Slashdot Mirror
Opera 6.0 for Linux Released
e1en0r writes "Opera released 6.0 for Linux and 6.02 for Windows today. The new features include cookie management and plug-in support. I've been using the beta release of Opera 6 for a while now and it's great."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Especially on Linux, there are at least 3 excellent browsers, or 4 if you count Galeon/Gecko as separate to Mozilla, with none of them having a significant lead over the others as far as I'm aware.
This happy situation, with all the browsers competing against each other on a level playing field unfortunately does not (yet) exist on Windows, but lets hope that soon as Mozilla and Opera both improve the market will balance out again.
Hurray for the benefits of competition!
A advisory was issued on Bugtraq today, and the 2 holes it referenced are fixed by 6.02.
Here's the description (taken from the advisory):
Opera allows the location of a frame to be overwritten by an url
containing the javascript protocoll. The javascript code will be operating
in the same domain as the url that was overwritten. Thus we can read
cookies from other domains, local file structure and private information
from the cache (history of links visited).
Does anyone know how many people are involved in coding opera?
Um, this is my sig.
When I first started comparing browsers Mozilla was slow as dirt and really buggy (fixed since then) and IE was/is insecure so I looked into Opera.
At first I thought that the required ads were going to get annoying, but in truth, they weren't that bad at all. Plus, if I hated them that much I could pay a small fee and get rid of them.
But the best part about Opera is it is the fastest html renderer there is out on the market as far as I am concerned. A second high point to Opera, is that it is completely standard compliant. Unlike some browsers... which one you ask? Um... IE maybe, but that could just be me.
The winner in the pack now has to be Mozilla, but a close second right now is Opera.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Actually, ASP is a server side scripting language. Opera doesnt interpret .ASP, the webserver does. If a site using ASP (an MS technology btw...) doesnt render correctly on your machine, its not Opera's fault, it is the site developer's.
:)
One thing that might help is to change how Opera identifies itself. On the version I have, it defaults to IE 5, when I have a problem I switch it to Netscape. I occasionally have good results. The reason for this is sometimes an ASP or PHP site will detect your browser and alter its content based on that.
FYI
"Derp de derp."
Man, I havent run a 386 in like 10 years! ;)
On Windows, Opera beats the hell out of IE even with the 'bloat' that you seem to think taints it. I totally enjoy using it, but I do have issues with its stability. Oh well, maybe in version 7...
"Derp de derp."
You can get rid of the advertisement. You just have to pay for it.
Opera Software makes it's living by selling ads or by selling the browser. They used to have a time limited trial version, but decided to get rid of the time limit by making it adware.
So shell out the $40 (or less, can't remember), get rid of the ads, and support the company directly if you like the product.
You even get a discount if you purchase licenses for multiple platforms at the same time.
Which part of "Buy Opera today - For the best internet experience Ad Free" do you not understand?
Except it could be argued, How are we to level the playing field (removing IE-only sites), if we browse pretending to be IE?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
The irony of you complaining about the "bloat" of opera, and then state that you're using Mozilla hasn't been lost. That's a pretty funny joke, really.
Having said that, Opera has finally achieved a level of functionality (err, "bloat". Of course a browser that fits on a floppy wouldn't offer the features that customers needed, and wouldn't have any market presence) that makes it a very worthy replacement for IE on the Windows platform, at least: In my day to day use, 95% of my browsing is with Opera 6, and pretty much the only time that I don't use it is when visiting msdn.microsoft.com : Apart from that I've seldom had the slightest problems, and it offers fetures (such as multiple-windows in one host: I love this) like being able to accept/reject pop-ups (or prompt), among a whole slew of "quick preferences". Mouse gestures rock and I find myself trying to use them in IE all the time.
Opera is a fantastic browser, and if anything its time is just beginning. The advertising banner is unfortunate, but for people willing to pay the small price it is tremendous and well worth every penny.
Yes, competition is good, but there is a point where there are just too many browsers. As a maker of all things web, it is very difficult to work around all the quirks of these browsers (and yes, *all* browsers have quirks) I have Opera users tell me they are MSIE in their user agents, I have Galeon users thinking they are running Mozilla, and bizarre rendering bugs across the board.
Making things even more difficult, I have to contend with varying and often non-existant toolbar API's which make things like the superb Google Toolbar and (in my mind) the also superb StumbleUpon Toolbar impossible to develop for browsers that are not Mozilla or IE.
I think its time to go for a little Darwinian Selection. Survival of the fittest browser. And I think that browser is Mozilla. Its the most full featured browser out there, it's free, it's open source. I had a couple problems with it, I filed bugs, and they were both fixed within the week! I'm having a hard time finding any flaws with RC2, it's brilliant. For all those who are using alternate browsers because Mozilla is "bloated" and "buggy", check again.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
It's really the mouse gestures in Opera that make it the winner for me. They seriously make browsing much faster. Since I'm authoring and reading web pages all day, I really notice the small difference adding up. Especially when I have to go back to IE or something. :)
For the uninitiated, mouse gestures in Opera are Palm Graffitti like mouse motions that take the place of button-clicking for some operations. For example, right mouse button+moving the mouse left is like pressing the Back button. Similarly-simple commands exist for maximizing/closing/minimizing windows, etc.
Does Mozilla have similar gesture support? I thought I remember reading about that a while ago, but I haven't been able to find it.
Opera's also very fast. It eats up a lot of RAM by default, but you can edit the RAM cache size in Preferences, which actually makes it run pretty lean (or as lean as you want it to).
The built-in mail reader is quite nice. Fast and simple. The contact list management is nice. It's got instant messaging built-in, but I haven't tried that yet.
Opera does tend to crash at times, but it loads quickly, and when you load it back up it gives you the option of reloading all the URLs it was surfing when the crash occurred. After a crash, I'm up again so quickly that I hardly mind, although it is a bit annoying. Hopefully, this 6.02 release is even more stable.
Well, that's just my two cents about the Win32 version, anyway.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
> But Opera can identify itself as other browsers.
:)
More importantly, Opera by default identifies itself as another browser.
One of the first things I did when I configured it was to set it to identify itself as Opera rather than MSIE. I can't say I've ever felt the need to revert.
I guess I must have somewhat atypical browsing habits, since I can't say I've seen many problems with layout or JS - the worst I can think of from the past month or so was perhaps an offset CSS/Edge style background image on some site, and that's still rendered better than MSIE.
Certainly as a web developer I find I hit problems with MSIE more often than I do with Opera. I guess that's because I'm not a DHTML weenie
while they won't get rid of all ads Opera does have a few perks to make ads less annoying. Opera can stop pop ups (or put them in background), it can disable animated gifs, and disable javascript (yeah, i know every browser can do the last one). One last cool trick is that in the top left (or wherever you position it) of the window there is a button which will 1) turn off all images on this page, 2)only display cached image, or 3) normal. So Opera definitely has some nice ad stopping abilities, but it can't block the simple banner ads, you still need junkbuster.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
You can block the ads by adding these lines to your hosts file. You can also add these servers to the Junkbuster block file.
Or you could just pay the reasonable registration fee instead of trying to find some technological means to cheat the people that wrote Opera.
It's ad-sponsored or user-sponsored. Either put up with the ads or register the browser.
I have been working with javascript, DOM, CSS2 for fun in the evenings, and so far Opera doesn't do enough of what I want it to do. Mozilla seems to be the only browser that supports the DOM as outlined by the W3C, and for that reason, I won't be using it, regardless of how fast it is.
See an example of what I've been doing with Mozilla here. It's a card game that I enjoy on my Handspring Visor and "ported". Works great in Mozilla, but dies in every other browser I've tried.
Ah well. Go Moz!
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Actually you can install Mozilla with only the browser if you so wish, or only the email client. You don't have to have any of the extra programs if you don't wish to - try using the Installer builds if you don't believe me.
I see people saying stuff like "Mozilla is bloated". That cracks me up. How big is a Mozilla install? About 18mb. Please compare that to Internet Explorer and yes Opera too, and I think you'll find it's favourable.
Now there is an argument that says, well you don't have to install Composer, but parts of it will still be there if you need Messenger, because Messenger uses Composer. This is a valid argument. But really, Mozilla is not bloated as in physically big. I always have it running in the background with FastLoad (when I'm in windows), and never notice it. I can do this, even with IE loaded.
In another post, someone is bemoaning how Opera, which previously shipped on a single floppy, has added too much bloat.
Bloat? BLOAT? PuhLEEZE.
Try this on Windoze: from a fresh log-in launch Opera, Mozilla, Internet Exploder and Outlook Express. Then press ALT-CTL-DEL, and click Task Manager, then click the Processes tab. Then take a look at how much RAM each is eating up.
I did this at home, so I don't have the exact numbers handy, but as I recall Mozilla ate about 24MB, IE 7MB, OE 13MB (yikes!), and Opera 6 about 7MB.That's with no sites loaded. Now open up some good, large, complex pages; I tried Slashdot, Salon, CNN, and a few others, the same sites in each browser. In OE, Opera and Mozilla, go sign onto my IMAP email server, just for good measure. Now Mozilla uses 30+MB, IE is up over 20MB, OE is still eating 13MB or so, and Opera is using... about 12MB. Not too shabby.
Now close all the browser windows and log off email. Guess what? Moz is back to 24MB, Opera's back to 7MB, OE still hasnt' changed much, but IE is still sucking down 24MB. Nice garbage collection there, Microsoft.
When you consider that A) Opera provides the functionality of IE *and* OE, and B) some of IE/OE's resource usage is hidden in assorted other "OS" DLLs, Which one is bloated again?
Oh, one last little test... open up a loooong site in each (nice fat thread on Slashdot at Score:0 will do it), then press and hold the down arrow key and see how long it takes to scroll to the bottom. Opera is about twice as fast as Mozilla, and about half again as fast as IE. Add in Opera's industry-best standards compliance and rendering speed, what's not to like?
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Opera/6.0 (Windows 2000; U) [en]
Is my current user-agent. If some idiot has created a page and chosen to restrict viewing to one or two of the many browsers availible, you tell Opera to report its user-agent as MSIE, but the Opera string is still there, and will show up in the logs:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows 2000; U) Opera 6.0 [en]
Knowing the mental qualities of most page-restrictors, this fools their detection scripts quite nicely. This can blow up in your face, however, if the malicious web designer chooses to intentionally exclude Opera, by denying all browsers that contain 'opera' anywhere. I have complained about this to the Opera support groups but they told me it wasn't possible to do a "complete" fake header. If you want that I guess you have to rewrite user-agent headers with a proxy.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
But at any rate, the upshot is that when he said "6.02" he was actually referring to an older version than the recent 6.0 release, despite what the numbers might make it look like.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Correction: "Which for *some* linux users, who are stuck using inferior mice without enough buttons (either by choice or otherwise), means both-buttons-at-once."
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I can't say much about a native FreeBSD version but as for the rendering web sites improperly.. that isn't Opera's fault. Running silicon.com through the W3C's HTML validator brings up around 89 errors. This is not the fault of opera it is the fault of sloppy web design which has become prevalent around the web.
The reson they, probably, ignored your request was the fact that you where lucky it ran at all since Opera supports, and strictly adheres to, the W3C's standards. Sloppy HTMl,XHTML,XML, etc is very prevalent today and only recently have company's begin to insist on error-free code - something the rest of the programming world tries to do but most Web coders ignored for years. If you are going to bring up the "browser-blah renders it fine" argument yes, it will and Opera won't because opera doesn't have the same type of error control built in on purpose. Strict standards and no more unsupported tags (Netscape was famous for this) are a must to have a truly interoperable web.
BTW, i am curious to see what you mean by 'loads of sites.' I use Opera excuslively and haven't had any problems for months. Even silicon.com was usable. make sure Opera is set to identify itself as 'opera' and note MSIE or Netscape - sometimes people use activex controls or other unsupported crap which might be what is causing silicon.com to not work.
I think he's right. What are these extra features which are worth 39$? I would love to have a reason to support these people but the free alternatives (mostly konqueror 3.0 but I suppose mozilla as well) do 97% of what I need. I really would love to find something to differentiate enough that it's worth +$39...
I do have one problem with the "software should all be free" attitude, but it is that people refuse to see that something which is open source is harder to charge money for since people could pirate it with almost no effort at all, and thus software that is free in the freedom sense of the word yet not free in the gratis sense of the word is rather rare. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head. I was about to mention Linux
distros, except that with them the price they charge is entirely on the honor system. It is
perfectly legal to buy one Redhat CD and install it on 100 computers, then burn a copy of it for your friends to install on their computers. It is perfectly legal to download the whole ISO image and burn the CD without ever even buying one initial copy to start with. The only reason they can make money at the model is because there are enough people that are willing to pay them money anyway even though they are not legally required to to get the distribution. This is because most of their customer base consists of "fans" and others who want to see them do well. That model doesn't work if Redhat use was expanded to the computer using populace at large.
But saying, "these people don't realize that freedom of use inevitably leads to gratis distribtion" (which is my point) is very different from saying "These people are lazy-ass bums who want everything to be gratis" (which is how your post ends up implying things).
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Opera is a very good browser, as far as the engine goes, but it comes up short where the interface is concerned.
If you have multiple tabs open, and close one, the next one made active is the one last opened. That means that the order can been terribly random. With Mozilla, you close one tab and it takes you to the next one to the left. Quite simple.
Opera's interface has always been bulky, and a bit weird. You have forward and back buttons on the main toolbar, but the stop button (was) only on the windows' toolbar.
Mozilla allows you to better customize javascript permissions, and don't even get me started on Opera's bookmark system (hotlist).
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing Opera has to offer that Mozilla hasn't, is the button to easilly toggle from 'Autor' to 'User' Mode. What this does is allow you on a per-window basis to easilly switch between the colors & fonts the page has defined, and the color/font you have defined. You'll appreciate this if you've ever visited a page with fonts so small you couldn't read them, or page colors that either blind you, or blend the fonts with the bacground so you can't really read it.
I realize that Mozilla eats up much more Memory and CPU power, but that's just something the needs to be gradually improved on. Even as it is, it's requirements fit my machines just fine.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
...another thing plagarized from Opera...
:-)
;-)
Oh, dear...I suppose that choice of words is yet another way you can tell Opera isn't open-source.
So I assume Opera patented tabbed browsing then?
-=Maggie Leber=-