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 was Mozilla A Long Time Ago

[Onionesque]

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).

Choice words for a choice browser

[Flakeloaf]

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.

of course it's not your browser of choice, but....

[TheLocustNMI]

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... :)

What Opera doesn't do...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Opera vs Crazy Browser

[Mr_Silver]

This is probably the wrong place to post it, but IE is my browser of choice. I don't like Opera's inability to render PRE tags to the right size and iffy javascript handling and I unfortunately don't have 20 hours to sit around to download Mozilla at 2k/sec on my modem.

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.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[rknop]

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

Don't read the news?

[xrayspx]

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.

Re:Opera vs IE, no, Opera vs Mozilla.

[xtremex]

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.