How do they expect to exist without accepting some pay for it?
Netscape and Microsoft, both multibillion-dollar companies at the time, could afford to dump their browsers on the market. Opera's coming late to a 2-browser party. If they'd try to release the browser without some kind of revenue generation, they'd be toast.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Personally, I'd stick to Mozilla
As would I. I don't run KDE to run Konqueror. I know it's good, but I won't be leaving Window Maker or worse, running WM and KDE at the same time.
I've slandered Mozilla too much already and won't be doing it this time. I can just hope it gets better, because Linux needs an UI independent, modern browser.
Flavio
Commercials at the Opera??! I thought sitting through one was boring enough... maybe if there are some Bud or Coors light ads in between all the high pitched screaming....
------- What exactly is real?
"So you talk about free software. Why are
you throwing IE in your example then ?"
IE
My other sig is also a
...as long as they don't get in the way.
Eudora Pro is an excellent example of this. It's far superior to Outlook or any other mail client out there. The ads there don't get in the way but are noticeable - I've even voluntarily clicked a few - and not out of guilt either. They had these World Wildlife Fund ads going which I had to check out. I haven't checked out Opera yet but I'll be willing to support it as long as it's better than Nutscrape.
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
See that banner on top of your page?
That's called an Ad.
Think the internet is free? Think TV is free?
And no, things aren't free if you're stealing.
Yargh. fricking /. HTML parsing :| I can't seem to get it to link correctly, but the bug is here:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60115
IAAL,BIANLY
Opera works, is fast, and it's small. Unless you want to go down the text-only route there is no other browser on Linux that delivers those three items together. Once the final release is done I'm stumping up the cash.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
You bring up an interesting point, that the development of OSS projects may well stagnate when the economy turns sour. Here's something to consider. Between, say Konqueror and Opera, which will likely still be available for download if the $$ heads south? At least in the case of the former, there is source code, that anyone can pick up and work with.
:-)
If Opera were to close their doors tommorrow, would we need to write a "fake out" program to feed fake ads to the free version so it will continue to work(note that others here say it needs to 'phone home')? And some would say that working for small startups is not conducive to a regular paycheck either
I used opera for three full trial periods (not on the same system) without purchasing it. I think I saved some 40 bugs because of that. Now that I am up and running on Opera 5, I do n't think I will spend money on the license. The reason is there is * I am not bothereed with ads appearing as long as I do not lose much of real estate. Just don't look at them. I have better things to do than looking at the ads and clicking on them. Have some self control without it you're an animal. Also, the ad banner now only takes up 10-20% extra of my screen real estate than the opera 4.0 browser without it. I can live that. Also another cool feature that I found in new version is the search text box. Way cool. I've always opened many windows just to do search on google and AV. With IE hanging my Win2000 and nutscrape out otf the question, I think Opera is my only choice. I don't see myself changing browsers in near future. Way to go Opera!!!
Personally, my concern is with the bandwidth those ads might consume. I've disabled the ads in AIM just because I dont want anything dirtying my bandwidth without my permission, no matter how small it might be.
According to their web site, it's just a single banner ad that changes once a week and gets downloaded and cached locally.
If a company feels its continued viability takes precedence over the choice to support open source, that's its decision to make. Yes, we have the right (and some say even the obligation) to judge them based on their decision, but we always do for every decision everyone makes.
As for Opera, I'm downloading it now, and hope to make it my default browser.
With open source and plenty of free software alternatives, there just aren't very many convincing reasons to shell out money for closed source alternatives.
;-)
Personally I'm looking forward to the day when all software is open, but developer's are going to have to turn to other sources of income. Support? Value-add? Gardening?
I recently grabbed Mozilla M18 and started using it (on Windows NT :-( ). I'm actually pretty happy with it... I'm used to Netscape 4.7 and IE5.x, and to me it seems pretty-much as fast as those for normal daily use.
The one problem that I have is that it won't work with any secure (https) site. I haven't had a chance yet to investigate and find out if it's Mozilla not handling it properly, or just that the sites refuse the connection from a browser they don't recognize... but either way it effectively makes the browser unusable for such purposes. And a lot of what I do requires access to secure sites.
It's unfortunate... because in all other ways I really like the browser.
-- Michael Chermside
> Try running it on something like a Pentium 200. Its painful. At best
I see what you mean. I run it on a P90 laptop. (Okay, it is slow as hell, but I really use it. Good enought for slooow suuurfiiing and in-bed reading)
Mozilla is slow on every platform. On a K7/600 I find it slow. There is no computer in the know universe where Mozilla (Slozilla ?) is snappy.
Anyone running mozilla on a daily basis on something slower than a P90 laptop ?
> shit like Mozilla
I disagree. It is slow, but it _works_. Mozilla fullfills most of its design goals. It is already free software, standard compliant, multi-platform. Not that bad for an not-yet-released browser (I wouldn't trade any of the 3 preceeding item for even a 10x increase in speed).
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
The commercial version is commercial free, except that it is supposed to generate commerce for the non-commercial version that has commercials for other commercial products (otherwise they wouldn't have commericals, right?)
Commercialism only informs the non-commercial version inasmuch as commercials for non-commmercialism direct commerce toward the commercial version which is, after all, what makes the world turn, don'cha know?
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Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
Slashdot is free... If You Want Commercials
from the free-as-in-good-bye-privacy dept.
Many of you wrote in to note that the latest edition of Slashdot is now free... except for the part that it runs commercials while you browse. (They don't even give you the option to buy a non-ad-filled commercial version if you like). It seems as though this advertising thing has also be applied to the other platforms. What do you guys think of ads in your web pages? Is it worth giving up your privacy for a free page, or paying fifty bucks for the HTML file? Personally, I'll stick to kuro5hin.
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The real Captain Derivative has a Slashdot ID.
If it was $1 I still wouldn't pay for them to bombard me with ads.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
For your sake, I hope they don't mistakenly stream all ads about stuff you don't want! It's going to be hell for you to have all that unwanted stuff laying around the house. In fact, most ads I see are for stuff I don't want. Looks like they'll have to find another revenue model...
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
You paid money for the Sherlock software, not for the search engine service.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I said that I registered last year BEFORE version 4.0 which means that I registered for version 3.6x or something and I could not upgrade for free for 4.0 - neither can I for 5.0 ...
Sorrry, CmdrTaco, but saying that using a sponsored browser is equal to giving up privacy is simply incorrect. Opera does not force you to enter details about you: It runs by default with exactly NO information about yourself and you CAN customize the ads to suit your needs if you WANT using the "Preferences" Dialog. So, do you really call some random ads, generated with exactly NO information about you "giving up privacy"? That is really a bit far fetched.
I think that Linux has a transparent proxy feature /etc/hosts mapping that hostname to
that does essentially the same thing if you're
doing IP Masquerading (which I am). Of course,
another way to do it for single hosts is to make
an entry in
0.0.0.0 (or whatever).
Ethical obligations? I never sign contracts for
use of software, so there's nothing contractual.
I routinely ignore adverts when I happen to see
them, so it doesn't make a difference. If someone
gets whiny enough that the adverts are not
retrieved, I could always modify IJB to fetch the
image and ignore it rather than not fetch it at
all.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Eudora also has this sponsored crap, after about 30 minutes i stopped noticing the ads so it was cool. if these opera ads are the same in visability then its no big deal
To really support this kind of free software, we should not only look at the ads, but (at least occasionally) buy whatever they're selling, whether we really want it or not! Maybe they could charge for the browser, and refund the price with your first purchase.
Opera were shooting themselves in the foot by not making a free version; webmasters need a copy to test their pages on, if not even more pages will be Opera-unfriendly and no-one will want to use Opera. Hopefully this will help.
I've been waiting for Opera to support DOM Core for ages, but their web page doesn't say whether they've done it. It could be they haven't changed much and this is just version 4.02 viewed through the wonder of version number bloat, I guess...
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This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
People who have a registered version of Opera 4.x don't see any ads when they install/upgrade to the new Opera 5.
I look forward to the day when it's just handmade string and recycled tin cans -- the completely free Internet!
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
i have never minded ads as long as they dont interfere with what i am doing. if they're separate popup windows then im not down with that as those do get in the way, but ads integrated into the look and feel of the product i dont really mind
-:-:-:-:-:-
visit me and dont say hi
All this talk about Mozilla, Netscape, IE, and Opera gets old real fast...
But seriously, for the little bit I've been using Konqueror, I've loved it. It does most everything that I want it to (hotmail is the only javascript enabled site, and I don't bother with java). Konqueror seems to render everything as well as netscape 4.7 under linux. In short, i'm much more impressed with Konqueror than Mozilla or (admittedly older versions of) Opera.
Now if any of those could reliably handle java...
Is there anything actually stopping someone from redirecting requests to the registration/ad servers elsewhere (i.e. localhost proxy or alternate server ala Napigator)?
Hell, with a free ISP which shows banner ads, adware in Opera, and banners on web pages, you might as well just get a full-screen ad display which runs 24/7.
-Nev
Konqueror forever !
forget all the rest.
You can get the commercial version for free or you can pay for the non-commercial version. Hmmm. The commercial version has no commercials and the non-commercial version has commercials.
:}
Who's on first!?!?!?
My inferiority complex isn't as good as yours!
Let's be perfectly honest here. If you're a 'Linux is great because it's "open source"' type of guy (and most of you are) and you don't have a problem with using a closed, proprietary browser like opera - then you don't really value your "open source" ideals.
Chances are that if you're down with non-free software on Linux, then you only use Linux because you have some irrational dislike of Bill Gates. That's pathetic.
The thing I admire about RMS is that he actually stands by the ideals he spouts. He walks the walk.
Anyone who calls for "open source or anything not from Microsoft" has no ideals worth mentioning.
The way so many of you abandoned the goal of free software for the nebulous, hazy goals of the "open source" movement amply demonstrates that.
--Shoeboy
There's an ad on just about every web page, including every page loaded from Slashdot. This just puts another one just a little outside the page.
It's like alladvantage, only it's a flat $50 up front, in a manner of speaking.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
I like the SDI approach. I never favoured MDI for anything. Tabbing is sometimes ok, if it makes sense. In KDevelop and spreadsheets it makes sense.
I tend to run a *lot* of apps at a time. It's just the way I use a computer after many years of UNIX. This is the main reason I have trouble running Windows. The taskbar isn't suited for it. I find myself resizing the bar a lot. Application switching gets really slow, too.
I like having the taskbar in the upper left, like in BeOS. That way, the entries don't get smaller as I open more windows. I tend to size everything like a page anyway, so I have room on the right for a panel (NeXtStep style) and some icons. KDE 2 won't let me do this properly like 1 did, which is my main complaint. Gnome can do it, but it's a pain in the ass to set up.
I guess I'm stuck with the default for a little while...
I guess there's really no point in replying to this, but what the heck...
No, typically I don't run all three at the same time, and usually the others are almost completely idle (swapped to disk), but I do switch between them. (I don't just run them for the heck of it)
I don't know how IE handles tables because I only installed IE5 when VC6 wouldn't install otherwise. I'm still running Win95(b) & in my experience IE makes the system much more unstable. Aside from that, I'm lazy.
Yes, it IS faster. The parts of mozilla that are slow aren't the parts that Galeon uses. As for the stability thing, try the latest CVS snapshot.
- First you'll need one of those 'free' PCs that they gave away a couple of years ago. They only run windows, have parts soldered to their motherboards, and have an advertising banner that can't be turned off around the windows interface.
- next, sign up for a 'free' ISPs. You'll have zero cost 56k access, but you'll have another advertising banner across the bottom of your screen.
- make sure you use this version of opera to do your web surfing with its advertising banner at the top of your screen. That brings the total to 3 banners!
- then, make sure you view sites which have excessive advertising such as computer shopper or zdnet. Your 'free' system will be complete, with 95% of your screen consumed by adversiting.
Maybe you should check the sort of product Opera produce. They actually make money from the browser based on the fact that it is good and useful
Not all Linux users want everything for free. I'm certainly prepared to pay for decent software. Opera certainly falls into that catagory.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
So why the hell is Opera $50?
Ummm... because it's good enough to command a premium. Duh!
Not an Opera user myself, but I've heard people say that its small memory footprint is a major advantage. That, and the fact that it's not integrated into Windows and therefore won't take the OS down when it crashes.
IMHO, a bloat-reduced Mozilla could put the final nail in Opera's coffin, but don't hold your breath. Until then, some people are willing to pay for what FS/OSS doesn't offer.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Sure it is.. but I would bet that the browser is actually doing a DNS lookup.. so if this is the case, juse find the name its using.. and make an entry in your host file like
127.0.0.1 images.ebay.com then it will look to your computer to find the ad and fail quickly instead of hanging on your FW.. I have a little MySql DB I use to block all banner and image server I come across. not that I need the bandwidth.. I just don;t like people making money off selling my browsing habits... BD
Taxes and Lazy People are best friends.
Personally I'm waiting for some of the gecko based browers to come out, mozilla ok but I have problems with it crashing and not connecting to secure web pages.
It sucks ass. Here I sit, all day. Every page I go to I am constantly bombarded by popup and banner adds. It's getting increasingly hard to find any real content through the slogging mess of commercials on the web, and in real life. In Milwaukee, they are painting entire busses with advertisements. A browser that is littered with MORE advertisements is probly the last thing I want. I'll take IE.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
I'm also running the Debian(woody) mozilla package at home on my linux box, that's on a p3-600 and it's fairly nice too, (crashed once so far, it just disappeared, heh)
Hardware is cheap man, you can probably buy a decent fast p3 for like $200 and a mobo for maybe $100 if you current one isn't sufficient, and maybe an extra 128 meg stick of ram for like $60 at CSO. Just went to their front page and they have a AMD Duron 700,64MB,7.5GB,40X System $399, give it more ram you you got yourself a screaming box. That's what I did to all my computers recently and now I'm a happy camper.
Ok... I'm a hardware addict, so sue me :)
Err... oops, this comment was supposed to be about Opera, wasn't it? :) I'd think of a joke to add to protect my worthless karma, but I'm really not that funny. :)
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> all kind of ad sucks, but it all boils down to this simple truth, will you pay for the software if you liked it? if you would, you can get it without ads in other words, quit whining.
Bzzt. Learn to read. I paid for this software. I have no problem about ads in software I don't pay for (as I will pay for the ad-free version). But there exist no version of sherlock without ads. I was complaining about the idea of pushing ads in software you paid for. In that case the Mac OS operating system.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
With this attitude I think we can guess why most companies are not interested in developing
commercial software for Linux...
BTW, according to their site the it is US$39, not US$50.
It is really simple. Just press F11 to go to full screen mode. Then the adds are all gone. Full screen mode looks a lot better than IE's version (no bar at the top or side).
If you can memorize the keys to controll it without the buttons, this is the way to go.
This download is only 2 megs! And it is so fast!
Seriously check this thing out. If the ads bother you, just turn them off with F11.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Compaired to Netscape 4, hehehe.
Compaired to something like Opera, both Netscape and Mozilla are about as fast as molasses. Especially on something like a Pentium 100 w/32MB ram.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Actually, if you bothered to read the article, then you would have realised that you can still buy the $50 version which does not have adverts, so you have no reason to complain...
--
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Us slashdotters tend to argue, "I lose my privacy by signing up - bad thing." Privacy, like alcohol, is good in moderation. We give up a little of our privacy every time we go shop, every time we vote, every time we fill out ANY form. Anonymized privacy is fine - the companies don't know our name, just our preferences. If we start denying our preferences to companies they tend to lose track of what developments we really want. As long as I know that the company doesn't sell my information I am fine with clicking boxes indicating what I like so that the company makes more money to give me better products. It doesn't cost me money and I haven't told anyone anything that I wouldn't tell a random person that wants to help me, say, a hotel concierge.
We need to get off our binging on our precious misnomered "privacy." I agree that real privacy is a good thing, that is, personal information like my social security number, what I like to do with my wife in bed, etc. But we tend to encompass too many aspects of ourself within that category when it come to the online world. We need to stop being hypocrites - giving out information in the real world that we refuse to give out in the online world.
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
I think making Opera free (but not ads-free) is a good idea - it makes sence, since people would like to have a nice fast neat browser on the same (almost) conditions as Netscape (e.g. quazi-free).
One thing... If only Opera Software made Javascript work a bit better in their browser, everything would be just great!
I'm using a laptop.
Multiply every price by 2-3x.
I can't afford that.
Cost of new laptop: $2000+
Cost of Opera to make old laptop seem speedy: $0 (or $39 in ad free version, which I will probably pay)
Thats about all there is to it for me. Opera is a lot cheaper then the new hardware it would take to make Mozilla work at something resembling a usable speed.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Mp3.com & SuSE ad's on bootup!! no thanks.. Just found the lines in the source and recompiled the kernel. :) I love open source.
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This is awesome! With just a bit of netstat and /etc/junklist, I guess I
some editing of my
could get a free small browser... well, if I
wanted it anyhow. I'll probably at least try it
and see if I like it.
To advertisers of the world: I will not see your
advertisements anymore, and will be doing my best
to free others as well. http://www.junkbusters.org
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Both Netscape and Explorer come with zillions of built-in advertisments!
We've got side-bars that pop open with 'helpfull' links. We've got pre-loaded (also 'helpfull') bookmarks! We've got a 'helpfull' button-bar.
I'm not going to count the pre-set home-pages, but what about desktop links to MSN? Browsers that come pre-loaded on computers often have extra buttons to bring you to the manufactuor's web-page!
This is a growing trend in comercial Software. Especialy monetarily-free software. I suppose they figure this is how they get thier money's worth. But every time I install something to my Windows box I spend at least twice the install-time just geting rid of all the obnoxious links, shortcut, start-menu items, start-menu groups, and worst of all: file reassociations!(Why would I want to open an MP3 with RealPlayer?) It makes me dread installing the latest verion of IE, WinAmp, or RealPlayer even if I think the upgrade itself is a good idea.
At least the folk doing Opera are up-front about the advertising and provide you with a way to disable it(pay money). Eudora does this too by the way.
-Andy
In typical fashion my question wasn't answered. Instead I was enlightened with a witty retort.
What do you guys think of ads in your software? Is it worth giving up your privacy for a free binary, or paying fifty bucks for the binary? Personally, I'll stick to mozilla.
Is it worth giving up your privacy to read slashdot?
Or is slashdot going to be completely free and without ads?
More bull. For CSS1, the only thing Opera 4.02 didn't support was "white-space: nobreak" - they do now in 5.0. MSIE produces gibberish for a simple thing like "font-face: sans-serif" - ergo, for CSS1 it's better. I haven't seen any tests for CSS2, but they claim full support except for aural CSS.
Pages dont look as nice on opera as they do on IE, Mozilla or even Netscape 4.7 at times
That's because lazy authors cannot write proper HTML. For instance, Opera respects width of table cells, whereas MSIE ignores it for table cells containing an image. So what in effect is a bug in MSIE leads an author to believe that their HTML is fine when it's not.
Further, what is "better" is in the eye of the beholder. If the goal was for everything to look the same in all browsers, we'd only need one anyway.
ummm, do you mean you'd run the animated GIFs on speed, then? So they, animate *rilly*rilly* fast!?!?!
disclaimer: sorry, really dull day at work...;-)
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
I run mozilla with only 64mb of ram. 'course I'm kinda used to it being slow, what with VC++ or Photoshop running at the same time. Oh, and I use LiteStep so most of the windows aren't all on the screen at the same time
Wait a sec... I had a point... I don't know how well IE handles tables, but have you seen the deeply nested table demo? YOW! mozilla takes ages to start, and opening new windows is a little slow, but page layout is FAST compared to netscape 4.7
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
.. might do the trick....
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
IE is subsidized, Netscape is subsidized, Mozilla is donated. So why the hell does Opera support its development by means of direct monetary compensation?
Opera's move doesn't cater well to people who misunderstand the word "free." You can't get money from people who think they're already getting something for nothing. That's like trying to convince someone that the peanuts they give you on an airplane are actually more expensive than the peanuts you buy in the store, even though they don't charge for the peanuts on a plane.
After seeing this story, I hope that Opera suffers for being upfront about where its resources to support its product come from.
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oh god, check their privacy statement b4 judging them out of the blue... They don't collect your details.. period...
And if you don't want the ads.. pay for it then!!
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
I'd expect Opera to merge with some tech company like Real and kick butt on their Opera imbedded or similar products.
I'd say chances are most people who use Linux do so because they like it.
No, most Linux "users" (by a simple numerical count) are doing it because they think it makes them instant 3L33T H4X0R D00Ds. They still have a dual boot '98 for playing games on, and they don't even know how to drive Windows properly, let alone a *nix box. The set of Linux users who know more than a web or IRC client is a depressingly small fraction of the total.
As you say, we certainly don't need the Jihad, and we need more code.
Fortunately I work for a company that's officially embracing (sic) Open Source 8-) They might not always take this too seriously, but a CEO's statement is great for embarassing your manager into allowing things to be released that way.
I imagine this would be fairly easy to get around --- just use an entry in the hosts file to redirect it to localhost and use a packet sniffer to capture the packets. Code a small server that plays back whatever data is sent from the server, but with a 1x1 transparent image replacing the usual banner ad.
Opera, afaik, is an inferior product. That makes it illogical. StarOffice, Applixware, and Koffice are all inferior products even though they're free. The fact that it's free is compensation for the fact that it's less featured than the big competitor, MS Word.
For many people, the free stuff is good enough for them and the trade off of feature is worth it. But no matter what anyone insists about free software, for the time being, MS Office is a better all-around product. It may be beat in certain categories here and there, but for most people, with a feature-by-feature comparison, Word dominates. Many of these features may never be used by some people, so the fact that it's free gets it the win.
Unless it snuck in when I wasn't looking, Opera still doesn't do Unicode. This is a big downer for anyone working in multiple languages, and finally multi-language support seems to be really happening on the Web.
How many years is it that M$oft has been shipping usable Unicode product....
Thanks for the stable CSS guys, but XML text support doesn't get far until you sort the character sets too.
I registered Opera last year because I liked the speed of the browser and they promised to add some of the missing features soon: Javascript support had its bugs back then and forget about Java ...
When they announced the version 4.0, I was very disappointed that I could not upgrade for free, because now they had added the features for which I had registered in the first place. Meanwhile, I don't care much about speed with an Athlon system now - I am going to try out the new version, but I doubt that it will convince me to pay another 50 bucks ...
> IE /is/ free, if vehemently closed-source.
Forgot that some people use free software as in free-as-beer. Free == Freedom, for me. In the case of IE, it is probably Free like Free Tibet, as someone have in its signature.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
You need to install the PSM (personal security manager, IIRC). Go to Debug->Install PSM, scroll down the page, and click on the installation button. It will download the PSM, install it, and give you a status update.
Restart Mozilla and you're ready for https ;)
In my opinion, the big thing holding Opera back was that you had to pay for it. I showed it to a number of friends who agreed they'd use it if it weren't for the cost. After all, Netscape and IE were both free.
However, Opera is a Norwegian company and probably didn't have as much money in the coffers as Netscape and certainly not Microsoft. How could they offer it for free? Well, by golly, free via ads is the next best thing.
Personally, my concern is with the bandwidth those ads might consume. I've disabled the ads in AIM just because I dont want anything dirtying my bandwidth without my permission, no matter how small it might be.
Adler
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
Thanks but no thanks... You can keep your browser and I'll have my Netscape 4.76. Which happens to work juuust fine (for some values of "fine")
/etc/hosts as aliases to 127.0.0.1 - and there - you're done - I know that because my /etc/hosts has some nice aliases to a bunch of sites with ads! :)
I don't have much of a bandwidth to waste with crap and I'm already too tired about spam. Getting it willingly is not something I'd do even if I was drunk.
On the other hand - you can get the names for the sites it uses to get the ads and map them in your
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Thanks for clarifing that point
Read my plan to save the Bengals
AOL. I know a few people at Opera too, and nobody there would put in anything like spyware. About all the techies there are members of Electronic Frontier Norway, and some are pretty active too.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Last time I was in my dad's office I noticed he had a piece of foam-board duct-taped to the top of his monitor so it could flip-down when he was web-browsing and cover the add-banners. It's the same idea, just slightly lower-tech.
-Andy
i'm bombarded with propagandic advertisements the other 99% of my life. i don't need them here.
Opera is not spyware, and it'll never be. I know a few people there, and about all the techies there are members of Electronic Frontier Norway. Nobody would dream of adding spyware. You could take my word for it, or you could write some stuff to see what kind of information Opera sends out. They are very concerned about privacy.
If you don't want the ads, pay for it, and they'll go away.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
It's less bloated than IE/Netscape/Mozilla
It's faster than IE/Netscape/Mozilla
It believes in things called standards
Granted, the third one counts negative for most people due to the fact that some pages are being designed based on "looks fine in IE" when if they simply adhered to the standards, it would probably "look fine" in ALL browsers! Now don't get me wrong, I'll be more than happy if Mozilla can ever take over as king in those three categories, but lets get real here, at the rate they're going, I'm going to be using Opera for at least another year.
Anyway, that's just my $.02, you may now proceed with "Score:-1 Doesn't suck the dick of open source"...
Dude, Monday night I paid your mom $5 for a blowjob. Tuesday night she needed a fix and only charged me $3. So Tuesday she paid me $2 for the jizz I blasted across her face.
How do you see the screen with all that light coming in from the big blue room? Eeeewww, gross! (sorry, couldn't resist ;-)
> yet I rarely (if ever) hear you [Taco] weigh the success of Slashdot against the loss of privacy it has caused you.
Actually, I think that'd be a damn good /. article. Not just to make your point that absolute privacy is a myth, but because I think Taco's take on the effects /. has had on his life would be a damn good read.
Taco, you reading? How 'bout doing this as an "anniversary" article or to commemorate some sort of turning point in Slashdot's history on a slow news day?
I couldn't help but notice that your e-mail, tww@tww.cx, ends in "cx". You wouldn't happen to be the goatsex guy, now would you?
Yes, but Bill Gates has decided it would not be appropriate to release a *nix version of MSIE (or MS Messenger, or Word, or ...) at this time, so the rest of us will have to settle for Netscape.
I had tried previous versions of Opera before, but it cannot replace IE or Netscape in my case because I have to view pages in Japanese, that Opera don't render properly. I read in an FAQ last month that it was supposed to be done for next version, but apparently v.5 still don't support far-east languages (Chinese, Japanese), and there's no trace about it on their web pages. So anybody have a clue when it is supposed to be done ? I can't wait to get rid of the fat-so (IE & Netscape) !
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
If you ever do find the product site you were looking for, could you send me an email ? I'm about to start a project possibly using PICs, and it sounds interesting.
-- Michael Chermside
I downloaded Opera for win back when it was 3.01 or something ridiculously early like that.
7 days into the demo period, I shelled out the cash for it. At the time I was hell bent on getting off of NS and IE wasn't even a viable consideration back then.
I still use Opera faithfully to this day. It's stable, the *lack* of java (not counting the plugin) support is *good*, since I use the web for information, not as a replacement for my television. It's small, it's fast, I swear pages load faster in it than in other, more bloated browsers. I like the fact that I can have 20 web pages open, and still only have *ONE* button on the toolbar.
Mozilla? Sorry, roblimo, but it just ain't happening. To quote suck.com:
"At the very least, the Mozilla Project has given the world a pretty good picture of what caffeine poisoning looks like."
-aj.
I have become, comfortably numb
Does this mean that, free or not, it's still commercial software? :)
jason
Have a good day?! Impossible! I'm at work!
Just block the access to the opera servers in your firewall script
I've been waiting for that too. See the Lumeria Ad Network.
Get Veiled
Okay, now that was quite the over-the-top rant.
Now that I'm a little calmer (though Taco still has me really pissed for putting such terribly misleading, ignorant information on a site that has so much influence), I'd like to rephrase a bit.
I've been working on the beta software for the past three years. Opera's staff has always been top-notch: they take the feedback gratefully, deal with priority issues quickly, and really have the idealistic goals of creating a fully-compliant, robust, user-tweakable browser that is truly best-of-class.
During the beta period of the adware, we beta testers hammered hell out of Opera management and programmers. We knew that adware would be a potentially flammable decision, and we made damned sure that Opera fully understood the need to separate the advertising from anything even remotely associated with personal data, including browser habit-tracking.
We also demanded that Opera provide *EVERY* possible detail of the adware implementation, so that there could be no doubt that there were no privacy problems whatsoever. We did registry searches, binary file text searches, re-wrote the "welcome to" text, grilled them to death. We even halted release while we dealt with a few niggling details in wording.
You can be damn sure that your privacy interests were fully represented.
And then to have Taco shoot off his mouth without having a fucking clue how the advertising is implemented, without bothering to spend three minutes of his precious time actually reading Opera's well-detailed and highly informative privacy statement...
...well, hell, it's just too much.
For all our efforts to make sure that there couldn't be controversy, we never accounted for the possibility that influential media personalities wouldn't actually *try* to be responsible.
So, please, don't be a Taco: before you get your panties in a know about privacy, go [read the Opera privacy statement] and educate yourself.
I'm not saying that the adware is wonderful; I personally don't like it being full-height, and I'm worried that they may serve overly distracting animations.
But there are *no* privacy flaws, and it is a *wonderful* browser. It'll take a few days to get comfortable with it, but I am confident that almost everyone will find that its features will make it faster and easier to browser the web.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
They probably done this so that they can earn money from people "evaluating" their browser too. Now you can support their product, and use it for free!
Though im sure its a very annoying "feature".
As for your your "Nutscrape" rant. Those toolbars can be removed. Use alt+left for back, and alt+right for forward when navigating.
For free software, I can see advertising as a means to help offset the costs of development, etc. Although it's rather annoying and a hit to privacy: you're still getting the software for free. The same goes with free internet service providers: you don't want the ads, then buy the product, ya mooch! 8^)
But seriously -- if I start seeing manditory ads when I boot, I'm going to have to climb a bell-tower.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Okay, this is getting silly.
... to ... look ... at ... them, whether they wind up making a a click (or a purchase) or not. I don't see the ubiquitious Banner Ad disappearing anytime soon.
... So I can now use my ad-supported ISP with my ad-supported browser to view ad-supported web pages about ad-supported software.
Talk about your saturation levels.
People have been predicting the Death Of Banner Ads for ages, and it hasn't happened yet. The fact is that the Internet is becoming a place where a huge number of people spend their time, and the ads influence them whether they click on them or not.
99% of average Americans would probably say that television ads don't influence their purchasing decisions. Just like 99% of Internet users say they block ads at their brains (I don't even look at those! Not me! Ha ha! Those are for lame newbies!)
I suspect that Internet ads are the same way. People are going
Granted, they're not a fail-safe way to generate revenue. Maybe they're not even good investments. I don't know, I'm not in the commercial web industry (well, sort of, but not the ad-supported type). But I think we'll be enduring them for awhile.
Now it is difficult to praise the virtues of Linux to my students (I teach UNIX/Linux to Computer Science students) when faced with these facts...
Who said anything about Linux? One, the operating system is not the browser, no matter how much Bill Gates testifies to the contrary. Don't blame Linux for the faults of Mozilla or Konqueror. Second, both Mozilla and Konqueror run on more than just Linux. They also run on GNU, BSD, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, and every other Unix. Three, IE has been in the works for about a decade. Konqueror has been in the works only about two years at the most. Ditto for Mozilla, which was rewritten from scratch. Considering the ages of the browsers, they're doing quite well, and will far surpass IE when they get to IE's age.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Considering that most pages you browse will probably have tons of ads on them anyway.
Christ, there are a lot of *IGNORANT* Slashdot users out there. Most of them are making comments and passing judgement without having the first fucking clue what they're talking about, because THEY'RE TOO GODDAMNED LAZY TO DO SOME RESEARCH.
For starters, go read [their privacy statement], which is a helluva lot more upfront and detailed than anything you've seen from any other software company.
Then download and install the software. Back up your registry first, if you're really paranoid, and use InCtrl to track installed files.
Oh, *LOOK*. The advertisement is a standard-sized banner, affixed to the toolbar. It's wholly seperate from the web pages.
Now slap on some port-monitoring software.
Oh, *LOOK*. There's *NOT A FUCKING PRIVATE DETAIL* being passed to the ad server. You get a user id so that it knows what ads it's sent you, and *THAT'S IT.*
No information about your browsing habits are shared. No information about your name, address or anything else. If you *choose* to select the variety of ads served you, it naturally has to tell the server that you want tech ads, but not women's hygiene product ads.
Gettafucking clue.
I won't even begin to dwell on the idiocy that surrounds the free versus commercial software crap. Sixty employees, one product: of *course* they gotta make money from it. They don't have the opportunity to fund their browser from sales of the OS or office suite.
Have fun, moderators. Don't let your personal bias show.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Joshua
Terradot
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
When it boils right down to it, the ubiquitous parties interested in the commercialism of softwares for lucrative returns or rewards will just be that far better in the future as there is nothing, notwithstanding catastrophic failure of the economic model.
In any event, I couldn't get O5 to crash on that page.
No Laughing Allowed!
The adware isn't the problem in deciding whether to upgrade from 3.62 or not. It's the other stuff. 600k more (compressed) for more email (I HAVE an email client), integrated search, and ... AN INSTANT MESSAGING CLIENT??? (oops, sorry about screaming, I lost control for a moment)
Looking at the new features list gives me the bad feelings I get when reading Mozilla features.
I wonder why someone out there in Windows-land won't just release a small browser that works? Adding an instant messaging client defintely does not count as an upgrade. It's bug fixing that Opera should be concentrating on.
Well, it's no problem. I still have 3.62 and even after Opera Software is on fucked company I'll have it.
--
Hmm. Interesting that Gecko is slow for you -- I don't notice such; when I've used K-meleon on Windows its performance has been comparable if not faster than IE, and I haven't noticed any loss of speed in Galeon as compared to NS4.
How much RAM do you have? If you've comparatively little or are doing lots of background tasks, I'd almost wonder if you're swapping...
Btw, why are you posting as an AC? The ability to quickly see whether anyone's responded to my recent posts from my user page was enough to sell me on a login. Since you're apparently also someone who cares about following up on their posts, I wonder why you don't do the same.
Each Galeon or Mozilla thread weighs in at about 30MB of RAM. I know better than to add those up.
No, you'll have to keep looking.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The free software/hardware, as long as you take the adds model has failed.
No, it's only failed where the company gives you no other option but their free-with-ads product.
Companies like Opera, Eudora, Globalcomm (CuteFTP), etc. are basically providing unrestricted shareware. The catch is that unlike regular shareware with "nag" features, this shareware actually makes a little money for them. It also means people will be less likely to try and hack their software to run past the trial date, since there is no more date restricted use.
They will probably make more money doing this than staying with their old business model. Comparing it to ZapMe and that type of business is just wrong man, it's JUST WRONG!!
-thoams
"And like that
I thought the idea was that we'd put up sites to hawk our wares, with product reviews by trusted individuals, register our pages with search engines and let people find us when they want us.
No. The idea is simply a network of linked information. Nothing more, nothing less. If you want an ad-free network then go create your own. But this network belongs to the public at large and the last time I checked, advertisers where still a subset of the public.
Don't get too elitist about your purity. You do admit you're hawking wares, and there's millions of people out there who think that that kind of commercialism doesn't belong on the web either.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
So why the hell is Opera $50?
Because the makers of Opera are not Netscape/Microsoft when it comes to cash? Because Netscape could make money off their other software, as could Microsoft? Because they are not a non-profit organization? Take your pick.
Opera's move is equivalent to treason in the browser world.
The sad part is that the only reason you feel that way is because Microsoft successfully made it seem legitimate for a company to give away a product that costs many man-hours to produce, and the only reason they could do that was because of their monopoly power and huge profit margins on everything else.
That's like charging $20 for a cup of water at a marathon when the tables are providing them for free.
No it's like charging $2 for a bottle of water when you can drink it out of a fountain. Oh wait! There are already successful companies doing just that! How do they succeed? Because they offer something people are willing to pay for: clean water, water that tastes better than tap-water, water that comes in a convenient sized bottle.
Is it starting to sink in yet?
After seeing this story, I hope that Opera makes it onto [fuckedcompany.com].
Yeah! The less competition, the better!
Software designers are so infatuated with the fact that they can, that they don't stop to think if they should.
What are you, the Jeff Goldblum of Jurassic Dork?
"And like that
In your ~/.Xdefaults:
Netscape*toolBar.search.isEnabled: false
Netscape*toolBar.destinations.isEnabled: false
Netscape*toolBar.myshopping.isEnabled: false
Netscape*toolBar.viewSecurity.isEnabled: false
--
Not spyware? So why does it say on Opera homepage they've partnered with Cydoor, the known spyware maker?
How about
http://accs-net.com/smallfish/cydoor.htm
Plus, does Opera 5 support codepages other than ISO-8859-1? I've been trying all releases up to 4.02, and I still can't view properly encoded HTML documents in my own language (needs 8859-2). MS IE and Netscape got this right before versions 3.0 of each. I can't see how they can be selling a browser that can't display standards-conforming HTML in at least half European languages - not to mention the rest of the world.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
except for the part that it runs commercials while you browse
its still free to use.... commercials or no commercials.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
I can attest to this: No ads here after installing over my old 3.62 dirs (I keep the 4.02 install on the side, just in case...)
Biggest advances for me are small: navigator.plugin reports correctly to Javascripts, and when keyboard-navigating in forms, a selected radio-button will be highlighted. (Earlier, you just had to guess if it was, try it, or navigate to a form element which did show focus, then navigate back again.)
Does this mean that CT will be "sticking to" kuro5hin?
Spare us the hypocrisy, please.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I gave up my privacy this morning by getting in my car and driving to work. I was forced to look at buses plastered with ads. And there were signs everywhere along the roads with ads on them. I feel so "dirty" now.
I've seen lots of comments about the ads in the free version, and comments about how much people love/hate other versions of Opera, but can anyone comment on how things have changed for 5.0 besides the addition of a sponsored version? The web site mentioned better javascript support, some sort of intergrated search feature and an integrated instant messenger. Those last two certainly sound like unneeded bloat to me, so I was wondering if anyone had actually used this version and could comment on how it compares to the 4.x versions?
Dr. Smoe
The free software/hardware, as long as you take the adds model has failed. Every company that tried it either had to adopt a different model or went out of business. See ZapMe for an example. The problem is that in order for this to make sense one of two things has to happen: advertisers need to trust your medium (e.g. TV) or you need to have millions of viewers (which is how TV got where it is).
Opera has neither.
I don't see many problems with adware. But hey, Opera's Ad's are DAMN big! In my 800x600 screen it's extremely annoying. That's why I hated Opera. However, it's VERY VERY fast! A great work, too bad I would have to pay for it.
I recall a version of MSIE for Solaris and HP-UX. Is that discontinued?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I think it is great! I don't mind the advertising, I have found many usefull links from them. If you really want to, you can switch to a full screen in the browser and there is no banners.
Somewhere in the menu maze on the Opera browser, thare's a link to an Opera page that provides you with all the codes for the software. They are no trouble at all to modify. Opera even provides instructions! Si my friends, if there's something in Opera that you don't like, just change it. I must say that it's speed is no illusion. I am posting this particular message with IE5.5, but I prefer Opera by far. The ad in question doesn't mean a thing because Opera gives you complete control of the cookie files. It will even sweep up the crumbs after each session.
"Oblivion is just a click away." -Aazz
You read my mind Mr. Anonymous.
Mozilla is a joke disguised as a browser. I've never used a program so slow in my entire life (except maybe older versions of Mozilla). Calling the interface unresponsive is like calling a Nuclear bomb somewhat powerful.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Well, well, seems you got a thing or two wrong here, Taco. Do better research next time.
Is it worth giving up your privacy for a free binary ...
As noted by many others, this is not about giving up privacy. By default, you say nothing about yourself, and if you do, it'll be no more serious than "I like music, give me music ads".
Fifty? $39 is more like it. And there are many discounts, too. Upgrading from a 4.x license is free, there's a student's discount, cross-platform discounts, etc. One word, Taco: Research
Of course, stick to the large Mozilla beast if you want, but please don't spread this kind of wrong info about Opera. From now on, I'll read your posts with a more critical eye.
C:\PROGRA~1\OPERA\adprefs.ini
Change to
Problem solved.
Opera's move is equivalent to treason in the browser world. You don't charge for something that other companies provide for free. That's like charging $20 for a cup of water at a marathon when the tables are providing them for free.
After seeing this story, I hope that Opera makes it onto this list.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
(yes, I know, its my second comment on this, but now I'm annoyed)
I re-read what you posted Taco... get a fucking clue. Amazing how you can tell us so much about what it does to invade your privacy without ever having actually used it.
Do me a favor would you? Read the protocol spec, watch it with a sniffer, and then tell me about how horrible it is. At least then you'll have an opinion more qualified then a fucking hack pretending to be a journalist.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The java web browser that I wrote for one of my CS classes far exceeded netscape's current capavilities. Mainly it didn't crash, it only half sucked, and even though it was a java program, it didn't eat 32 MEGS of my memory.
"Can't sleep. Clowns will eat me"
Are the Opera advertisements still displayed and if so, are they accepting the cookies from advertisers even though you have explicitly said that you do not want them?
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
I'd argue that if you want to use Opera for free, it is well worth giving up a small slice of one's privacy in return. I can think of several others, right off the top of my head:
- Giving up one's privacy for the sake of getting to and from the grocery store;
- Giving up one's privacy to let light stream into your house through the window;
- Giving up one's privacy to go to the hospital and have that broken leg set in a cast;
- Giving up one's privacy by walking across the street to greet your new neighbor;
- Giving up one's privacy to enjoy a night at the bar with a group of good friends...
The list goes on. Taco, you should know more than any of us that absolute privacy is a myth. You're famous amongst geeks, and yet I rarely (if ever) hear you weigh the success of Slashdot against the loss of privacy it has caused you. It is quite common for one's privacy to be the lesser consideration in a decision, and if you want to use Opera for free, then sacrificing a sliver of your privacy to do so legitimately is not that great of a concern. Of course, you could always pay full price or pirate the full version to protect your privacy, or simply stick to Mozilla, as I suspect you will. (Personally, I agree--though it's no major sacrifice to give up that privacy, I'm not keen on using an app with integrated advertising when a completely free alternative exists...)$ man reality
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
is to try every means possible to get something for nothing - just like it's the business' duty to try to make as much profit as possible for as little expense as possible. An exciting, neverending battle of wits. Sometimes one side or the other will go too far and get spanked by the govt, and sometimes the govt goes too far and gets spanked by the people. Anyway, what's sometimes bad about 'push' ads is that for those of us still on 28.8 modems (pause for laughter to subside...) listening to streaming audio breaks up when the ads rotate. Broadcast.com tried to do that with WFMU. Realplayer was embedded in this window with ads that rotated every couple of minutes - and every couple of minutes the audio would break up, making it unlistenable. After bitchin' at WFMU they pointed me to a direct address, and all was fine again, sans ads.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This thing with advertising sounds similar to what Juno (email software) does. I'd rather pay for the whole kit n kaboodle. We have enough ads in our life as it is.
1) Upgrading from 3.x to 4 costs $15.
2) Upgrading from 4 to 5 is free.
3) Even if you didn't already own Opera, buying from scratch is only $39.
no sig, just plain old fashioned goodness.
--robotmonkey
Oh joy this looks great! [root@zippo:~]$ apt-get install konqueror Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done The following extra packages will be installed: kdebase-libs kdelibs3 libkonq3 The following NEW packages will be installed: kdebase-libs kdelibs3 konqueror libkonq3 0 packages upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 33 not upgraded. Need to get 8965kB of archives. After unpacking 30.7MB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n Abort.
*shrug*
I installed ICQ 2000b and deleted half of its DLLs based on the descriptions included in them.
How did you read/find the inscriptions included? I opened it (ALAgent.dll) with a hex-editor and only found "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" and lots of code?
Just wondering...
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
If people really want to try Opera, they'll try this version. At least this 'trial' won't time out. Mine timed out, and I was *close* to paying for it, but I couldn't bring myself to spend $40 for it. $20 yes. $30 maybe. $40 - couldn't do it. I realize they've got development and expenses, etc., but it wasn't *that* good of a browser, comparitively speaking, going against two 'free' ones.
Yes, I've paid for IE already, in the form of paying for Windows, but it wasn't extra cash coming out of my pocket later.
Konqueror is becoming pretty useful too under linux, so my desire for 'another' browser under Linux isn't strong enough to pay for a Linux opera right now either.
They've probably heard it before, but if it was just priced lower, they'd probably sell more copies. I don't mind the $10 I spent on a cheap CDROM game if it sucks and I never play it again. If I spend $50 on something, and don't use it, I don't feel as good about the experience.
creation science book
Not really. That seems to be one of the problems with the protocol. I could point it somewhere else without a lot of trouble.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I understand that the tools exist, but how user friendly they are?
What percentage of IE users uses this feature? Even if somebody knows this, would he try to remember all the abbreviations. And if he remembers would he use it?
I mean, they must have *something* to tell you apart from others? If not, how can they keep track of which client has seen which ad??
Rob
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
If you liked it so much, I assume you purchased a copy? The upgrade from 4.02 to 5.0 (for Windows) is free, has no ads, and doesn't need you to dig your key out from your old e-mails.
Why do some of you refuse to pay for software? Is it a compulsion? I am not just talking about MS apps. Several posts here say something to the effect of "Just wait for the cracks and then you can use the ad version with no ads". If you like the browser and don't want ads why not pay for it and reward the software company that designed it? How is a software designer supposed to pay his/her bills if they don't get paid for it? Would someone please explain this to me?
It's a developer's right to put ads in his/her program(s) just as it is his/her right to ask a fee for the program(s).
That doesn't mean that I'll use the program though. If I have a free alternative (free as in beer is good, free as in speech being better) I'll use that, even if it's somewhat less functional.
So as long as they don't put ads in a default GNU/Linux installation it's fine by me.
Likewise I now use ReiserFS because the adds (SuSE, MP3.com) are gone in the Debian patch I installed.
Monkey sense
I dislike adware. But, if they want support Opera this way, then more power to them. I wouldn't use it.
The worst ad-ware I ever been in contact with is the Mac OS. Sherlock for instance. I paid real money for this OS (well, I paid money for the developer membership), and they have the balls to try to send ads to my desktop. Launched Sherlock once, and never have launched it again (and yes, I know the reason behind the ads in Sherlock, but I don't care. A vendor should never push ads on my desktop)
The is also the kind of not-so-gentle-reminder at startup that pisses me, like the Quicktime-4 "Upgrade" panel, or the Stuffit one. And often default installs tries to promote other products. This is equally true in Windows.
What is strange is that free software is not totally immune to this (see the 3Com nic two line credits that contains a ad/promo9tion each time you boot). But at least, I can remove those if I want.
I sincerly fear what my desktop will look like in 5 or 10 years. You can't get usefull info out of the web without ads (which you can hopefully block). Even google started to track links.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
When cable first came out in the '80's it was ad free, but the cost was prohibitive to most of us. Over time, the monthly rate had dropped, but now it seems that even the premium channels have as much commercialization as broadcast TV did in the '80's. Watching broadcast TV is a waste of time in the US now, unless you like to watch commercials.
I see a pattern, and I see that pattern affecting software. Advertisers will pay to have software developed, and people will be more than happy to use the software for 'free'.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Dislikes
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Anyone read this thing? Their site clearly stated it costs $US39. I hope you are not paying the extra $11 for shipping and handling. :-)
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
For the record, I use Mozilla on Linux and Opera on Windows.
It seems strange that no one is discussing the new features of Opera 5.... so here they are:
All theses and the full installer is only 2MB? AOL/Netscape/Mozilla/Microsoft are you listening?
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
Does this sound hypocrytical to anyone else?
/. critisise Opera for offering a free version of their browser because Opera want them to watch adverts in return.
Some people on
The same people are probably putting up with adverts at the top of the screen right now. I don't pay for slashdot. I get an advert.
Okay, so I can expend a little effort and try to blank out the ad. But the site is probably worth clicking on one occasionally. Ditto for Opera.
Sheesh!
With Regards,
Phillip H. Blanton
Well, I d/led the Win32 version yesterday, and the add seems to be stuck on a link to Opera. IT takes about 1/3 of my button bar; that's OK. One thing about Opera that few have mentioned is the breadth of OS support. Opera for EPOC, for example, is 100 times better thanSymbian's own browser; I seem to recall that they are starting to ship it on new EPOC devices, so must be good. BeOS version is good too.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
This is going to go against most of the posts here, but I think that a setup where it's free w/ ads until you pay is an excellent option. It allows them to get more coverage without bankrupting themselves. The decision to go from a strictly "for pay" to a "for pay or ads" is a good one (IMHO).
If you don't like it, there is other options.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
The internet motto: "When all else fails: Advertise"
.com's will get a lifeline :)
OR
"Ads -- the other white meat"
It is just a matter of time before taco bell decides they can make me just as hungry by showing me an animated gif of a taco being made as I get from the 30 second TV version....Maybe then some of these poor
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
While there are some people that, I am sure, will not use something if it's not open source (I'm sure there are some debian users out there that feel this way, bless their data access) the vast majority of the linux users I've met don't really care - yes, linux is better because its open source, but were it not open source, it would be just as cool, merely because it does indeed, haul. If OSS didn't create good, solid software, then nobody would be attracted to it. This doesn't exclude the ecceptance of other software from our tastes naturally. Yes, I use linux. I use it for all of my work. However, I'll play Counter-Strike in windows. Does this mean I don't support open source software? No, it means that there's a better 'solution' for games than linux provides, and counter-strike in paticular. The same goes for browsers.
I personally don't like any of the browsers out there right now. Gaeleon faster than netscape? Not in my experience (maybe I should try a more recent version from CVS?). Opera is ugly, and has a very odd user interface which I find inefficient and convoluted. Skiptsone is too slow and buggy still. Mozilla requires at least one stick of 256 megs... it's huge, and I don't have the finances for that - so much for 'free' software. :) Netscape standalone is currently the best option for me. As soon as I find a fast, stable, lightweight browser that supports images, basic HTML/CSS functionality, and a modular design - that is, it can easily take a plugin at any time - I'll be quite happy. A browser that weighs in at under 5 megs on start, and doesn't ever go much above that in proportion to the memory cache specified, will bear my children. No pretty widgets necessary - just use a good ol' standard toolkit, please. Just a couple buttons, too - back, forward, stop, and reload should be plenty. The rest can be done with menus. I think Skipstone has the right, or at least the best, idea behind it, but it's really quite slow as of the last time I tested it. Still, pretty decent work on their part (they made pronto, it should be good). When the ghecko engine actually is at a 1.0 versioning, and all the kludgish devel code is removed, things might improve, but we'll see when the time comes.
I suppose Konqueror or whatever the KDE browser is called, might be worth a shot. *scampers over to KDE's site* Sure, I'd prefer GTK, but anything beats Motif.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Not only that, but I've found that Netscape 6 (aka Mozilla) doesn't properly render some of the pages that I regularly view. Under 4.75 they were fine, but things like http://www.chapters.ca, Canada's answer to Amazon.com. Especially evident on the "DVD" tab, the text is displayed right over images instead of beside it like they should be.
with any webfilter proxy you care to install.
n -service-pimp-browser (© Deutchen-sprechen-zum-Englisch) that doesn't try to sign you up for some POS TLA ISP PDQ.
This is a trivial hack, and so what if Opera loses!
Enough win-luser eyeballs will see their
stuff, that a few non-incompetent types with the
knowledge and skill to install a package and edit
a config file are no loss to opera or their advertisers.
But still, it is good to see someone try and
supply a compliant, non-globalized-megalomanical-corporate-informatio
Ethics II Axiom 2. "Man thinks." B. Spinoza
Having no ad in the program is quite better. But be creative. Enjoy those ads as if they are news. YES, they are annoying, but in other-hand, you are getting latest information about various products.
I guess it is more of advertisers' too; why they don't make an ad interesting enough to attract people. They are usually very dumb and imho, only people knows nothing would ever click it and buy their product...
I have been a registered Opera user for a couple years so I am not concerned about the ads, I won't see them. But, I did look at the screen shots and I did not find the layout of the ads offensive or overly obtrusive. From the privacy statement at Opera, it seems they are handling it responsibly. Slashdot has a banner ad above every screen and I do not hear anyone screaming about that.... Centurion Five
There is no privacy infringement in Opera 5! This comes straight from Tollef at Opera, the guy "in the know" about the Linux port. He says if Opera puts out spyware, he and a good deal of other people he knows will leave Opera.
OK, that said...I'm using my karma bonus (which I rarely do) so maybe this will get noticed. Opera is a good browser, and, I think, a good company. I registered as an alpha/beta tester for their Mac port, and have been following Opera for over two years now. I've been reading the opera.* NGs for the past week as info about Opera 5 has been leaking out. I know what I'm talking about.
The ads are served independently of the web page. They are part of the UI. They don't tell anybody what you were looking at. They only report if the ad was clicked. You get to customize the ads you see...it's not based on your browsing patterns. Read the privacy policy if you're still not convinced. (That means you, CmdrTaco.)
If you like Opera, you'll pay the $39 to register it and remove the ads. However, a free version is a great way for designers to test with more browsers, in particular, a very compliant browser. I see this as a good thing. If you're really paranoid, then fine, don't use it.
Posted with Opera 5.
Constitutionally Correct
I wanted to check out various sites to see it's rendering quality... (Quite good, expected behavior)... But crashed on second site I went to... http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/main.htm l
Rollover menu's on the left... Crash when I mouse over them...
Dang it...
That would be too painful to be useful...
I am now trying it for Windows (here at work) and I must say it's a HUGE improvement (speed wise) over the new Netscape 6.0.
I am saddened that Netscape has fallen so far and so fast. 4.7 was the workhorse of the College and business industry for a long time.
Don't even get me started on IE (random kick outs, BSODs, what a POS. Sure it's fast, at least at crashing.)
-- Don't you love a world where they give paranoid sociopaths guns, and tell them to shoot traitors and subversives?
The first time it runs to get an ad, it talks to the server and asks for a user id (its there in the protocol). This is the only major red flag we found in the system.
However they have flat out told us in the newsgroup that the user id is used only to track which install of Opera has seen which ads, and no other information is logged or linked to it, period.
So long as they aren't lying, I don't see a problem.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
That's okay, I see adds whenever I boot Linux too:
ReiserFS version 3.6.19
Something about being sponsored by mp3.com and SuSE Linux. That's great. I'm booting my Debian GNU/Linux system and I get an add for SuSE for free!!
I'm not complaining that corporate sponsorship is rampant.... I get the excellent reiserfs for free as a result!
If I rememeber correctly there were many ad-funded e-mail clients for windows a few years back, where did they all go??
Also, isn't Neoplanet (IE+ads+skins) run the same way?
AOL owns Compuserve and Prodigy, try Earthlink, Mindspring or Juno as new clients. One issue may be plugin support, can people see all that kick-ass flash content with opera?
Read my plan to save the Bengals