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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 ...
Will be faster. GIFs are for whimps.
... a very very slow monday for you to post such a story ... i think everyone slightly interested in opera that reads /. already tested it
IAAL
Many banking and other websites do not render properly with Mozilla, and I'm never going to pay for a browser like Opera.
So unfortunately, sometimes you must choose IE.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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).
Funny, IE isn't my browser of choice ...
/.ers don't use IE. I personally don't use IE, because I move between Windoze, Sun, and Linux platforms so much it is nice to have a common interface. I use netscape on Win and Sun, and Mozilla on Linux. I don't want to have to remember O on Windows, and L on mozilla, etc... :-)
I really wonder how many
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
How many browsers can you use anyway? I've got IE (need for work), Mozilla, and NS 7 beta. Mozilla gets 95% of the usage now, and has an email program I can trust which I certainly can't say about Outlook.
Opera is just too late on my radar screen to make a difference. YMMV however.
I was expecting to see "This article sponsored by Opera Software" at the end of that posting. Has Slashdot started taking cash for posting articles that are little more than advertisments for a particular product? Or in this case, a link to a review which is as far from "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" as can be?
...
In either case, I read the review, and it beautifully disproves Opera Software's claim of making "the world's fastest web browser", with load times varying between 50% and 300% of IE's on the pages that were tested. Opera also displays ads unless you register it (for $39!) -- why bother when it doesn't offer any major advantages over another non-MS browser like Mozilla?
It should also be noted that Opera has had some Microsoft-esque security holes in the past
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
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. :)
I do love that quick pop-up disable feature... and it still allows me to run javascript.
Programming is simply the application of logic to creativity
Sorry, Kiniski, but when I hear "wild child" I think Truffaut (as in his film "l'Enfant sauvage"). So if Opera is the wild child of browsers, it would be incapable of parsing or rendering HTML, would periodically generate frenzied outbursts of sound and signals, and would occasionally defecate on the desktop.But with years of patient training, it might become a functional browser.
It seems to me that most web-sites design their pages to run well with IE, and IE only. I've been using Opera steadily for the last two years or so, and I am extremely impressed with it's features and the usability.
Opera *is* fast, no questions there. I have measured the download times on sites between IE and Opera, and this is a definitive fact.
Opera does follow the W3C standards, in contradiction to IE, which most likely won't display W3C-standard pages properly.
Opera is one of the products that I would recommend. At the moment, I am at school, and here we have IE. It crashes constantly. Opera is rock stable on the single computer I've installed it on.
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
True, it's fast most of the time but it does seem to have severe problems with link in the /. articles. The just take forever to load...
Whatever you may have to say about IE, it's still the browser of choice. The choice I refer to of cource being the choice of web designers.
What's the point of using another browser anyway with this being the case.
I always seem to have to return to IE when I have trouble browing sites. (Such as all the banking sites in my country...)
and to my constant shame, IE is MY browser of choice. For the most part it is simply the best (god I feel sick), I prefer Opera for the features, but for rendering web pages, IE is it. Maybe if I got off of my ass and started looking into anti-aliasing for X I might feel different. As far as Opera is concerned, I really like it, and have had few problems other than rendering quality, though now that I think about it, Opera under Windows may blow IE away.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Stupid Mozilla, if only I was using Opera I would've been first post!
iCab!
I don't know too much about Opera, but are there any other "features" that it offers that IE doesn't, or at least doesn't do as well as Opera? I like competition in any market, but if it doesn't have anything substantially additional with it that IE doesn't, then I can see it gaining much market share, especially since one has to pay for the ad-free version? Maybe someone here can shed some light in this.
Opera doesn't have to beat IE as a browser, it has to beat Mozilla. Opera is a good browser in ways, but it's got to be a lot better than Mozilla to attract a market.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
If you feel the need to stick with IE, you can at least try out CrazyBrowser (at www.crazybrowser.com). It's basically an add-on to IE, but you get noticeably faster (tabbed!) browsing and popup blocking. And it's only a 600k download, what a deal!
It is faster. The performance advantage is really noticable on old PCs. On a new 1GHz with 128 Mb ram, everything is so fast it doesn't really make a difference.
The disadvantages of Opera is there is no DOM and most of the bugs don't get fixed.
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
no, we do NOT need 1 browser. We need a clear standard for writing web-pages. Strangely enough, there is just such a standard..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
After several attempts to go through and learn all the different mouse gestures I decided to disable this function as it started to become more of an annoyance.
If thou can not learn even that thou art not worthy of reviewing Opera.
I could do this back when I used Netscape, but I had to disable all javascript and it involved navigating through preferences and deselecting boxes and whatnot. Perhaps Mozilla has this option now, but it runs too slowly on my system.
I had some problems with things like Flash and Quicktime in earlier versions, but they all seem to work fine now. The multiple document interface also saves a ton of real estate on the taskbar. I never thought that it would matter, but once you get used to it you can't stand seeing 6 different tabs of IE/Netscape/whatever.
My girlfriend uses this stupid freemail at www.iwon.com. One day, she was unable to log into it as it said her session was expired (this is with IE). I cleared the cache, deleted cookies, tried again, same thing. I then installed opera and had her try again with opera. Same thing, said her session had expired - please re-login. So then I install netscape and she is able to get into her mail with that. This would tell me that opera and IE have to be sharing some code somewhere.... any ideas?
AOL is about to switch to a Mozilla based client in their next version of their software, so that is huge numbers of people switching from IE to Mozilla. I am a staunch IE supporter, mainly because of bad tables, Javascript and CSS run-ins with Netscape in the past, and never being able to get over our differences. If Netscape/Mozilla has CSS/JS support on par with IE, I would be happy, but when designing a website, Mozilla is just a right pain. So although many people seem to be running IE, things may start to head back the other way with the advent of the next AOL.
Security and Privacy. The ability to prevent unwanted pop-up, pop-under, and browser hijacking. Microsoft will not go against advertisers. You can download and install addons to rid yourself of unwanted adds, but when that happens in bulk MS will release a brower update incompatable with that addon.
Get a free ipod.
Yes, I use Opera because of the features. I like the MDI. I cannot live without the ability to go back/forward using only the mousebuttons ("gestures"). I can press ctrl+g to quickly apply my own stylesheet to the page, as can I disable image-loading with a click. I can use the zoom-control to get up close when I need to (which happens), I can press F12 and quickly enable and disable javascript/plugins/popups. I can press CTRL+J to get a window with all the links on a page. I can enable automatic periodical refresh, I maximize frames with the click of a button. When exploring large link-collections I can use the special 'create linked window' to browse efficiently without having to open/close lot's of windows.
I'm sure mozilla can do much of this, but IE? IE is - as far as I'm concerend - a joke as far as features go.
Opera is all about the small things which makes my browsing fun and efficient. That said, I have a long list of things I wished it could do, some of them from IE (I want a page 'properties' function)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I can't say much about Opera since I have not personally used it, but MOZILLA is a quite suitable alternative to IE, and free. The newest versions of MOZILLA are at least as stable and work just as well. I have no problems using Mozilla on all the sites which Konqueror chokes on such as my bank and other favorite sites that make heavy use of java and javascript. I dont use IE because I am on Linux.
siri
I haven't used opera in a long time, but I'm using Mozilla and IE right now. Mozilla isn't very stable, as far as my experience so far. If Opera is faster and stable, and compatible with all the crap out there, i'd use it... I'll have to give it a try.
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.)
I think you're confusing "choice" with
and of course
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.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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.
This slashdot community is to Linux-centric to even want to see that other people like using IE.
How about:
IE has NEVER crashed for me and I can browse anywhere? And this is not an isolated incident?
I have had several versions of Opera, Konquerer, Netscape, Mozilla. Thay all have crashed on me, and they all have trouble with sites.
So moderate me down on this one too. I don't care, I have karma to burn, baby!
Me.
Yeah, it's such a terrible burden to have to write HTML-compliant code, instead of having IE render just about anything you throw at it.
Write correct, clean code and you won't have any trouble with Mozilla-based browsers.
Is the reviewer referring to sanskrit here or is there actually a dead language called sandscript?
>With Opera Unicode allows users to read pages from
>literally any language, except Sandscript.
I've never heard of Sandscript. Is that like Applescript? Or is it more like Sanskrit?
----- "I'm still sane on three planets and two moons."
You can choose which browser you tell servers you are (OPera, IE, a bunch of Netscapes) and by default, this is IE 5 (because so many stupid site builders check for IE only and won;t let you in of you don't have it).
Go to Quick Preferences in the File menu and change Idenfiy As... to whatever you want.
HTH
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
I regularly come across websites that performs a check before showing the content and sometimes prevents you from viewing it if you're not using MSIE. A year ago or so, that was the case with two financial institutions where my wife and I kept our money...
I don't know if Opera still has this feature but I remember that it was possible to make the Opera browser present itself as Netscape or MSIE; that was a nice feature, that I would like to see in Moz right now.
Mark me as redundant, but DAMN STRAIGHT!
Building sites on Mozilla isn't a pain. If you're doing what you should be, they work!
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!
to me, the interface seems clunky (i.e. the refresh and stop button are one and the same, and change state according to whether or not you are fetching a page) and i have noticed no significant difference in the speed of rendering pages when compared to mozilla, ie, or konq. call me a cheapskate, but another thing that turns me off opera is the fact that it isn't free.
I've been using Opera 5 on Mac OS9 for about a month now and I'd say it is by far the slowest browser of the three. Pages load about 3 times faster on IE, and 2 times faster on NS. Sometimes it takes 30+ seconds just to shut the program down. And while a page is loading, no chance of letting it load in the background - it ties up the whole computer and you're stuck.
I'll be upgrading to OSX shortly, and maybe it'll be better for that.
I've tried as hard as possible to resist IE, but unfortunately it really seems to be the best browser.
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
That somebody who took it upon themself to review the product did not wish to take the time to familiarize themself with one of its biggest features speaks to a certain lack of proffessinalism... That aside though, I don't see how the gestures can be considered a "con". Even with them turned on, I find it difficult to perform one accidentally (I myself only use the back and forth navigation and never run into a problem of triggering another gesture accidentally). Finally, since there's an option to turn them off, I really fail to see how, iven if they are "annoying", their inclusion can be held against the browser.
I think that it's by providing these features that Opera can succeed in the marketplace alongside of IE. One great feature would be trying to predict the next link you will click and pre-loading that page. (Like for multi-page articles).
Ñ'
I'm not going to install anything but IE on anybodies computers anytime soon. I use moz my self, but I'm also the person they are going to call the moment (no matter what that hour that moment happens to happen) when some site tells them that they are using an unsupported browser.
They are not calling me to thank me for standing up for what is right and to making it very clear for them that the site they tried to visit is created by a bunch of microsoft oriented retards. They are not going to tell me that they aren't interested in the site anymore now that they are aware of this fact.
No. They are calling me to ask how to enable this other browser that actually works everwhere.
TC - My Photos..
Ok, Chimera claims the crown on Macs as "the fastest web browser" it renders pages significantly faster than IE, and that ain't no joke! It also bothers to smooth your text fonts, so that it makes pages look REALLY nice.
I actually HATE to look at web pages in anything else, because Chimera makes things look THAT much better... and Chimera does it faster... beats the crap outta me why people can't do the same... oh, yeah, that's why we still have x86... people would rather make what they have work, than switch to something that works better.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
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
I've noticed some sites intentionally block/cripple Opera.
To get around that you can use a proxy and change your user agent string to:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Actually 0pera 6.03)
(or something similar...)
And fool 'dem com-pee-u-ters!
--arcades
Opera is much faster than IE and the interface is much smarter. You would think Microsoft would copy it but they are obviously to incompetent. Its just the little things that make it good - like the way i can CTRL+SHIFT Click on a link and it will open it in a new window in the _background_ thus i don't even have to stop reading the page. Absolutly perfect for anything like slashdot or e2. Not to mention the way i can carry on from where i left after a crash (when windows crashes, you loose all 30 windows you had open).
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Hate to say this, because I used to love Opera as much as anyone could love such an underdog. Opera, however, as far as I can tell, engages in the deplorable practice of spamming. I used an untouched address to send them a bug report. Within days I was receiving 6-10 spam mails per day - and this was a business address, which had never received spam before and was not used for any other online activity save for legitimate email receiving. It's died down since I started reporting them all to Spamcop, but it still surprised the hell out of me. I sent Opera another note protesting the whole thing and asking for an explanation, but I haven't yet heard back from them. If anyone knows contrary, please post - I'd love to stop thinking they'd do such things and go back to supporting them.
I use Dillo on my FreeBSD box. When I'm on that box, it's usually for research and looking up information. No javascript needed. And I reallt couldnt care less if I missed the designers COOL flash intro. It's content content content.
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.
You forgot to mention one thing:
K-Meleon is dead. It's been unmaintained since 10-30-01 and doesn't support any of the more recent Gecko snapshots.
You'd be surprised at how large a portion of that 80% is AOL. If they switch, you'll see a BIG drop in that lead. "Browser of choice" is a bit misleading when you account for them, too. They chose AOL, and so only chose IE indirectly.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
Banner ads on your browser and pages really doesn't help increase speed when you are on dialup.
That's not the case as Opera only downloads its adverts once a week. It caches them and rotates them throughout the week. You also get to configure the adverts from the preferences based on your interests, age, location etc. so that you at least get adverts that are likely to be relevant to you.
I've never even noticed Opera downloading the ads, and I've been using it on dial-up for 18 months now.
There are two features that Opera has that blow the competition (including IE, Mozilla and Galeon) away as far as I'm concerned. The first is its Multiple Document Interface, which is vastly better than Mozilla/Galeon's tabs and infinitely superior to IE's single document interface. The second is the mouse short-cuts for back and forward, which I now can't live without (hold down left button and click right button to go forward, hold down right and click left to go back). Simple but brilliant. Add to these the fact that it's highly configurable to suit your own preferences and I wouldn't use anything else.
The only site I've had problems with in Opera recently is this one, but that wouldn't work in Mozilla, Galeon or Netscape 4 either, so it's obviously another case of shoddy IE-only web development.
Suck figs.
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:
0 75 S.html
http://www.securiteam.com/windowsntfocus/5YP0O2
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.
5. Using mouse gestures means no more having to find that pesky little back button.
4. I love that button in the corner where you can easily toggle weather or not to load images... its great for slow loading graphics laden pages over dial-up.
3. The "quick preferences" submenu under the File menu allows you to enable or dissable cookies and javascript, accept or refuse popup windows, or spoof the identity of your broser, all with one click.
2. Tabbed browsing - Opera had it first!
1. Google searches, straight from the address bar.
---
I could have done ten, but there is work to be done...
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
I use Opera as my main browser. It is fast, mostly by doing things the smart way, like starting the download of a file you select and downloading in in the background while you figure out where you want to put it on your hard drive.
Opera doesn't always work because there are lots of people who code only to IE rather than to the documented standards. Also, some bugs in the way that IE and Netscape implement the standards make pages written to work with them look bad in standards compliant browsers such as Opera. Opera does have a compabibility mode that it uses to try to accomodate pages written for IE, but you can only go so far.
IE isn't the be all and end all of browsers. Netscape isn't either. It's interesting how slow innovation has become since Netscape got sold to AOL and Microsoft decided that they own the net.
I'd encourage everyone to try Opera out. Try it again if you haven't since version 6.0 came out. You may have to keep IE around for some sites, but then it's not like we have much of a choice on that if we run XP anyway.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
After reading his "timings" I decided to try to open same sites in IE. On my machine (PIII 350, Win NT with IE 6) Fark was under 3 seconds, The Tech Zone - 2 seconds, ClubVibes -- 3 seconds, Sputnik - 1 second + 2 seconds for flash to start. FutureLooks - 3 seconds.
I guess all those huge margins are nothing more than hickups in guy's internet connection.
Hyperom.com
It is what I like to call the lemming factor. People learn how to code HTML to the MS Standard. (ugh, it pains me to even say those words). "Web designers" take classes in said topic, only to be actually learning MS-only code. They are taught it is better, and they don't question it. No reasonably intelligent person would knowingly code something like that unless they were in MS's back pocket, or are simply ignorant. They are lemmings, they follow what they are TOLD is the way to do things without actually looking into it objectively.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The reviewer seems remarkably uninformed about the state of alternate browsers, possibly because, as he suggests, he's been enslaved to IE for the last few years. But he seems naive to certain subleties, such as Mozilla has about as much cross platform support as Opera does or that both Mozilla/Netscape (new betas) and Galeon have support for tabbed browsing. Galeon's is as if not more versatile as Opera's.
But in his defense, some of his inexperience put some shock back into some of the things we have become immune to. For example I'm glad to see he addressed Opera's outrageous subscriber price.
Not the best browser competitive analysis I've read. It reads much like a paid endorsement for Opera.
-jag
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
There's nothing worse than people taking credit for things that aren't theirs, ESPECIALLY open source software authors. I'd also like to point out that Galeon had tabbed browsing LONG before Mozilla integrated it.
Why bother with it? Like most UNIX browsers, you can copy the link and middle click ANYWHERE in the current window (except on a link) and it'll take you to the site that you want. :)
It actually drives me nuts that I have to go through the trouble of actual cut and paste operations in Windows when the UNIX versions of browsers always make things so simple.
MDI is quite similar (I would say superior) to tabbed browsing. Certainly it doesn't take a great leap to get from MDI to tabs. Either way, Opera's tabs implimentation doesn't break when you open tonnes of them like Mozilla
> 1) Good DOM support
Never been interested in DOM support. DHTML is almost universally awful, and none of the sites I use regularly use or depend in it (quite rightly).
> 2) Not crap CSS2 support (Where's IE's and Opera's fixed positioning support?)
Opera does fixed positioning; it just doesn't do overflow, so no emulating frames-based sites in it.
IE supports fixed positioning by switching to default positioning, breaking sites like www.w3.org/Style/; isn't that nice
> 3) Image blocking
I have a user css file which blocks most banner adverts
> 4) Better cookie management
Never seen the point. I couldn't really care less if someone wants to tag my client and watch what banners I never even see.
> 5) A saner UI. Opera's only good if you really know it.
If you say so. Having to look in Mozilla's dodgy directory hierachy and overwrite one of the files to add my user css file was so much easier than just selecting it in the prefs window in Opera..
> 6) The sidebar (Opera's is nowhere near as customisable)
What, you mean that thing I always turn off in either client?
> 7) The UI takes up less space than Opera
No it doesn't. In fact, with tabs and the document <link> bar it takes about 20px more vertical space as my everything-on Opera display.
> 8) Javascript console
> 9) DOM inspector
Not being a DHTML weenie, I can't say I have a use for them.
> 10) XUL
What? How is XUL an advantage? It results in slow, non-standard UI's (Mozilla's URL bar still doesn't work like any other string input bar on Windows. I wonder why).
And don't forget:
11) Exceptional progressive rendering.
On the other hand, Opera has over Mozilla:
It's swings and roundabouts, really; Mozilla and Opera are both good browsers, with different enough approaches to cover most users. If I didn't get a student discount on Opera I'd be using Mozilla.
"Sandscript" is a dead language. Uh... Is that maybe what ancient India used to program or something? And a script error on every page, beautiful.
....it breaks them. The author of this article makes some claims about how Opera needs to be WC3 compliant. Last I checked (and if I'm wrong, y'all are gonna give it to me ;) Opera is as much a WC3 compliant browser as Mozilla, and certainly moreso than IE.
The issue that designers, programmers, and ultimately the end-users must combat is that all sorts of flash-bang features that go into making pages look great in IE screw the hell out of those same pages in other browsers. Opera's efficient standards compliance measures wind up backfiring a bit because when this Made For Internet Explorer crap comes along, Opera chokes on it like the worthless coding it really is.
Mozilla really floats the middle ground well; pages that don't render quite right in Opera always show up fine in Mozilla, and if there were a good mouse gesture plug-in (I admit it, I love 'em), Mozilla would be all I use. Can't wait for 1.0!!
Web developers should never, never, never, never assume that those who visit their sites are using any one particular browser. IE might be the most commonly used browser for whatever reason, but that doesn't mean EVERYONE uses it. If you are being lazy because of the supposed marketshare of IE and just writing for IE, you are only helping Microsoft's plans to totally own the web. Making sure that the W3C standards are met is worth the extra effort in the end.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I agree with the philosophy of coding to the standards; I've been _trying_ to do that for 7 years.
/different/ 85 percents.
Unfortunately, nobody really hits the standards. Sure, Mozilla and Opera and IE all hit 85% or so, maybe even higher for "two year old" standards.
But they hit
IE doesn't even get the CSS box model right. On ANY version. Even 6. That's a fundamental deal, that's not frosting like rollovers and hover tags.
Mozilla and Opera have different ideas of what lots of the fundamentals mean. Who's right? I don't know. After a while, you realize that it doesn't matter. It should, but it doesn't. The code itself can validate against strict w3c rules, but it works differently in all three browsers.
What I do is try and code for Mozilla and/or Opera as the standard, get it "done" and then see how broken it is in IE, and fix it accordingly.
If you start with IE and go the other way, it seems to be a much longer and harder journey, since IE is so loopy with the standards.
Mucous membranes are the part of your brain that, like, make you think about mucous. --Beavis
I I am a front end graphic designer/coder, which menas I design what people see and use, I get dirty with some javascript and asp when necessary but my company has backend/plumbing people to take care of the database and heavy coding needed. As a frontend designer I use Dreamweaver to rapidly create a page the way I want it too look and quickly switch to code view to tweak/ change things and go back to layout the rest of the page. I can code by hand but when its done so much quicker visually I dont need to do it by hand. Thus Dreamweaver/FrontPage/Interdev etc. need to be the ones creating the inital code to be crossbrowswer. I should'nt have to remember what one browser does versus another and on which version it does and doesnt do it. Thats just ridiculous. The standards are a base from which to jump off from and it seems that IE has made quicker strides in developing what people want to see unlike Netscape or others.
Slashdot is a biased community of very talented,smart techno savvy individuals. Most internet users are not. Most users are Windows/IE platform based not Linux/Mozilla or otherwise.
With the staggering amount of sites out there and the number of designer/developers and platform combinations and developemtn tools. Expect diversity. Expect it too be different and you won't be dissappointed.
Flame On!
But:
"Sandscript" a dead language (Sanskrit)
"heatsync" on a hardware website (heatsink)
I have a good friend who is a high school teacher. I'm not sure whether to sympathize with him or punch him.
-Styopa
One of the biggest areas where Opera seems to fail is with a lot of newly developed websites that didn't take Opera into consideration since IE seems to continue to dominate the browser market with authority.
Oh, obviously it's the browser's fault when it fails to render broken pages correctly. Sheesh!I use Opera mainly because of the tabbed browsing and the ability to turn off images with one click. On our crappy dialup at home, that's important. I also enjoy the zoom feature, the quick preferences and the ability to open popup windows in the background, or not at all. Not to mention that it eliminates the problem of page widening posts!!
I'd love to use Opera exclusively, and I use it for almost all of my browsing, but it seems to have a problem with many secure sites. It just can't open the pages and I get a could not locate remote server error. Anybody have any ideas why this occurs? Anything I can do to fix it? Too bad I have to use IE as a backup just for instances like this.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Actually it's widely known that VHS was the technology of choice because it's what the porn industry embraced and started releasing titles on. And while you can try to ignore it. Porn is a HUGE pull on any media known to man. And has influence in people's decisons.
It doesn't do Sandscript (sic)
Is anyone doing reviews literate anymore?
do any browsers other than IE 6 offer support for SMIL? i've started working with it a little, because of how much easier it is to create web page animation when compared to the likes of javascript... i am rather unknowledgable about browsers, i admit...but so far out of the ones i've tested, IE was the only one that read SMIL correctly.... which irritates me, because mostly i find it isn't that great for other things.
I had a really nice example typed out using < and > and it told me I violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Way to go slashdot, lock it down so that valid comments can't get through! Why not just leave these things to the modding system and let valid content through! I believe this is the last time I attempt to post help on slashdot as I have had nothing but trouble when trying to do so now and in the past.
Just an example from my last project, where I used quite a lot of JavaScript code.
It seems that Mozilla 1.0 RC1 has problems with obeying the selectedIndex property. The JavaScript reference tells us this: "If no option is selected, selectedIndex has a value of -1" But setting the property to either -1 or 0 in Mozilla makes no difference! And it all works in IE 5-6.
Also, the project is using CSS extensivly. Mozilla doesn't show anything but the background color, and it works perfect in IE. And both the CSS and HTML code passed the W3C validator without any errors or warnings. Why, Mozilla, why? What am I doing wrong here?
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.
Ahem capitol one 's web pay system works prefectly under netscape (you know that old one on EVERY linux install). This is how I pay it with My no-microsoft computer system.
It has been that way for over 4 months, after myself and 30 other friends sent them daily "your web designers suck, fix your webpages" email and snail mail letters... I am waiting for the new netscape to become stable and then start the campain all over again...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned that Opera has stuff like pipelining and http compression since version 5. I was a staunch Mozilla supporter until I discovered Opera -- so far it has been able to do everything I need, and more. The keyboard shortcuts are a big plus point. Tabbed browsing has been around for ages in Opera. Browsing with Opera is a very fulfilling experience.
/. mentioned quite a while ago that they would start having no more than one advertisement per day hidden in the articles.
Maybe they should charge a few bucks extra for consulting about ads, though, to avoid little quirks like Opera not seeming to realize that the browsers they should be FUDing about on Slashdot are Mozilla and Konqueror.
No wonder Opera is "so fast"... it's missing even the most basic Document Object Model (DOM) support.
While everything seems to render perfectly in Opera (which probably has one of the best CSS rendering engines out there), the underlying DOM1/2 support is really bad.
This means standard compliant ways of altering different elements on the page don't work at all.
Things like changing display attributes (to make things visible and invisible... great for expanding/collapsing bars) dynamically doesn't work in Opera, when the same exact standards compliant code works in Mozilla, IE:Mac 5 and even version 5 of Internet Explorer for Windows.
Opera seems to look great on the outside, but the underlying engine is flawed. No wonder it can claim to be so fast and so small... when several-year-old standards support is still missing.
I try to do cross-browser pages but Opera falls short of Mozilla, NS6, or even IE5. By default it lies and identifies itself as IE in the user agent field. DOM2 support is almost totally missing although some functions seem to be there but are non-functional stubs. Arrrrgh! Here's a list of documented Opera annoyances.
I use Opera at home. My online bank says that I must use IE or NN to do my banking, Opera won't work. Inside Opera, I pick the option that disguises Opera as IE and presto-chango, I can now use all of the online bank services.
I suspect other web sites that reject Opera could be similiarly fooled.
Enjoy your life, it's the only one you've got!
In my experience, I've not noticed much of a speed difference between Mozilla and Opera. Mozilla definitely sluggish for me, although I can only claim to have tried the Win32 version.
*shrugs*
- "I'll probably get modded down for this."
I used IE until the beginning of this year when I dumped my windows 98. I now run mandrake and initially used Opera (with the banners) as my browser... I tried out Mozilla for a while and then Konqueror for a while with KDE3. I found both Mozilla and Konq dissappointing in rendering many sites... and I couldn't access my online banking with them. So, I switched back to Opera when version 6.0 was released... I even broke down and paid for it! It is in my opinion the best browser available for Linux... nothing can beat it for rendering and speed (at least for all the sites I visit on a regular basis).
You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Are Talking To Me.
The free version of Opera is so loaded with spyware that it fed me an ad for Monster.com job listings in Cincinnati, OH. Since the spyware knew where I was, I don't trust Opera.
How ya like dat?
wget -O -
Several people have also actually taken the time to check their facts before spreading FUD and lies. Independent people have analyzed the ad traffic, and Opera is not spyware. Check their newsgroups.
Clever signature text goes here.
No, it'll just be employment you have trouble with.
Whether all browsers should work with standards based HTML, the reality is that as soon as you want to do anything complex: almost all of them break from the standards; interpret standards their own way; do random unique stuff; whatever.
So, if you want a nice, safe, white page, some blue links, maybe a table with no background, standards work wonderfully. Unfortunately, most of the people who commission websites seem to believe that the latest gimmic and losing 5% of users is a far better bet than a circa '95 web page that everyone can, and nobody will, use.
Are all of those claims nonsense? Who cares? The point is, these are the people who are paying for the sites to be made and, if they want their gimmic, they get it or they hire someone else.
(And yes, my personal website does run pretty much standards compliant and you know what, people love it, but that's about the only one where I get complete creative control.)
As for spywareinfo.com, it is obvious that they aren't interested in facts. The site they point to, to explain that Cydoor is spyware actually says that Cydoor are no longer into spyware. How can you trust them when they don't even bother to include information about this?
You have been fooled by spywareinfo.com. Then they pretend to fix it, but they fool you again. Cexx.org clearly states that Cydoor have cleaned up their act. But that doesn't matter to people who only want to push their own agenda.
Clever signature text goes here.
I remember the first time I used vi. It *stunk*. (give me a second -- I'm not trolling) There wasn't even an obvious way to get the heck out of the application. At school, elm was our default mail handler and by default it often used vi for editing emails. I found this horribly annoying, quickly changed to pico, and [almost] never looked back.
Now here I am a dozen or so years later and I do all my dhtml, asp, and php coding in vim (www.vim.org). Turns out vim's done a perfect job of creating a "mouseless" UI, and it's much more efficient to edit text with both hands on the keyboard than just one (with the other running shuttles to and from the mouse).
If <functional unit>Opera can be to mice when browsing</functional unit> what <functional unit>vim is to the keyboard when editing text</functional unit>, they'll have something much better than simply being faster than IE or some other browser. Opera may already be that good, and the "vi[m] syndrome" I experienced years ago might help explain this reviewer's initial reaction to mouse gestures. I'd be awful happy if I could navigate through a browser without bothering with menu items and tools at the top of the screen (Personally I'd prefer a browser ready for "elegant" use without a mouse, but I'm prolly in the minority there!).
The most efficient interfaces (notice I didn't say "best"), ultimately, aren't the ones that have their instructions on the screen at the same time. More than one browser falls short of that mark right now.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Standards compliance is an excellant tool for measuring compatibility, etc., but what really matters about a commercial website isn't whether it's standards-compliant but whether the desired customers can make use of it. My bank has recently upgraded their net-banking site such that Opera works perfectly with it, where it hadn't just a few months ago. Yet another reason not to use Netscape Navigator! (I never use MS-Internet Explorer, it's too untrustworthy).
It also asks you the first time you do one if you want to turn it on/off. I don't see what his problem is either.
Which they don't.
I would advise you to check the full facts rather than just the ones that fit your own lies.
Clever signature text goes here.
one big advantage over Mozilla/Netscape is that Opera is so easily available for so many platforms. Mozilla just makes available Win32, Linux and Mac builds and unless somebody contributes, thats the end of the story. Netscape offers support for some non win/linux/mac platforms only through partners' sites - e.g. for the Solaris version you have to register with Sun and then you still dont get a 2.6 version.
It was NOT introduced in version 4. I started using Opera at version 3 point something, 3.6 I believe it was, and it had it then. It's had it since the earliest alpha version if I'm not mistaken. What was added recently was the ability to turn it off, for the whiners out there that complained about it endlessly.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Even if all the browsers supported all the standards, you'd still have to code for multiple browsers because of bugs. I have found that that is often the biggest problem - even with simple code like css1, the different browsers will handle even the simplest stuff very differently, thus making 'standards' useless. If the quality isn't there, the standards the browser is supposedly built to don't matter. (and yes, I'm referring to Netscape's bugs in css).
While on the topic of Opera - does it handle HTML layout correctly yet?
After having the opportunity to fully test out Opera I find that paying $39 is slightly expensive for the browser, especially if you're Canadian as that works out to $61.99. To pay $62 for a browser seems to be a little far fetched.
I wonder if the thought that the Candian Dollar is worth a different amount than the US Dollar ever crossed this guys mind? Does he even realize that just because they are both called Dollar doesn't mean they are on in ethe same? If you traded $39 US Dollars for Canadian Dollars and hiw calculations are correct, I'd guess that you'd recieve somewhere in the neighborhood of $62. Does he even realize just how ignorant that made him seem... which is exactly what you dont want to seem like as a reviewer..
Yes, lies. Or ignorance. I don't know which is worse.
Clever signature text goes here.
I tend to write XHTML-compliant code, and Netscape baulks over that many more times than IE.
But that was not the point of my post: my point was that AOL was switching, which would bring lots more Mozilla users potentially.
Oh well, you are obviously just a troll.
Clever signature text goes here.
In almost any case in computers, certain products will do better in one arena while failing in another. The question is - Is it better overall with a few failures, or a failure overall with a few advantages? (It's been this way with CPUs for ages - Athlons waste P4s in most arenas, but there are a few cases where a P4 will eat an Athlon alive)
:), is up there at the top, WAY above NS/Mozilla or IE.
Same goes for this - Overall, Opera was faster than IE in the arena of page loads. Of five sites: Half the load time for 2. Close to half for the next. MAJOR disadvantage for one. Slight disadvantage for another. Overall, Opera wins in this (limited benchmark)
Let's not forget other factors, such as overall responsiveness (How it "feels", of course page load times are a part of this), and startup time from launch.
Most importantly - Usability on a slow system. Opera ran fine on my old P133 laptop with 64M of EDO RAM. Hell, it ran OK with only 32M RAM, when Netscape 4.x took 10 minutes to start. (NS 6.x/Mozilla - Don't even think about those bloated memory hogs).
Opera, if not the fastest graphical browser on Earth (Hard to beat Lynx.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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:
That's almost all the most seen problems. It takes no extra time to support both browsers.
If you liked that feature you might want to try some of these too: http://www.geocities.com/pratiksolanki/. For example, you might want to enable the feature for Windows too.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
No competing browser is going to gain anything on IE until they can render anything on the web just as well as IE. That includes the ability to render horribly broken HTML. Yes, it sucks. But there's nothing anyone can do about it at this point. Microsoft certainly has no reason to push for cleaner code, and no one else has the market share/leverage to dictate anything about the web anymore. The only group that comes to mind that could have any impact here is the W3C. And from what I understand, they're actually addressing that issue.
XHTML, due to its XML-based nature, is very strict about how documents are parsed. Non-well-formed documents are explicitly denied the ability to render. Even IE obeys that. As for what's out there now, there's not much you can do. I've found that, luckily, there's a pretty strong correlation between quality of site mechanics and quality of site content. Most of what won't render on standards-compliant browsers isn't worth looking at, anyway.
In any case, IE's competitors have taken great strides in the past few years. Just two years ago, there was nothing even remotely close to IE in terms of capability. Remember Netscape 4? Feature sets have become very similar among browsers, and standards adherence is much better than it used to be. Things are improving. Give it time.
Mouse gestures are terrific. I only use the "forward" and "backward" stokes and can't imagine why the reviewer would find those "annoying" and turn them off.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
IE isn't a "broswer of choice." It's the broswer of it-got-forced-down-my-throat-and-I-can't-get-rid-o f-it-without-hosing-my-system for most users and the broswer of it's-there-and-I-am-too-lazy-or-uninformed-to-inst all-anything-else for the vast majority of users not covered by the first part.
Do not touch -Willie
That's fine to advocate your dog using an alternative browser, but nothing's going to gain steam until people like YOU do this kind of advocacy in your company. The reason that many webapps are IE only is because people like YOU and the others at your company aren't making it an issue. Mom and dog are going to use whatever browser is at hand when trying to connect to their bank and 401k, and unless that browser is IE my Mom is going to get shut out. Companies like YOURS are building the fences that keep site IE-only apps because my dog isn't using Opera.
Well gosh, isn't that tidy? You won't be making standardized sites because my Mom still uses IE, and my Mom still uses IE because all the webshops are making IE-only sites. I don't know if this is news to you, but people like you have a lot more influence on these issues than my dog does. When was the last time you asked your manager how long it will be until your timecard app will work with Mozilla?
Is there really anything that IE does that can't be done a different way which is more compatible? Sure Microsoft can make this stuff seem easier, it's part of maintaining mindshare and you sound like you sold your share quite easily. Ever heard of the phrase "tyranny of the majority"? It's what happens when everybody jumps on the bandwagon.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
If you like Links, try Links-2, a fork that adds graphics (X11, AtheOS, framebuffer and SVGALib!) and javascript support.
It seriously rocks. Even the original Links author contributed code to this fork. Finally, a great graphic browser has arrived to the console. I use X much less often now...
The filesystem is the package manager
I hear you. Unless there's a skin for Mozilla that makes it look absolutely identical to IE, and it comes with a rendering plugin that makes it render pages in exactly the same way as IE, then I could never put it on my mom's computer.
I used her computer last weekend to check my mail while visiting. Two hours later my mom is telling me that her computer is broken. Turns out that I had unmaximized the IE window and forgot to maximize it again when I was done. The computer screen looked different to her, and and thought it was broken.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Opera will do form autocompletion, but only using the personal info fields you put into the preferences dialog. So for example your address and email work fine, if you entered them. Put in that first letter or digit and you get the popdown list; hit down arrow and tab off to the next field. Not as automatic as IE but works fine for most purposes.
Which reminds me, Opera's overall keyboard form handling is way superior to IE. Hit tab and you go to the first form field on screen; keep (shift-)tabbing and you navigate only among form fields. IE highlights all sorts of crap when you tab through a page; tab is mostly useless in IE.
The article's page didn't seem to support Opera...at least my regular old v.6 that identifies itself as Opera (non-java). Didn't have a single image load (unlike the cache-brimming pics from /. )
I gotta say, I LOVE Opera.
Only recently, did IE stop that annoying habit of expiring pages so easily--something Opera was always good about avoiding.
In fact, after an OS got totally fubared, I was able to slave the drive and correct the .ini/.cfg files and save EVERYTHING no sweat.
(Now my forlorn MCSE-innerchild kinda sees this as a security loophole but it sure saved me a headache)
I LOVE IT---I lOVE it--I loVe IT!!!
IE runs fine performance-wise if it has a big fast machine all to itself. But when your CPU is heavily utilized it will bog, and it is just slow on an older system. Opera is still quick under low resource conditions. Opening new browser windows is also still quick even with low resources.
As far as stability goes, both Opera and IE are pretty darn stable in my experience, but IE still dies more often.
Yeah, it's such a terrible burden to have to write HTML-compliant code
HTML isn't the problem. It's all the scripting features that are the problem. Even trying to write simple standards-compliant javascript will end up horking most non-IE browsers. IE has an even better implementation of javascript than Sun does.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
So far I have't seen anybody offer points on which browser is faster. I use both of them and it actually seems like Mozilla is faster.
Maybe I'm a version behind or something.
are stable as..
While Moz is still a bit young.
IE is the superior browser, bar none.
Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
Most of the time its heap faster
Just do some tests yourself.
Save a random sample of obviously different sourced web files off the web onto your hard drive, then comparing remdering times, between IE (Mac, Windows, Solaris), the Geckos (Moz being the main one), Konq & the various Operas (like Gecko its cross platform). Most of the time Opera comes 1st.
You see all the others have some codebase that originated from Mosaic. Opera's code's fresh, it has no bloated/hacked legacy Mozaic code in it.
http://www.opera.com/support/supsearch/supsearch.c gi?options=index&name=570
It has links to Opera's privacy policy and a detailed technical description of the ad module.
As for the unique ID, it would naturally keep track of which ads have been downloaded already to avoid too many duplicates.
If Doubleclick didn't spy on their users but were labeled as "bad" by "privacy advocates", it would seem that these "privacy advocates" aren't trustworthy, and that facts don't matter to them.
Clever signature text goes here.
I have no love of M$, but:
- their browser is generating well over 90% of hits on my clients' servers
- their browser _actually works_, unlike piece of shit NS4...as for NS6, it rocks - why? BECAUSE IT CAN RUN FORMERLY IE-ONLY CODE and doesn't crash as often as fuckwad NS 4.x
- pages don't forget their css and take all day to re-render (incorrectly) when you resize in IE and NS6...DHTML works much better allowing me to avoid Flash...
None of this means I ignore NS4; it means I have to write *double* the javascript and sometimes double the HTML to support a dead piece of shit, but I do it. Though I'm making fortune 500 sites on increasingly tight budgets, nearly everything I make is usable in Lynx.
So get off the IE-hating trip, it's irrational. And ferchrissake, what's worse, MS or AOHell?!?! Remember folks, Nutscrape is AMERICA ONLINE now. Are you AOL users?
Jesus fucking christ.
"Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top. " - Edward Abbey
Moz's 'tabbed browsing' is just a nasty hack copy compared to Opera's MDI.
Say you check the same half dozen website every day, well in Opera you can have all 6 together as a multi-home page setup. You start Opera & they all come up together with their own tabs.
...can it parse XML and do XSLT transformations? How about MathML and SVG support?
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Notable is their Opera 7 wishlist, which includes a wish for configurable keyboard shortcuts. (yes please)
I am glad Mozilla has adopted the tabs, there are a few other Opera features that would be well appreciated in Mozilla as well (remembering open windows, gestures, whole page magnification to name the most obvious ones), at least some of these are in the works at mozdev.org. And proper DOM support would go a long ways toward making Opera the ultimate browser.
Oh, and even though this is buried in the thread, that article had one glaring mistake, the Opera download includes the JRE 1.3, not 1.1. Big difference, Java has come quite a ways since 1.1 and it is useful that they have a relatively modern JRE included in the download.
Bleh!
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
I read this far down and to make this on topic, you're completely right about the wierd text sizing. I find that sometimes I'll have to zoom in on pages to read them. At least that zoom option is there for us to use.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
The review could have just said "BEST BROWSAR EVAR" and that would've accomplished the same thing, only it wouldn't have wasted nearly as much of my time.
As much as I would like to see rendering performance benchmark comparisons between browsers, this doesn't seem to be one. I have no idea what kind of benchmarks those are.. do those test the guy's connection to the Internet, rendering performance, caching, CPU speed, or RAM? I think that if one were to test a BROWSER's performance, the webpages need to be stored on a fast hard drive, the memory and disc caches need to be disabled, and you need to use a really fast machine in general. Then, the only problem would be getting some kind of _accurate_ rendering time..
I'm guessing that none of these were actually done with this set of benchmarks. I mean, 8 seconds to render and download a page, where opera takes 3 second?? I tested the website on my relatively underpowered machine using IE4 and it only took a few seconds to display on a cable modem.
There are instructions there for setting up such a page locally on your machine for use with Arachne. You'll want to do this, and not use the default arachne start page. Be sure and use a hardware modem with Arachne, just as you need to when using Linux. btw, the Linux version of Arachne is alpha, and you need to stay with the DOS version, which is very good. Does email really well, too. Arachne works very well with MS-DOS 6.21, but, if you use Caldera Opendos 7.01, you'll have more conventional memory to run Arachne.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
Opera... I've got v5.12 and v6.00 installed at home, and am moderately impressed. It handles HTML and CSS pretty well (at least on most sites), but my major complaint is its JavaScript support.
Opera Lies. Default installs pretend to be IE, adjusting the userAgent string and adding some of IE's DOM properties. This isn't so bad... document.all works, for instance, but try something like document.body.insertAdjacentHTML and things will go belly up rapidly. Things like clipping, dynamic DIV creation and innerHTML are still not implemented -- as of v6 it's still playing catchup to Netscape 4 in these areas. So you need to detect Opera specifically in any advanced project to do workarounds.
A good test to distinguish between browsers used to be for document.createElement, which IE and NS6 support but Opera 5 didn't. For those of you not familiar with the DOM this allows you to create tags anytime and place them in the document. Run this in Opera 5 and 6:
alert(document.createElement);
and you'll find that v6 reports it exists. But it doesn't -- it's simply a blank function, to allow more pages to think they can run in Opera. This is pretty foolish -- if a coder like me decides a page requires that ability to run, why report that it exists when it clearly doesn't?
So in conclusion, hopefully Opear v7 will clear this up and implement proper DOM1 support (that is, beyond getElementById and similar). Until then, I'll browse with IE6 or Mozilla.
(Random note: Anyone know if Konqueror can or has been ported to Windows? I'd be interested to try that too as an alternative... and don't have the HD space for a Linux partition).
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
Well here's the skin. Personally I find Mozilla renders pretty damn close to IE these days.
and so has mozilla (remeber the one discovered by GreyMagic)?
my poijnt is both are great browsers.
but it's a bit manipulative to mention one browsers flaws (I've been with opera since version 4 and those are very rare)
and not mention the other ones
for the record, I'm using mozilla since 0.6 and I have RC3 now. however I still prefer opera.
Math is the weapon!!
Thanks for the link. Nice to know those binaries are still out there - I like Opera 6.03 great, but it could still be very handy to have access to 3.62 - an HTML 3.2 compliant browser that will fit on a floppy and run on win16 could come in very handy.
Win 16 means it's compatible with not just win3.1 but also even very old versions of OS/2, WINE will run it perfectly (I know, I was running it on a dual boot Win 3.11/Slackware box for quite awhile, it was very handy, the same binaries running from the same directory, with the same settings files regardless of OS.)
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Besides Opera there are a lot of others you might want to check into... Replacements for Internet Explorer on every computer platform: MSBC's The Alternative.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
Remember AOL just stared using Mozilla (or was it NS 6/7?) for it's Prodigy users. After that they will likely move over its' AOL base to Mozilla as well, for that exact same reason. to hurt M$.
As someone else pointed out,
/td
/tr
/table
/form
form
table
tr
td input
works.
Not only that, but div tags are an even better way to do layout. Check out my friend's completely table-less site:
http://thatsnice.org/
and check out my table-less weblog:
http://defore.st/
Tables are great for tabular data, but they're not so great for layout.
If it breaks 98%, it's probably not standard.
Show me what non-standard thing you do that can't be done within the standards without breaking a popular browser?
I have a shorter memory. I am stuck at version 5.12. My OS=win95 and 64 MB on a 400 Mhz PIII. version 5.12 is fast. when i tried version 6.0 it became very slow.
Yes, you say, memory is cheap and there are newer OS'es. But this a a company PC. So i keep using opera 5.12 hoping there are no big exploits actually used.
You write:Yes, with version 4, Opera introduced an MDI interface. So what? What does that have to do with tabs? Tabs are what Opera calls "pages", and it didn't appear until version 6.0.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
My favorite alternative is Arachne. It's a fullscreen graphical browser available for DOS and for Linux using SVGAlib/GGI. It supports tables like nothing I've ever seen, is extremely fast, very reliable, and supports ftp/smtp/pop3/etc. I used to even run the DOS version on a 386SX/20 with 4MB ram - a little bit slow, but it ran fine! It does not yet support Java(Script) yet, but JavaScript is in the works. It is among my favorites for Linux, and is the BEST for DOS.
I believe this post has it spot on. What Hyatt is pointing out is a technicality (the window bar probably worked in a similar fashion to tabs) but Hyatt's not wrong - it wasn't tabs.
There is no problem. Apart from the fact that Opera caters for my needs, while IE does not. In fact, both Mozilla and Opera are superior to IE from a usability standpoint.
Clever signature text goes here.
Cexx.org talks about Cydoor. People keep talking about how terrible Opera are for using Cydoor's ad servers. I am pointing out that Cydoor have cleaned up their act.
You then go on about two completely irrelevant things:
1. Business model? Sure, it is a way to distribute the software for free. But it is irrelevant when it comes to spyware.
2. The id issue has been cleared up ages ago. It is not used to track the user, but the ads. Opera does not spy on the user, and this has been proven beyond any doubt.
Lastly, I am not talking about all privacy advocates, but the ones who are either ignorant or lie about what is and what isn't spyware. Spyware has a clear definition: It is software which spies on the user.
So-called "privacy advocates" who don't give a damn about facts should not be trusted, as they obviously have a hidden agenda.
You are not commenting on it because you dare not distance yourself from people who refuse to give people facts, rather than play their own game?
And finally, anyone can see what is sent to the ad servers from Opera. It is carefully documented on their site. If people refuse to even check this, but still go on about how it is "spyware", it says something about them and their inability to use facts rather than speculation and hype.
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Opera is a great browser, when a page doesn't render correctly, it's because the site's webmaster doesn't care about browsers other than IE.
One thing that pisses me off the most is when I'm denied entry to a site because I "don't have IE" and I "Need to install IE to view the site properly".
It's no use trying to argue with an Anonymous Coward who is convinced that Opera is spyware.
despite that I found no sites that that prove that Opera has spyware, this AC will still spread word that Opera is spyware because the unregistered version uses banner ads.
I'm willing to bet that this AC has known (proven) spyware such as Gator, Kazaa, Morpheus, or Radlight DivX Movie Player (at least one of the above).
Opera had a MDI interface well before version 4.
Lets compare the functionality of the 'Window Bar' and the 'Tabbed Browsing'. The window bar is a row of buttons labeled with the title of each open page. When clicked they bring that page to the foreground of the MDI interface. The Mozilla tabs are a row of buttons (they respond to a mouse click) with rounded corners and shading to make them look like a folder tab. They carry the page title and when clicked bring the document to the foreground. Functionally identical.
Now, for the version numbers you are so sure about. Run Windows or X86 Linux? Go to evolt's browser archive and download some old versions of their browser and turn on the window bar.
Now I've finally figured out why all of you think that Opera introduced this in version 6. With version 6, Opera works in SDI mode. Now I'll admit they copied other browser in this, the first version of Netscape I downloaded worked in SDI mode. And, like Mozilla, Opera allows a hybrid of SDI and MDI modes within each SDI interface with a page bar (sound familiar? a row of buttons that allows you to choose the foreground web page?). However, you can't say that Opera copied Mozilla with this feature, people have been complaining about Opera's MDI mode for as long as they've had that feature.
Bleh!
Nonononono. IE has a better interpretation of the DOM. Javascript's pretty standard, and simplistic enough that pretty much everybody gets it right. I also can't see why that would shock you, as the only part of JavaScript that Sun contributed to was the name.
Because. And to be specific, MDI, keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures, disable images with a single keypress, apply user CSS with a single keypress, disable annoying JavaScript popups, size, speed, security, etc. etc. etc. I could go on forever.
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