Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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 ...

5 of 579 comments (clear)

  1. Opera was Mozilla A Long Time Ago by Onionesque · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

  2. Choice words for a choice browser by Flakeloaf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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"?

  3. of course it's not your browser of choice, but.... by TheLocustNMI · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  4. What Opera doesn't do... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)

  5. Don't read the news? by xrayspx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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