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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 ...
At work I use a Win32 box, and I use Opera exclusively. It has been stable, well-featured, and fast-fast-fast for years. I pray that they'll put enough work into their experimental OSX port to make it usable.
I haven't quite understood the mania over Mozilla, which still doesn't begin to compete with Opera for stability and speed. Mozilla is unusably sluggish on every platform I have tried (Win32, OS X, OS 9).
I remember Opera (Win32) being able to fit the installer on a disk and running on a 386 with only 8 MB of ram. Quite a feat. I used to enjoy its zippy speed on my 200 mhz Pentium class computer compared to the hulky behemoths Navigator and Internet Explorer. However, when Navigator started to lose out and IE hit version 5 and became quite a bit faster (along with the fact that it was intergrated into the OS heh) I stopped using Opera. It is nice to see that it still is small in foot print (although no longer fits on a floppy and no longer runs on a 386 with 8 MB of ram) and is still faster than the larger competition in most cases. I think this article has done it, I am gonna download the new Opera and give it a try. :)
We're forced to use Mozilla at work 'cause IE has more holes than a Peter North fan club. On a Win32 platform it's unstable with many instances running (I suspect they're all the same process), crashes for no apparent reason, takes forever to load and is fugly.
I can't blame it for crashing when it tries to load certain sites, since many people are obviously using Bill's Malformed HTML to generate IE-friendly (read "IE-Only) web pages.
Even with the kind of vulnerabilities that made me want to dump IE in the first place and flaky Javascript support, I'd still use Opera if I could.
Unfortunately, MS is the VHS to everyone else's Beta. Inferior technology, bloody annoying to use, but way better market permeation. Bleh.
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
for upwards of 80% of the Earth it is, and frankly, it's getting bigger. I work for a web-development company, and the last couple of projects that we have designed and developed have revolved around IE, and IE only -- why is this, you say? Well, because of certain things that MS has built into IE, and IE's overall "acceptance" by commercial customers. Granted, most of these projects are intranet applications, but it makes no difference! To the consumer, more and different browsers are a "good thing", but to web-development companies, and the folks who write applications for a broad number of people, one browser is a "good thing". Integration with MS services (like that god-awful MS-only authentication thing), better embedded plugin support, and the fact that many dotNET web-apps *may* have a hard time running correctly in Moz and Operea all contribute to smaller-mindshare browsers low acceptance ratings.
:) ).
:)
Now, before i denegrate my ENTIRE character, let me say that I am a staunch anything-other-than-IE-and-mostly-Mozilla supporter. I use Mozilla 95% of the time (and mostly IE when i have to A) fill out my timecard on our IE-only intranet at work -or- B) pay my Capital One card
So, what can we do to help? Advocacy. Get folks using Moz or Opera -- your mom, your brother, your sister, your dog, whatever. Brief them on how Moz came to be -- it's free as in speech, ma! Or, we could just wait for MS to cock-up IE...
thelocust[dot]org
DHTML. It has huge dom issues. It's not a bug, it's simply an non-implemented feature. Check out the Dynamic Threading on kuro5hin.org in Opera. It doesn't work, not because of bad coding, but because Opera simply doesn't support all the stuff necessry to make it work.
Opera also has some strange negative text-indent behaviors (you have to double it!), and a few other odd quirks (but every browser has those.) It's definately better than IE in most things (24 bit PNG transparency rules!), but my browser is Mozilla. (Oh, and Mozilla is also free.)
"why bother when it doesn't offer any major advantages over another non-MS browser like Mozilla?"
Ok, I really like Mozilla too, because it's open source, it's free, it has many neat features, it runs on many platforms, it displays nearly as much websites as IE and and and ....
But I was happier than seldomly before when I recognized today that Opera also runs on my new FreeBSD box. I used only Mozilla/Galeon for some days now exclusively, and starting Opera today was like switching from a supertanker to a speedboat.
Mozilla can have *whateverneverbeforeseenfeature* it is, compared to IE in Windows or to Opera in FreeBSD/other Unix just unusable due to it's unbearable sluggishness.Mozilla for my Online-Banking site, Opera for everything else.
However, I have found Crazy Browser which is a replacement for IE using the IE rendering engine.
In fact thats what I'm using now and for a 690k download, it's lovely. Full support for websites (even those with iffy HTML), tabbed interface, Windows XP theme support, popup filter and a really nifty feature which indicates when pages have changed in your links list.
It's also free (as in beer). Having access to the source doesn't bother me (and 90% of the population) in the slightest since I wouldn't understand a word of it or really look at it.
I appreciate that this is a geek site and therefore most people won't touch IE with a barge pole but if you do like IE (and I do) but want tabbed browsing then check it out.
As far as I'm concerned, it does everything that I'd use in Opera, so therefore I don't really see the point in paying for Opera. Granted they've done a fine job - but it's just not for me.
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Opera/Win32 vs. IE:
Gestures, disabling pop-ups, custom searches, opening new pages inside Opera instead of on the desktop, easy download management including pausing and resuming, restarting browsing where you left off, improved stability.
Even the adverts don't annoy me.
The only advantages IE has over Opera is that some sites are written solely for IE, and that Opera's ftp client sucks (but who uses ftp in browsers anyway?).
I don't know about Mozilla, but IE really does suck compared to Opera.
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I write two kinds of Web code. The "For Pay" stuff is written specifically to blow up when the end-user isn't using IE. The company doesn't even want users to TRY any other browser, it's a support nightmare. I'm not sure I'd have made that decision, but I understand the reasoning behind it.
"My" Web stuff is written to render in any browser, but there are lots of extra features that I've coded in to make navigation, etc. easier for IE users. NetScrape users can buy stuff, but IE users get some helpful DHTML tools to make it easier.
These tools are hidden to all other browsers & those just render the normal static content, because I don't have time to debug them on other browsers that represent 3% - 4% of my customers.
I may be confused. I frequently use HTMLTidy and it says "no no", I ignore it. I just ran the w3 validator and it choked on every "input" tag in a table, said "check which elements are allowed here".
Hmm. I just checked mine again, and it validated as HTML 4.01 Transitional. This is a page where I do a stylistic, though legal, no-no, which is using tables for bulk formatting. (This is a nod to those few people who still use the ancient Netscape 4; NS4's CSS support isn't good enough to do a sidebar menu properly, so I do it the "wrong" way with a big table formatting the whole page.) In the "main" part of the page, there are lots of form elements, but the W3 validator didn't complain.
The non-standards compliant thing I do use on this page is the "wrap" attribute in "textarea" tags. That's a nod to inconsistent browser behavior; using the attribute makes the major browsers consistent, but it's not a part of the standard. Oh well.
-Rob
Go to CNN.com with Opera 6/Linux. It's a shame.
I use Opera 90% of the time under Linux, it's great, fast, looks great most of the time. However one major feature that it lacks is a "delete URL" button, like the X> that Konq has. When you're cutting and pasting a URL in, you can't then highlight the current URL and delete, because then you have to go back and RESELECT what you wanted to paste. It's a pain. Much easier to select, hit X>, mid-click.
I like music
It all depends on your target market. At my last job, we had 45% of users using netscape or mozilla. Why? I have no clue. They also happened to be on Solaris or IRIX machines. Which was another oddity. Hollywood uses IRIX. We weren't marketing to the film industry.
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Most /.ers have a big mouth, a large ego, and little in the way of actual courage.
It's always the same story. Sony does a nasty thing, boycott sony, Sony has a new toy, "I wish I had one".
Same goes for IE. I'm not into browser wars, I didn't try Opera, but I use Moz 0.9.9 everyday since it was released and it works. It's not "better" or anything, it just displays the sites I visit, and that's about all that matters to me. And when I hit a site that requires IE, then I skip it. Really. If I can't get to their site, they don't want my business. It's as simple. And yes I do this at work, and yes, I set the company policy, and we're doing quite OK without IE (nor a single windows as it is).
Instead of bashing M$ and using their products nonetheless, what about actually trying to live by your values?
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.