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Opera 6.03 - The Wild Child of Browsers?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the home-of-the-singing-fat-lady dept.

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 ...

6 of 579 comments (clear)

  1. Opera vs. K-Meleon on older MSW computers by afflatus_com · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --

    -----
    Cast a Cold Eye
    On Life, on Death
    Horseman, pass by
    --W.B. Yeats' gravestone
  2. Lynx users try links by rwa2 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  3. Re:What is Opera's competitive edge? by jeddak · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  4. Uh, No. by crisco · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --

    Bleh!

  5. The funny thing here is... by gamorck · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    --
    I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
  6. Couple of advantages by ChrisWong · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.