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: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.)

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.

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.

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: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.

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.