Opera 6.03 - The Wild Child of Browsers?

IEEE1394 writes: "Ever wondered what other Internet browsers are available outside of Internet Explorer? Opera 6.03 from Opera Software boasts itself on being 'the fastest browser on earth.' Does it really live up to its claim of being unique and being fast? Is it the wild child of the browser family and can it ever surpass Internet Explorer as the browser of choice? Let's find out." Funny, IE isn't my browser of choice ...

Comments

Opera vs. K-Meleon on older MSW computers

[afflatus_com]

I run an quite old laptop that came with Windows OS. I picked up the free K-Meleon (which despite the name, isn't for KDE):

K-Meleon on SourceForge

Stripped of bloat, Mozilla's rendering engine runs fast and light on a P133Mhz laptop with 16MB.
A sample screenshot is here:
Screenshot of UI and context menu

For comparison to Opera, I found: Opera 5 to be faster than K-Meleon, but with Opera 6, they were batting close to even.
K-Meleon images don't dither very well if set to 256 colours (often the case with older computers) because of a palette shift. Opera dithers them nicely
K-Meleon renders HTML better than Opera 6 (though Opera 6 does do a better job of difficult CSS than Opera 5).
Opera is a full suite of apps, with alot more features vs. K-Meleon, whereas K-Meleon is a browser and browser alone.
K-Meleon does let all the toolbars (URL, menu, URL bar) be placed in a single row to maximize screen real estate on a laptop.
K-Meleon doesn't have Opera-style tabs yet, which is about the one feature missed the most.
K-Meleon is Free.

Re:Lynx

[Sarin]

actually I think gifs work under lynx and or w3m. A while back I ran an xwindows session and had to look up a page from a terminal and I saw some gifs/jpeg/png whatever they were in my little xterminal window.

Re:Opera was Mozilla A Long Time Ago

[ultrabot]

Mozilla is unusably sluggish on every platform I have tried (Win32, OS X, OS 9).

Try the new release candidate (or any release candidate). As fast as IE, and better features (popup killing, tabbed browsing).

Re:Advertisment?

[discogravy]

I'm a rabidly happy opera user, and while the /. article does sound a bit like an advertisement, I can honestly say it wouldn't surprise me at all if it were coming form a very happy user (like myself).

Tabbed (or windowed) browsing, a search box (deafulted to google, but you can change that,) in every window, skinnable, a hotlinks/bookmarks folder with stuff that's actually usefull and gestures; in addition to that you can magnify or resize the entire page...not just pictures or text, but the entire page (sometimes it looks like ass, true, but it comes in usefull when you're tired of looking at really small letters...can't tell you the amount of times I've set /. to 140% and sat a few feet further away from the old 19" monitor.

Opera has definitely made my browsing a much better experience. I happily shelled out 40$ today (even though I've been using the free version for like four months or so, I have been too broke to consider paying real $$ for software that is *quite* functional even with the ads....and a note about that: none of the ads were annoying blinking neon sex ads, either. In fact, if i recall correctly the last ad i saw before I payed up was an ad for User Friendly.

I can see how a user of Moz (and I have all 3 browsers on my machine, and I use all 3 regularly (although I really only use IE for windows update and on the rare occasions in which Opera does not render a page well. So far, this is the only page i've come across that doesn't render well.

Give it a try for a week before you knock it, it's way better than IE and at least as good as Moz (although I like it tons more than Mozilla, personally.)

Re:Lynx

[Anonymous Coward]

Install the w3m-img package (for Debian, at least), and you'll get images right in the terminal. Really scared me the first time I saw it... I didn't think that such a thing was possible!

Lynx users try links

[rwa2]

I discovered links while browsing through dselect a few years ago, and it's pretty awesome for a text mode browser: It supports tables, frames, and will even pass mouse clicks through when run through an xterm... it's almost exactly like using a GUI browser with the graphics off! I'm really surprised more people don't know about it by now.

Hmm, from freshmeat, it looks like the new version even has graphics support now :/ . Oh well :P . Give it a shot!

dillo was the only graphical browser I could ever get running on a 486/33Mhz with 16MB RAM (mozilla 0.8 ran, but swapped too much to be usable). Actually, come to think of it, Opera (5.x?) didn't work too bad either.

Re:Lynx

[gmack]

Unfortunatly links caches dynamic pages and that makes a lot of sites completely unuseable.

When I asked the author about this he said it was supposed to do that for speed reasons.

I actually had all 3 of the major text based browsers on my system and between the 3 of them was able to browse most sites.. that was until I gave up and went back to Mozilla after I discovered that a simple php game I wanted to play wouldn't work with any of them.

Re:What is Opera's competitive edge?

[jeddak]

To this customer, Opera beats IE in that it provides:

• stability
• speed
• nice interface (even w banner ads!) - and lovely TABS TABS TABS
• configurability - the Preferences window is very detailed
• cross-platform experience - I run it on Windows, Linux, and MacOS X.

Re:Advertisment?

[Darren Winsper]

Mozilla had tabbed browsing before Opera. See http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/2002_05_1 9_mozillian_archive.html for more details.

As for major advantages:
1) Good DOM support
2) Not crap CSS2 support (Where's IE's and Opera's fixed positioning support?)
3) Image blocking
4) Better cookie management
5) A saner UI. Opera's only good if you really know it.
6) The sidebar (Opera's is nowhere near as customisable)
7) The UI takes up less space than Opera
8) Javascript console
9) DOM inspector
10) XUL

That's just off the top of my head.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's why the argument is valid: Online banking is a security sensitive application. That means that the webinterface will have to be tested and has to work as expected. It must not cache data which shouldn't be cached, it must not display things which should be hidden, it must not create ambiguous formating, etc etc. This stage of application development is time consuming and therefore expensive. It won't be done for browsers with x10% fanbase. Browsers do behave differently. Most standards are not perfect specifications (without ambiguities), so there is no 100% safe "standard compliance".

Uh, No.

[crisco]

I'm sorry, but Mr Hyatt is incorrect in asserting that Mozilla had tabbed browsing before Opera.

He claims that "Opera only added tabs in its newest version after Mozilla had them already in its trunk builds."

Opera introduced its 'Window Bar' (buttons for each open within the MDI) with Opera 4, wich came out in spring of 2000. Around that time Mozilla was at M14 and the first Netscape 6 Preview was being released. Neither of those had the equivalent to Opera's Window Bar. The first mention of Mozilla 'tabbed browsing' I can find is a year later, contained in this post to the Mozilla newsgroups. Implementation didn't happen until late summer or fall of 2001, possibly being beat to it by the Multizilla project.

Of course NetCaptor (A shell for the MSIE HTML rendering component) had them back in '99, maybe even earlier.

Re:What is Opera's competitive edge?

[Zathrus]

easy download management including pausing and resuming

Opera's ftp client sucks (but who uses ftp in browsers anyway?).

Er, so which one is it? Good or bad?

I'd bet that most people use ftp via web client now, unless you have needs for things like automatic FTPing on a scheduled basis or often do FTPing (since browsers are usually stateless and don't keep the control connection open - problematic with ftp sites that are hard to login to).

The funny thing here is...

[gamorck]

That all these people seem to feel Opera is so teribbly secure - yet not a one of them know about this major security hole discovered last week:

http://www.securiteam.com/windowsntfocus/5YP0O20 75 S.html

Being that this consitutes a majorly braindead security hole (allowing the value attribute on a file field to be filled in by the webmaster?!?!?!) I think its safe to say that all browsers in existence are lacking on the security front.

J

Re:The funny thing here is...

[hkmwbz]

Why don't you post the URL to the people who discovered the hole?

http://sec.greymagic.com/adv/gm001-op/

You could also quote this from their report:

Opera was informed on 15 May 2002 and confirmed our findings. A day later, in the evening of 16 May 2002, Opera informed us that the vulnerability was fixed and committed to Opera's own version control system.

On 27 May 2002, Opera released version 6.03, which addressed this issue.

Opera has been extremely responsive and quick to understand and patch this vulnerability. They have shown that they truly do take security seriously.

The hole was fixed very quickly after it was discovered. Your comment is a bit out of place, unless you are really trying to say "all software in existence is lacking on the security front".

My Top 5 Favorite Opera Features

[spike2131]

5. Using mouse gestures means no more having to find that pesky little back button.

4. I love that button in the corner where you can easily toggle weather or not to load images... its great for slow loading graphics laden pages over dial-up.

3. The "quick preferences" submenu under the File menu allows you to enable or dissable cookies and javascript, accept or refuse popup windows, or spoof the identity of your broser, all with one click.

2. Tabbed browsing - Opera had it first!

1. Google searches, straight from the address bar.

---
I could have done ten, but there is work to be done...

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Asprin]

The tabbed feature alone makes the whole process less stressful (I'm not sure why when you can just switch between windows but it just does) even if you have to then check complex things in IE and tweak the lot when you're finished.

IMHO, popups are well contained, and desktop clutter is controlled - you only have to minimize one window instead of fifteen.

Opera also has options to prevent popups entirely, but the controls aren't as robust as Moz (yet), which will also let you prevent child windows from doing *utterly* *ridiculous* things like resizing themselves, etc.

Couple of advantages

[ChrisWong]

There are a couple of Opera features that make it hard for me to switch to any other browser:

• Firstly, it pioneered mouse gestures: I'm so used to navigating with the mouse (for example, back/forward through history) that it's annoying to use a browser without this feature.
  
  
• Secondly, no browser on the planet seems to whip out pages from cache anywhere as fast as Opera. They just seem to snap onto the screen, (again) making browsing through history a breeze.
  
  
• Finally my favorite: the little author/user mode toggle button. I can't stand the font/color choices on many pages, but a single click of the mouse instantly makes a web page readable in Opera. Not relevant to the IE/Opera debate, but this is a great feature for Linux users as TT fonts often come up too tiny on many web sites.
  

List of other browsers (200+)

[gnasby]

For a list of alternative browsers (over 200 in fact) have a look at: www.browserlist.browser.org.

This list is a bit old (it hasn't been updated since June 2000), but it gives you a good idea of what sort of stuff is out there.

Opera has lots of missing standards support

[starvingartist12]

No wonder Opera is "so fast"... it's missing even the most basic Document Object Model (DOM) support.

While everything seems to render perfectly in Opera (which probably has one of the best CSS rendering engines out there), the underlying DOM1/2 support is really bad.

This means standard compliant ways of altering different elements on the page don't work at all.

Things like changing display attributes (to make things visible and invisible... great for expanding/collapsing bars) dynamically doesn't work in Opera, when the same exact standards compliant code works in Mozilla, IE:Mac 5 and even version 5 of Internet Explorer for Windows.

Opera seems to look great on the outside, but the underlying engine is flawed. No wonder it can claim to be so fast and so small... when several-year-old standards support is still missing.

Re:http/1.1: Pipelining and zlib

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... http compression is nothing new. IE since atleast v4 I believe, and Netscape since like 4.08 (althought NS 4.x still has quite a few quirks), and of course Mozilla all support it.

As for pipelining, Mozilla's got it too. You just have to turn it on. Prefs > Advanced > HTTP Networking > Enable Pipelining.

Free opera is loaded with spyware

[macdaddy357]

The free version of Opera is so loaded with spyware that it fed me an ad for Monster.com job listings in Cincinnati, OH. Since the spyware knew where I was, I don't trust Opera.

Re:Free opera is loaded with spyware

[hkmwbz]

Quit spreading FUD. Opera has documented every aspect of its ad implementation:

http://www.opera.com/support/supsearch/supsearch.c gi?options=index&name=570

Not only that, but anyone with a brain (and a packet sniffer) can analyze the traffic and see that they are telling the truth.

And the code in Opera which handles ads is 100% written by Opera's own people. It uses no external code.

And while they are partnered with Cydoor, that's no problem since Cydoor has "cleaned up its act considerably", according to this site:

http://www.cexx.org/cydoor.htm

So get your facts straight please.

Re:Intentional Blocking of Opera by Sites

[SystemFork]

You're insane, just hit F12 in Opera then select, "Identify as MSIE 5.0"

From that point on, any webservers you visit will think you're using IE. It's a great way to get around uppidy webmasters who shut other browsers out completely before testing to see if they actually are broken.

FUD

[hkmwbz]

You should really take the time to get educated about this. Not only is Opera's ad implementation carefully documented, several independent people have analyzed the traffic between Opera and the ad servers. No spying.

As for spywareinfo.com, it is obvious that they aren't interested in facts. The site they point to, to explain that Cydoor is spyware actually says that Cydoor are no longer into spyware. How can you trust them when they don't even bother to include information about this?

You have been fooled by spywareinfo.com. Then they pretend to fix it, but they fool you again. Cexx.org clearly states that Cydoor have cleaned up their act. But that doesn't matter to people who only want to push their own agenda.

Designing sites which work in Mozilla and IE

[Nicopa]

That's FUD and your web designing license should be revoked.

Explorer and Mozilla are very similar in their object model. You have just to take care of 3 or 4 things like:

• Both support document.getElementById, but IE4 only support document.all. If you care about the old IE you must use a tiny function which will try both.
• Event handlers in Mozilla get the event object in the argument instead of window.event. So you need to do function handler(event) { if(!event) event=window.event;
• Mozilla is very tidy and bind objects only where they need to be. IE binds objects everywhere, so something like window.myForm won't work in Mozilla, you should the old and standard way.

That's almost all the most seen problems. It takes no extra time to support both browsers.

Some of us have to work in the *real* world

[HelpfulPete]

I have no love of M$, but:

- their browser is generating well over 90% of hits on my clients' servers

- their browser _actually works_, unlike piece of shit NS4...as for NS6, it rocks - why? BECAUSE IT CAN RUN FORMERLY IE-ONLY CODE and doesn't crash as often as fuckwad NS 4.x

- pages don't forget their css and take all day to re-render (incorrectly) when you resize in IE and NS6...DHTML works much better allowing me to avoid Flash...

None of this means I ignore NS4; it means I have to write *double* the javascript and sometimes double the HTML to support a dead piece of shit, but I do it. Though I'm making fortune 500 sites on increasingly tight budgets, nearly everything I make is usable in Lynx.

So get off the IE-hating trip, it's irrational. And ferchrissake, what's worse, MS or AOHell?!?! Remember folks, Nutscrape is AMERICA ONLINE now. Are you AOL users?

Jesus fucking christ.