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

Lynx

[00_NOP]

Will be faster. GIFs are for whimps.

Re:Lynx

[vr]

well.. you can turn off images in Opera. you think that will help? :)

Re:Lynx

[Sarin]

actually I think gifs work under lynx and or w3m. A while back I ran an xwindows session and had to look up a page from a terminal and I saw some gifs/jpeg/png whatever they were in my little xterminal window.

Re:Lynx

[Anonymous Coward]

Install the w3m-img package (for Debian, at least), and you'll get images right in the terminal. Really scared me the first time I saw it... I didn't think that such a thing was possible!

Re:Lynx

[cyborch]

NY Times random login generator there should be more of these, we need to make our lives easier, there is no need whatsoever for nytimes to require my userinformation to display free articles. If they want to display their articles freely why have these login requirements at all?

Re:Lynx

[gmack]

Unfortunatly links caches dynamic pages and that makes a lot of sites completely unuseable.

When I asked the author about this he said it was supposed to do that for speed reasons.

I actually had all 3 of the major text based browsers on my system and between the 3 of them was able to browse most sites.. that was until I gave up and went back to Mozilla after I discovered that a simple php game I wanted to play wouldn't work with any of them.

Re:Lynx

[killmenow]

Well, since Mel is here, why not use

telnet host 80

Re:Lynx

[joss]

Bah, I bet you're a vi (as opposed to ed) man.
wget is the way to do it.

must be ...

[Hank Chinaski]

... a very very slow monday for you to post such a story ... i think everyone slightly interested in opera that reads /. already tested it

Re:must be ...

[xtermz]

Hmm... I guess car magazines shouldnt run reviews of new models, because anybody interested in those new cars already test drove them... and Money magazine shouldnt give any stock advice, because people who buy stocks already know what to buy...
...
..
now do you see how flawed your argument is? So what if "everyone slightly interested in opera that reads /. already tested it ", believe it or not there actually are people who have _never used it_.. ...

Re:must be ...

[nomadic]

I've got to agree with the other guy on this point. Opera's well-known, and they occasionally have stories about new releases and such. To just spontaneously put an intro story like this is a little silly.

To take your car magazine analogy, it would be like Car and Driver publishing a story that assumed its readers never heard of Chevrolet.

Re:must be ...

[rmohr02]

Read http://slashdot.org/~CmdrTaco/journal/8188. It should answer your question.

Re:must be ...

[NanoGator]

"... a very very slow monday for you to post such a story ... i think everyone slightly interested in opera that reads /. already tested it "

One of the biggest hinderances to using Opera today is not the browser itself, but how other sites support it. Anything that makes web-masters more aware of a new popular browser on the horizon is a good thing.

IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[duffbeer703]

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.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[bsartist]

If I'm designing web sites, I design for IE.

They you're part of the problem.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[rknop]

c'mon man. I use Mozilla at home quite a lot and I design web sites (although I do more back end stuff than anything), but let's face the reality of the situation: If I'm designing web sites, I design for IE. Usually, my pages are fairly simple and work just fine in Moz, opera, etc, but I ain't waisting my time making scripts cross-browser compatible, etc, because those folks paying the bill don't care and the customer is always right.

You are part of the problem. You should be designing web pages to the standards, not to IE. Design to the standards, the site will work with IE. Your employer's happy, your customers (even those who don't use IE, or wouldn't if you weren't so ignorant in your web design choices) will be happy, and nobody even has to know that you aren't writing IE-specific stuff.

Given that there are web standards out there, and that IE implements them, I just don't undersatnd this attitude that you must design for IE. What's the problem with you people? Sheesh.

-Rob

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[rknop]

He's right, you know. Banks and large corporations don't give a stuff. It's not viable.

I simply do not understand this argument.

Write standards compliant stuff, it works with IE. (OK, don't push the standards to the edge; use two-year old standards.) Nobody is losing here. The vast majority of your customer base has the functionality it wants. And those other 3% of your customers now also have the functionality they want. What's the problem here? What's the sacrifice? What's the tradeoff? Everybody wins. Your bank administrators paying for the web design are in better shape, because not only does it work for the 96% of their customers who use IE, it works for the 99% of their customers who use any of the relatively up-to-date web browsers. It's better for the bank. Why, why, why is there any rational argument for writing IE-speicific code, other than laziness and ignorance, given this?

-Rob

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Pfhreakaz0id]

Look, I design HTML so it renders in anything, no problem. But the standards are ridiculous and have no bearing on the real world. W3 validators say I can't put form elements in tables!!!! Hello? What do I tell employers/clients when their forms look like sh*t!? Sorry, but even though Netscape, Mozzilla and IE all render this page just fine, It doesn't conform to standards and my ethics won't allow me to code it?

But when I'm doing heavy Javascripting/DOM stuff, I ain't taking the trouble to write several versions of scripts. I always present the option of netscape/mozilla compatibilty, but when they use nothing but IE, they don't care. I'm working on an intranet project right now that has some government employees on Sun's. I said "we need to take the extra time to make this netscape compatible", the team lead says "oh, they have IE on termnial server, we're not bothering!".

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[rknop]

W3 validators say I can't put form elements in tables!!!!

Funny, I've never had the W3 HTML validator (HTML 4.01) complain about this.

-Rob

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Pfhreakaz0id]

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".

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[swfranklin]

Are you serious? It isn't the writing of the code, it's the testing! If you've ever written a major Web-enabled application, you know that nearly as many hours are spent testing as coding... and every platform that you want to try to support means virtually the entire test plan gets run again!

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.

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

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Domini]

PS: Opera is the ONLY standards complient browser.

If you had to make your page compliant, it may not work with most browsers still. (Acording to Opera.com)

Most companies cannot afford the support and testing with ALL browsers.

It's simple economics.

Me.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Darren Winsper]

I dare you to prove that statement. Fiver says you can't.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[rknop]

"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.

That's fine-- what you're doing I have no objection to. If there is "added functionality" for whatever subset of your users, that's no problem. (And, of course, it's best for you to add the functionality for either (1) the majority of your users, or (2) those for whom it is easiest to do so if there is a big difference.)

If the core functionality works in all standard browsers, and the extras you've done for IE don't get in the way of the core functionality working for standards compliant browsers, then great.

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.

Here, however, I sincerely hope that your employer goes messiliy out of business as soon as possible, and that you find a job somewhere else. Yes, this will get modded down as flamebait and troll and everything else, but hell, it's what I think. And, no, I don't believe it will happen, what with the real world being the sad awful place that it is, but it's what I really wish would happen.

-Rob

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[__past__]

Any one who programs their sites with a message saying (and I have seen this many times) "This site is best viewed with Internet Explorer" has to be a novice...

Anyone who talks about "programming" web sites should be banned from publishing anything on the web.

It's the number one clear sign that this person didn't understand the first thing about markup.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[weave]

My bank (centura.com) says on their web site that they don't support NS 6 browsers, but it works just fine. My school's braindead portal program, Pipeline, does a browser sniff and says it won't work with NS 6, but if you use IE to find the logon page, and then go straight to that in Netscape 6 (or mozilla) and hence bypass the browser sniff, the entire site works just fine.

Maybe I should be wondering if there is a conspiracy going on here! :)

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Pfhreakaz0id]

no guys. I'm talking using rows and cells to make the form look the way you want it. Input tags inside td's and tr's... this is apparently a no-no, but works fine in IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera....

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Asprin]

The tabbed feature alone makes the whole process less stressful (I'm not sure why when you can just switch between windows but it just does) even if you have to then check complex things in IE and tweak the lot when you're finished.

IMHO, popups are well contained, and desktop clutter is controlled - you only have to minimize one window instead of fifteen.

Opera also has options to prevent popups entirely, but the controls aren't as robust as Moz (yet), which will also let you prevent child windows from doing *utterly* *ridiculous* things like resizing themselves, etc.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[(void*)]

It only takes extra time if you design with no forethought.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Dwonis]

HTML has been called a declarative programming language...

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Pfhreakaz0id]

Ok, now that I've been modded out of existence and insulted, I'll go over this again, in slightly more forceful language.

Despite the comment by a poster below, I'm "reasonably intelligent" (and have the IQ test to prove it) and certainly not ignorant of standards and fully capable of writing standards-compliant HTML/Javascript. But I don't. Here's the reason why folks: BECAUSE I'M NOT THE ONE PAYING THE BILL! I don't write web pages for me, I write them for folks who pay for them. If I want to do something for fun, or enjoyment, I'll play hockey or do some woodworking or play poker, but I program for a living. To house and feed my family.

You CANNOT tell me it does not cost more to develop multiple versions of scripts to do interactive content. And any monkey with any number of graphical editors can knock out static HTML. You're only paid for dynamic, server side code in something and client-side scripting. It takes more development hours ($) to develop multiple versions of scripts, and more QA test machines and personnel ($) to test those pages on multiple platforms and more support personnel ($) to support those multiple platforms. Thus, many, many folks footing the bill for all this lovely web development chose not to incur those extra costs to support the 3-4% of the user base that doesn't use IE (those were the last numbers I saw). For an intranet/extranet application (where most of my work is done these days), that number declines to less than 1% in most cases.

I guess you could call me immoral for working for such "heavens", but I don't consider browser/computer/OS/hardware platform choice a moral issue. Sue me.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Dwonis]

If the security of your web application depends on browser-specific behaviour, you should not be writing security-sensitive web applications, because you clearly don't know what you are doing. Learn a bit about cryptography and secure programming first.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Pfhreakaz0id]

Well, I see the problem. Most sites I design use a big table to resize page dynamically. So the base of the page is one big table with a menu pane on top, a menu on the left, (both of which are big cells), then big tables inside the main area. So ALL forms are going to be inside a table. Moving the form tags completely outside the table is a pain to read, but I guess I could do it....

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[arkanes]

Totally untrue. If you're using nearly any sort of non-basic javascript or DHTML, you have to write at least two totally different sets of scripts because of the differences in the object model. Thats totally aside from dealing with rendering differences or compensating for bugs in individual browsers. Sure, JS and DHTML and all that may be lame flash crap that shoulnd't be on web pages, but if the customer wants it....

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[NanoGator]

"If I'm designing web sites, I design for IE.

They you're part of the problem. "

I got news for ya: The people who decide what browsers to support aren't the people who program it. They make decisions like this:

"I hear that Internet Explorer has 98% of the market share."

"Oh, that means we can support IE, and then we can skip worrying about other browsers and save time and money!"

"Exactly."

You really want to talk to the Pointy Haired Boss, it's his decision.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[NanoGator]

" I just don't undersatnd this attitude that you must design for IE. What's the problem with you people? Sheesh."

Don't you think that you should be telling his boss this? He's the guy who decides this stuff. Believe it or not, bosses have a way of making sure you have to cut corners to make your deadline. If you read about all the 'quality' jokes in Dilbert cartoons, then you know why it's so ironic.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[bsartist]

It takes more development hours ($) to develop multiple versions of scripts, and more QA test machines and personnel ($) to test those pages on multiple platforms and more support personnel ($) to support those multiple platforms.

That's precisely why standards exist. Why should anyone waste money and time developing multiple browser-specific versions of a site, when a single standards-based site that supports all browsers will work just as well, for far less money?

I don't consider browser/computer/OS/hardware platform choice a moral issue.

Are you trying to tell me that when you create pages that say "you're using the wrong browser, go away," you're not making a value judgment? Rubbish. If you were truly neutral on the issue, you'd let your users decide for themselves what browser to use, instead of expecting them to use your own personal favorite.

Sue me.

If a blind user finds your site to be inaccessible to his screen reader, and decided to take issue with it, that is a possibility. Criminal prosecution is another possibility; in the US at least, discrimination against the handicapped is a crime.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Moonshadow]

The first example is incorrect, but it quite nice when you're trying to eliminate the spaces that automatically surround a form. Quite helpful when you're strapped for screen real estate :)

That said, if you don't HAVE to do it that way, don't. It'll break in some future browser implementation.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Domini]

I agree fully with you! You just don't know it!
:)

Opera may be standards compliant in the same way that most PCs today are more IBM compatible than IBM!

Standards compliant is not really necesarily a good thing! I'd rather use a browser that works...

Go IE!

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[93 Escort Wagon]

Hmmm... last time I checked, IE did support the same W3C DOM that Mozilla/Netscape does. So why should supporting both require multiple versions of scripts? What's done on the server-side is invisible to the client, so that's not an issue; and if you write DOM-compliant code it will still work on IE with no loss of functionality. I haven't seen anything worthwhile that the IE-specific code can do, except for infect boxes.

FYI I also code for a living, but (apparently unlike you) I have access to the various server logs. Last I checked (a few days ago) the split was running 75/25 to 80/20 - and locking out 1/5 of your userbase is NOT smart.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[gol64738]

You CANNOT tell me it does not cost more to develop multiple versions of scripts to do interactive content.

multiple versions? what for? this is the reason why the World Wide Web Consortium exists at all! develop your scripts to written standards, and you'll only have to do one version that will work for every platform.

haven't you noticed that web sites are becoming more and more standards compliant? if you keep scripting for an IE only audience, then soon your web sites will be considered 'broken' and your employer (or customers) will be asking you why their website looks/acts screwy.

trust me, save yourself time and effort now and base your code on existing, internationally recognized standards. the money is the same, and you'll be doing both customers and future developers a favor.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[bobv-pillars-net]

But the first example will allow you to have two tables with no intervening space (in IE) while the second will insert a paragraph-sized block of whitespace after the /form tag.

Of course, the first example is improper tag nesting (the tr tag shouldn't contain anything but td or th) but I do it that way because IE requires it and the other browsers don't complain.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[Bedouin X]

Uhhh... I have never had Dreamweaver generate IE Specific code. A List Apart had an article a few weeks ago on how to make it generate valid XHTML code (by closing BR tags and automatically inserting DTDs).

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[DA_MAN_DA_MYTH]

haven't you noticed that web sites are becoming more and more standards compliant? if you keep scripting for an IE only audience, then soon your web sites will be considered 'broken' and your employer (or customers) will be asking you why their website looks/acts screwy.

Besides there is nothing worse in the world than writing in some form of clientscripting anything that resembles the following line

ns6=(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Gecko")!=-1)?tru e:false

The evils of web development. Customers often ask for a lot to be done, that other browsers cannot provide, or if they can with a lot more hours coding to make them both compliant. Most coporate environments choose to use IE, therefore you make it a specification to develop for IE only. This does save time and money, especially when you are building weblications for their company Intranets that support various things like Remote Scripting.

But here is where the evil-ness comes in. What happens when the sites become broken? Well the first question you ask the customer is well what browser are you using? If they answer something else other than what is listed in the specification, which often is a legal binding contract, then you don't have to support it and if you choose to support it you can make a couple extra bucks consulting. (The constant circular life cycle of web development)

To sum the above in two words: Job Security.

Re:IE often HAS to be your browser of choice

[gol64738]

Most coporate environments choose to use IE, therefore you make it a specification to develop for IE only. This does save time and money, especially when you are building weblications for their company Intranets that support various things like Remote Scripting.

in the case of corporate intranets, you're not coding html to be compliant with w3c standard web browsers. instead, you're coding for a specific web client (IE).

What happens when the sites become broken? Well the first question you ask the customer is well what browser are you using?

if you would adhere to w3c standards when coding, then sites wouldn't become 'broken', in which case there wouldn't be any questions to ask...
is this so hard to understand?

To sum the above in two words: Job Security.

this last sentence truly baffles me. i'm a python and php coder and have a terrific high paying job. all of my linux friends are employed as administrators and/or coders making good money as well. it's this gigantic pool of MSCE's that are either taking the low end jobs or not employed at all...

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).

Re:Opera was Mozilla A Long Time Ago

[ultrabot]

Mozilla is unusably sluggish on every platform I have tried (Win32, OS X, OS 9).

Try the new release candidate (or any release candidate). As fast as IE, and better features (popup killing, tabbed browsing).

Re:Opera was Mozilla A Long Time Ago

[jilles]

I use the mozilla rc3 version. It is nice, but much slower than IE in some things. Particularly opening new windows is slow (I use the quickloader of course). However, popup killing is cool and so is tabbed browsing and bookmark groups.

Other than opening new windows, it is pretty fast. Especially the HTML rendering component has a nice performance. It needs good performance because the entire GUI runs on top of it!

Re:Opera was Mozilla A Long Time Ago

[xtremex]

I don't use windows, but I don't open new windows....I DEPEND on tabbed browsing..I'm completely lost if I don't have it

Re:Opera was Mozilla A Long Time Ago

[sk8king]

I use Opera on tha administrative web interface of our E-mail server because of the keyboard shortcuts and that when you hit the back button, you are instantly BACK. I've tried Mozilla on this server, but it renders a large (x rows)*(2 columns) table with text boxes in each cell VERY slowly....1/2 minute or more and all other browsers I've tried [Opera, Netscape 4.x, Explorer] all seem to render it lightning quick.

I do use Mozilla for all my other browsing though, just because I really like the feel of it and tabbed browsing. Opera is good too for regular browsing, but it just doesn't feel right [crashed a few too many times when I first started trying it I guess]. Basically, I'm using Mozilla because I want it to succeed.

Re:Opera was Mozilla A Long Time Ago

[tshak]

Although Moizlla has caught up recently you are right that Opera has been way ahead for most of the race. Even now, aside from a few features (Mozilla has smarter popup control, for example) I still agree that Opera seems more stable and it is a very lightweight browser. It just doesn't get as much recognition here because it's Closed Source.

Advertisment?

[W2k]

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 ...

Re:Advertisment?

[discogravy]

I'm a rabidly happy opera user, and while the /. article does sound a bit like an advertisement, I can honestly say it wouldn't surprise me at all if it were coming form a very happy user (like myself).

Tabbed (or windowed) browsing, a search box (deafulted to google, but you can change that,) in every window, skinnable, a hotlinks/bookmarks folder with stuff that's actually usefull and gestures; in addition to that you can magnify or resize the entire page...not just pictures or text, but the entire page (sometimes it looks like ass, true, but it comes in usefull when you're tired of looking at really small letters...can't tell you the amount of times I've set /. to 140% and sat a few feet further away from the old 19" monitor.

Opera has definitely made my browsing a much better experience. I happily shelled out 40$ today (even though I've been using the free version for like four months or so, I have been too broke to consider paying real $$ for software that is *quite* functional even with the ads....and a note about that: none of the ads were annoying blinking neon sex ads, either. In fact, if i recall correctly the last ad i saw before I payed up was an ad for User Friendly.

I can see how a user of Moz (and I have all 3 browsers on my machine, and I use all 3 regularly (although I really only use IE for windows update and on the rare occasions in which Opera does not render a page well. So far, this is the only page i've come across that doesn't render well.

Give it a try for a week before you knock it, it's way better than IE and at least as good as Moz (although I like it tons more than Mozilla, personally.)

Re:Advertisment?

[Moox]

"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.

Re:Advertisment?

[Darren Winsper]

Mozilla had tabbed browsing before Opera. See http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/2002_05_1 9_mozillian_archive.html for more details.

As for major advantages:
1) Good DOM support
2) Not crap CSS2 support (Where's IE's and Opera's fixed positioning support?)
3) Image blocking
4) Better cookie management
5) A saner UI. Opera's only good if you really know it.
6) The sidebar (Opera's is nowhere near as customisable)
7) The UI takes up less space than Opera
8) Javascript console
9) DOM inspector
10) XUL

That's just off the top of my head.

Re:Advertisment?

[pb]

Of course there will be trade-offs--there are so many HTML pages out there that it isn't surprising that there is some feature that IE renders faster than Opera.

One (bizarre) area I've found where IE is massively slow, Mozilla is somewhat sluggish, and Opera is blazing fast is when you need to paste a LARGE amount of text into a TEXTAREA. (I mean like 1MB or more) AFAICT, IE is completely CPU-bound here; maybe it has something to do with the implementation of textareas in Windows? Also, Netscape 4 truncates these to 30,000 characters.

Opera Memories

[SynKKnyS]

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. :)

"Wild child" a compliment??

[Creosote]

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.

Re:"Wild child" a compliment??

[bafu]

Sorry, Kiniski, but when I hear "wild child" I think Truffaut (as in his film "l'Enfant sauvage").

Maybe they should have called it the "upstart" web browser. :-P

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.

Re:Choice words for a choice browser

[xtremex]

I remember when I used windows, it woulc crash for no reason whatsoever. Mozilla 1 RC3 hasnt crashed ever. Actually. I havent had mozilla crash in months.

Re:Choice words for a choice browser

[sanity_slipping]

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.

Wow. Are we using the same browser? It sounds like you're talking about IE here (fits well), but context says you're talking about Mozilla.

I currently have 45 tabs open, divided among 10 windows of Mozilla. It hasn't crashed on me in months. With quicklaunch it doesn't take long to load, and the modern skin actually looks pretty cool (a friend once uses the Mozilla widgets for his programs and pages =]).

Mozilla is stable, though it could probably be faster.

Re:Choice words for a choice browser

[Phroggy]

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.

Enable the QuickStart thingie, and change the theme to Modern - that should help with loading and fugliness. And be sure you're running 1.0RC3, or wait another 2 weeks for 1.0.

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... :)

Problem with /. links

[AVee]

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...

Unfortunately...

[jgerman]

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.

Re:Unfortunately...

[rtaylor]

I almost asked how you managed to use IE with anti-aliasing under X -- then I read on to discover that you're actually comparing the underlying systems and not browsers.

Re:Unfortunately...

[Zathrus]

I hear you... sadly.

I used NS 4.x (whatever the last version prior to 4.5 bloat was - I don't recall now) for years. I finally got fed up with the slow rendering, poor rendering, and crashes. So I switched to Opera 5. It was great - fast, worked well, and life was good.

Then I started hitting a bunch of random websites that simply wouldn't work with Opera 5. Sometimes changing it to ID as Netscape worked. Sometimes ID'ing as IE worked. Increasingly it just wouldn't work, period -- usually it was the javascript engine crapping out. And while I will heartily agree that it was probably because the page in question was non-standard, it didn't make an ounce of difference - that page had information I needed and it wasn't rendering under Opera.

So to my everlasting shame I switched to IE. I try to keep it up to date and patched, but I still don't like that it's inherently bug prone.

And I have to admit one other dirty fact - I rather like it. Yes, I miss tabbed browsing from Opera (which took me a bit to get used to, but I do prefer it). I really miss gestures. But I like the auto-completion features (despite an abiding fear that they're not wonderfully secure...), I like knowing that pretty much every page will render as it was designed to (excepting PNG stuff... blearg), and it's fast. Opera was fast too, but I still remember the horrors of NS 4.x.

Yes, once I get my Mandrake box up and running I'll be checking out Mozilla at home -- yes, different platform and whatnot, but I'm more willing to screw with my Linux box than I am a Windows box. Linux is easier to reinstall, and less likely to start getting flaky from DLL hell.

I should also check out Opera 6, since I hear it's mostly fixed the JS issues. C.F. above - my Windows box is stable, and I like it that way.

Re:Unfortunately...

[mike77]

peoples, you're making a slight error in your statements.

Browser of choice = your top choice of what you want to work in.

Browser of necessity = what you're forced to work with even if you don't want to.

slight difference, but it is an important one.

mike

Re:Unfortunately...

[jgerman]

;) Yeah I didn't make that absolutely clear, I really should try Opera under Windows, like I said I like most of the features of Opera, it's only the non-separate process issue that I don't particularly care for, and that's a pretty minor annoyance.

Re:Unfortunately...

[jgerman]

That's a gray area. My browser of choice is IE, I want to work in it because it's easiest on my eyes, and never has any problems rendering any websites. I also want to work in Opera, or another non-MS browser, however I tend to do all of my web browsing under Windows, mainly because I prefer IE for practical reasons. Which admittedly (as someone mentioned above) it is really a platform complaint. Technically I was inaccurate, but since I only use Windows for IE (and sometimes games) it means the same to me.

What is Opera's competitive edge?

[Orangedog_on_crack]

If any "alternative" browser is going to succeed it has to have some kind of edge over IE. This is only MY opinion, but unless Opera, Mozilla and the like are going to be a serious contender for the MS desktop, it will have to offer some more than just being faster. MS has a BIG advantage....IE is free (even though there is the "making a deal with the Devil factor involved with IE).

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.

Re:What is Opera's competitive edge?

[sffubs]

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.

Re:What is Opera's competitive edge?

[jeddak]

To this customer, Opera beats IE in that it provides:

• stability
• speed
• nice interface (even w banner ads!) - and lovely TABS TABS TABS
• configurability - the Preferences window is very detailed
• cross-platform experience - I run it on Windows, Linux, and MacOS X.

Re:What is Opera's competitive edge?

[Zathrus]

easy download management including pausing and resuming

Opera's ftp client sucks (but who uses ftp in browsers anyway?).

Er, so which one is it? Good or bad?

I'd bet that most people use ftp via web client now, unless you have needs for things like automatic FTPing on a scheduled basis or often do FTPing (since browsers are usually stateless and don't keep the control connection open - problematic with ftp sites that are hard to login to).

Re:What is Opera's competitive edge?

[xtremex]

Why can't you just install Opera on your work pc? Or do you have one of those jobs where the users can't install anything on their pcs? (That in my opinion sucks. Since in my job, I work better with my own tools. You can't tell a carpenter to use certain tools that YOU want him to use..makes no sense to me.)

Re:What is Opera's competitive edge?

[sharkey]

...are there any other "features" that it offers that IE doesn't, or at least doesn't do as well as Opera?

Opera renders www.microsoft.com MUCH faster than IE.

Re:What is Opera's competitive edge?

[NanoGator]

Sadly, stability (or lack of) is Opera's weak point. Though it's stable enough to be tolerable, I've had some rather inopportune crashes that I just don't have in IE. My girlfriend has it worse. Hers crashes quite a bit more. (Although her machine is an 'E-Machines.. heh) She lost all her bookmarks, though. One thing IE does right is it stores it's favorites as a bunch of individual shortcuts, makes it lots harder to trash them that way. Once they figure this stability issue out, I'll plunk down my $40 for it.

However, Opera does recover pretty nicely in most cases. It'll let me get my lost page back after a crash. Pity, IE doesn't do that.

Re:What is Opera's competitive edge?

[cpeterso]

I think Opera makes money from supporting embedded platforms that are scared to use GPL Mozilla code. For example, I think Opera supports the Symbian embedded OS.

Re:What is Opera's competitive edge?

[xtremex]

Oh, I agree with you 100%, but when an IT department tells you what IT geeks must use, that's when it becomes ridiculous.
I've had a job like that. They thought by installing Linux on MY personal laptop and hooking it into their network would ruin their netowrk. I kid you not. This was what the Sr Network Admin told me. Not a very enlightened response from their "lead" net admin.

Opera vs. K-Meleon on older MSW computers

[afflatus_com]

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.

Re:Opera vs. K-Meleon on older MSW computers

[evilviper]

I tried K-Meleon (current version) up against Mozilla 1.0 rc2.

K-Meleon starts up faster (obviously) but is significantly slower loading each page. (Just for completeness' sake, I was using the "Early Blue" theme.)

Mozilla has tabs (which behave much better that Opera's), and is even MORE FREE than K-Meleon.

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

[radja]

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

"Funny, IE isn't my browser of choice ... "

[telstar]

Funny, IE isn't my browser of choice ...

• Welcome to the minority...

Re:Opera isn't complient

[rknop]

What's the point of using another browser anyway with this being the case.

How about "IE is not available for the platform I choose"?

How about "I don't want to open my computer up to the Microsoft security flaw of the week"?

How about, "The web was designed for interoperable standards, and web designers who know what they're doing should design accordingly, thus making it unimportant exactly which browser you're using so long as it's a current one"?

How about "People who say that designers have to design IE-only sites are bloody clueless and lazy because real standards are out there which IE even works with, and there's no need to kiss Microsoft's butt on this one"?

-Rob

Re:IE browser of choice

[telstar]

I don't want to have to remember O on Windows, and L on mozilla

• Umm... I hate to state the obvious, but it looks like you already DO remember O on Windows and L on mozilla.

Features IE will never have

[Zapdos]

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.

Re:Opera isn't complient

[WebMasterJoe]

The choice I refer to of cource being the choice of web designers.

Actually, the browser of choice for a knowledgable web designer is "as many browsers as you can install." I've got Netscape Nav 4.72 and 6.2, Opera, and IE 6 on my machine at work and I use Konqueror (both the KDE 2 and 3 versions) at home. If I had a mac I'd test on that as well, but I don't.

As far as having to use IE when you have trouble browsing sites, blame that on MS - their browsers are more forgiving with bad data (such as missing table tags or quoted values in style sheets). Some web designers don't program their pages correctly and rely on IE to jump to the correct conclusions. I bet that if you were to put the web pages in question through an HTML validator, you'd get more than a few errors. The solution should be to properly code pages, but with Front Page and MS Word coding so many sites, I don't think that will happen.

Personally, I have become a big fan of Konqueror for KDE 3 (I don't remember if it is also version 3). At work, I now use Netscape 6.2. If you let Netscape run its little app in the systray, it loads just as quickly as IE (which makes sense, since IE uses a similar tactic but doesn't let you turn it off). And you don't have to deal with stupid IE extensions (like page wipes and image resizing).

Features

[eddy]

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)

Re:Features

[eddy]

A couple quickies - does Opera now offer the same kind of form entry memory IE does

It says so, but I've never used it.

username/password entry memory (which IE manages to do the right thing and ASK you if you want to remember new ones every time instead of globally doing yes or no)?

Sounds terribly insecure. Opera does not do that, and I wouldn't want it to.

Has Opera improved on it's popup disabling, or is it still all or none?

Yes.

(all or nothing. Yes, I wish they would give us more options)

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.)

choice?

[mattdm]

I think you're confusing "choice" with

• "It came installed on my system and it hasn't occured to me to look for something else."
• "It came on my system and I'm used to it now so I actually kinda like it."

and of course

• "What? I'm not using Internet Explorer. I'm using AOL."

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.

Lynx users try links

[rwa2]

I discovered links while browsing through dselect a few years ago, and it's pretty awesome for a text mode browser: It supports tables, frames, and will even pass mouse clicks through when run through an xterm... it's almost exactly like using a GUI browser with the graphics off! I'm really surprised more people don't know about it by now.

Hmm, from freshmeat, it looks like the new version even has graphics support now :/ . Oh well :P . Give it a shot!

dillo was the only graphical browser I could ever get running on a 486/33Mhz with 16MB RAM (mozilla 0.8 ran, but swapped too much to be usable). Actually, come to think of it, Opera (5.x?) didn't work too bad either.

Re:Lynx users try links

[stevey]

I use links in preference to W3m and Lynx nowadays - but I really wish it had a different name:

"So you're using Links then?"

"Yeah - I've been using lynx for years.."

"No not Lynxs - Links..."

What's the point of voicing my opinion?

[Domini]

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.

Re:What's the point of voicing my opinion?

[interstellar_donkey]

You're not alone.

Up until mid '99, I was a die hard anti-MS Netscape/Opera user. Finally I tried out IE.

The thing that got me was, it works. It worked well. Netscape has been behind the curve since it's 4.x release.

About every 6 months I'll try the latest netscape/opera, and recently mozilla. While they may be faster (on paper), IE still seems to work just fine for me.

While I still dislike MS the company, I do like IE the software package. After running MSIE on XP for four months, the browser has never crashed on me, and continues to earn my loyalty.

For a competetor to get me to switch, they can't be 'just as good', they have to be signifigantly better.

Re:What's the point of voicing my opinion?

[Explo]

I have seen all the browsers you mention crashing several times, including IE. Congratulations for your extremely good luck. All of them have also misbehaved at some sites. There's no such thing as a perfect browser, thus it's good that there's choice to find the browser that causes the least amount of annoyance for your particular browsing preferences, be it Mozilla, IE, Opera or something else.

Re:What's the point of voicing my opinion?

[Domini]

You don't see IE have trouble for sites because people code around it's trouble spots.

All the more reason for me to use it then. Was this your point?

The same mime/tree/forest point. If it does not crash for me, it's stable.

Re:What's the point of voicing my opinion?

[Domini]

If people try so hard to make sites work flawlesly with IE, all the more reason to use it.

Besides, it's rarely the browser that crashes, but the plugins or other 'dirty' applications with messy DLLs.

It can even be bad video drivers or a buggy version of DirectX.

I've been told that IE5.5 sp2 is quite stable compared to earlier ones.

With that said:

I've BOUGHT Opera - I try and use it out of principle... But I still NEED (work related) to use IE, and I do grudgingly admit it's superiority.

Re:What's the point of voicing my opinion?

[Domini]

End-Users do not care about HTML standards.

Since most of the users using browsers are these, they dictate the average measure of standards.

The "better" browser browses the best.

If most people had Beta, and more Beta tapes were available, and Beta had better policies with regards to licencing development specs and marketing, then they would have been the best. But they were not because they could not play the majoity of media out there.

Thus the "best" machine would be the one that made the average man happy, and not the perfectionist superior technologist.

I personally always support the underdog (especially if it is technologically superior) thus I was one of the Beta idiots, an Amiga nut and a Linux luser.
;)

I also OWN Windows Commander, Opera, Agent and Eudora. I've also used Cello, NCSA Mosaic, Mozilla, Lynx, konqueror, Neoplanet, Netscape and IE.

Make what you want, I guess.
I just tried to play devil's advocate... especially if there could be a bit of truth to it...

Re:What's the point of voicing my opinion?

[Domini]

Actually I have found problems in other browsers (Opera 6.03 and Mozilla 1.0) where certain pages display partly the first time, and then displays diferently on a refresh...

This is not a sign of a different implementation of an HTML standard... It's just plain a bug.
See this site for an example.

You have made a valid point, but said nothing that could convince me. Have you seen the IE codebase to make such an assumption? It would seem you are besing better on the fact that IE cannot (will not by MS) be split from the OS and that they do not want to give it away for free and that the source code is not open source. THESE are the reasons I would not want to use it either, but not reasons I would think it inferior anyway...

Also the fact that it has so many security flaws stem from feature overextension... something the other browsers lack. And even though you and I may not NEED these features, many people DO.

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

[NineNine]

1.5%? How stupid! I'd guess there's more people still using netscape 2.0 than 1.5%, and definatly 20% using some version of nestcape 4.x or earlier. You can't run a website well with such stupidity, and you might ought to get training from one of those "Open Source fanatics". Sorry, you're just being dumb.

You're guessing.

I'm looking at server logs with hundreds of thousands of users a day.

Now who's "just being dumb"?

Re:Opera isn't complient

[Domini]

'knowledgable' being thr operative word.

Your lack of support for Mac is to a large degree the view of most web designers. They are not as literate as they could be, thus they only support that which they know. Hence not Linux.

Perhaps Konqurer should become available for thr win32 platform as well?

Hmmm..

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

[barzok]

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.

Sandscript?

[Sinistar2k]

With Opera Unicode allows users to read pages from literally any language, except Sandscript. Then again, last time I checked I heard that language is dead!

Is the reviewer referring to sanskrit here or is there actually a dead language called sandscript?

Re:Sandscript?

[ahfoo]

Same here. I was really put off by that. My Mom spent several years studying Sanscrit at UCB in the 60s and I've always been proud of the fact. Oh well, shit happens but that with the non-mention of Mozilla was enough to give up on it.

Re:Sandscript?

[Fiver-rah]

Sandscript: the language *so* dead that nobody, except possibly the reviewer, has heard of it.

Re:Sandscript?

[NanoGator]

"Is the reviewer referring to sanskrit here or is there actually a dead language called sandscript? "

It's the primary written language of Jawas. Unfortunately, it all but disappeared after the Empire instituted the death penalty for anybody that didn't speak 20th century Earth English.

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

[tshoppa]

definatly 20% using some version of nestcape 4.x or earlier

You aren't interpreting your website logs appropriately if you come to this conclusion.

Many of the web crawlers advertise themselves as being early Netscape/Mozilla clients in the HTTP request; if you are including these in your figures as "real people using a browser" you're going to come up with horribly skewed figures like your own. Most decent server log analysis tools (such as the ever-present Analog) do a pretty good job of removing bots from the "real browsers" totals. See the Analog ROBOTINCLUDE option documentation for starters.

Re:No, but OPERA identifies itself as IE 5

[veddermatic]

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

Uh, No.

[crisco]

I'm sorry, but Mr Hyatt is incorrect in asserting that Mozilla had tabbed browsing before Opera.

He claims that "Opera only added tabs in its newest version after Mozilla had them already in its trunk builds."

Opera introduced its 'Window Bar' (buttons for each open within the MDI) with Opera 4, wich came out in spring of 2000. Around that time Mozilla was at M14 and the first Netscape 6 Preview was being released. Neither of those had the equivalent to Opera's Window Bar. The first mention of Mozilla 'tabbed browsing' I can find is a year later, contained in this post to the Mozilla newsgroups. Implementation didn't happen until late summer or fall of 2001, possibly being beat to it by the Multizilla project.

Of course NetCaptor (A shell for the MSIE HTML rendering component) had them back in '99, maybe even earlier.

Mouse gestures... Annoying?!

[levik]

The comment on the reviewer's part about the mouse gestures being annoying pretty much invalidated the whole review for me. I am using Opera full time, and find genstures indispensible to the extent that when forced to use IE/K-Meleon due to Opera's rendering issues, I constantly find myself trying to "go back" by right-dragging the mouse to the left.

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).

Re:Mouse gestures... Annoying?!

[Ian Peon]

The way that it seperates the documents is by an overhead tab system that can be easily modified to be placed on the bottom, top or side of the browser. Overall this is a very cool and unique feature...

Need to do a little more homework there sluggo.

It also looks the editor (if any) was asleep at the wheel. After showing that all the sites he visited rendered well, he states:

For the most part I could not find a site that didn't completely blowup in Opera.

Re:Mouse gestures... Annoying?!

[sean23007]

I completely agree with you. The mouse gestures are an incredible feature for a web browser. I have grown so accustomed to using them that, whenever I am forced to go back to another browser for whatever reason, I too right-drag to go back. It even happens in Windows Explorer!

You're right that the author invalidates himself by saying that they are an annoyance, but he further invalidates himself by writing such poor English. I was supremely disappointed by this article: it just doesn't do Opera justice.

Re:Mouse gestures... Annoying?!

[jesser]

If gestures annoy the reviewer, what makes you think they won't annoy a normal user? You can reasonably say "This reviewer seems to be writing for users who won't spend an hour tweaking prefs in order to get a browser that doesn't annoy them, and I'm not that kind of user". But you're not justified in calling the review invalid.

By the way, when I tried Opera 5, I accidentally triggered a gesture while trying to activate a context menu. I had barely moved the mouse while clicking. Even though I knew I could disable gestures, that annoyed me. It also made me suspicious that there would be more annoyances like that if I continued to use Opera.

Re:Mouse gestures... Annoying?!

[levik]

I think that it's a job of any reviewer to spend an hour playing with a program's settings. I would be fine with it if he said: "The gestures were confusing and annoying at first, but if you give it a little practice they become an indispencible part of navigation." (Which really is the case). The fact that he found himself not using them, and disabled them, hardly makes them annoying.

Besides, he completely fails to mention that Opera informs you the first time you use gestures, and, as I recall gives you an option to disable it right then and there.

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:Don't read the news?

[pclminion]

In addition to the bazillion other ways people have already mentioned, you can also just right-click on the address entry field and select "Clear".

Re:Don't read the news?

[xrayspx]

I should have been more specific. I wanted to clear the URL field without touching my keyboard I have multiple PCs on my desk, and often I will have my left hand on the keyboard for one of the PCs and my right hand on the mouse for the other.

You're absolutely right, that works, but a "Clear URL Field" button is far more convenient.

Re:Opera isn't complient

[xtremex]

Actually, I like Konq, but until they get tabbed browsing, I just can't use it..I'm too dependant on tabbed browsing.

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.

Opera probably spams.

[Xaltlee]

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.

Re:Opera probably spams.

[FFFish]

I have visited Opera's HQ. I have talked to the people who manage it and who program there. They consistently and completely impressed me with their professionalism, vision, ethics, friendliness, and honesty. Every last man and woman there were among the best people I've met in the past thirty-five years.

I will stake my *LIFE* on this: that Opera *does not* practice spamming, nor does it sell email addresses.

In short, I believe you must have submitted your email address to someone else. What you describe is simply impossible.

Re:Opera probably spams.

[FFFish]

It's a small and extremely busy company, with an absolute minimum of extraneous personnel. If you haven't received a reply, then you may well have slipped through the cracks. I can't imagine responding to someone who's claiming they do something they don't do is a high-priority ticket!

Re:Dillo is much faster (and lighter)

[xtremex]

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.

one more thing

[AirLace]

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.

Re:one more thing

[maxume]

Check out the forums. They all have a bit of recent activity. Apparently there are some issues with embedded mozilla, like no file save dialog, and problems with https, so they are waiting for those bugs to get fixed, before they release a version based on the latest code base.

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

[sporktoast]

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.

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

[xtremex]

I just went to your site on my Linux box using mozilla ..I didnt have any problems.....

The funny thing here is...

[gamorck]

That all these people seem to feel Opera is so teribbly secure - yet not a one of them know about this major security hole discovered last week:

http://www.securiteam.com/windowsntfocus/5YP0O20 75 S.html

Being that this consitutes a majorly braindead security hole (allowing the value attribute on a file field to be filled in by the webmaster?!?!?!) I think its safe to say that all browsers in existence are lacking on the security front.

J

Re:The funny thing here is...

[hkmwbz]

Why don't you post the URL to the people who discovered the hole?

http://sec.greymagic.com/adv/gm001-op/

You could also quote this from their report:

Opera was informed on 15 May 2002 and confirmed our findings. A day later, in the evening of 16 May 2002, Opera informed us that the vulnerability was fixed and committed to Opera's own version control system.

On 27 May 2002, Opera released version 6.03, which addressed this issue.

Opera has been extremely responsive and quick to understand and patch this vulnerability. They have shown that they truly do take security seriously.

The hole was fixed very quickly after it was discovered. Your comment is a bit out of place, unless you are really trying to say "all software in existence is lacking on the security front".

My Top 5 Favorite Opera Features

[spike2131]

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...

It's the lemming factor...

[gosand]

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.

MODERATORS: Mod the parent UP

[Dixie_Flatline]

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.

You don't need the URL field!

[Dixie_Flatline]

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.

Re:You don't need the URL field!

[xrayspx]

Awesome. That feature takes care of one of my major gripes. Joy!

Thanks

x

Mozilla vs Opera

[Fweeky]

> Mozilla had tabbed browsing before Opera

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:

1. Full MDI and SDI tabs, whichever your taste (I can't live without MDI :)
   
2. Document/User modes, allowing you to override stupid designers who think 11px fonts on dark backgrounds are the height of readability.
   
3. Better printing support (less clipping).
   
4. Full screen and projection modes.
   
5. Standard OS widgets, not custom, slow, misbehaving ones.
   
6. Not an application platform for a load of junk you're never going to use.
   
7. More configurable network, cache and security settings, without resorting to user JavaScript files.
   
8. Complete page zooming support; not just text size zoom with a tendancy to break layouts.
   
9. Doesn't also try to be a complete email/HTML editor/IRC client/tea lady.
   

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.

The redundant web page design summary.

[Maul]

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.

Couple of advantages

[ChrisWong]

There are a couple of Opera features that make it hard for me to switch to any other browser:

• Firstly, it pioneered mouse gestures: I'm so used to navigating with the mouse (for example, back/forward through history) that it's annoying to use a browser without this feature.
  
  
• Secondly, no browser on the planet seems to whip out pages from cache anywhere as fast as Opera. They just seem to snap onto the screen, (again) making browsing through history a breeze.
  
  
• Finally my favorite: the little author/user mode toggle button. I can't stand the font/color choices on many pages, but a single click of the mouse instantly makes a web page readable in Opera. Not relevant to the IE/Opera debate, but this is a great feature for Linux users as TT fonts often come up too tiny on many web sites.
  

Re:Couple of advantages

[evilviper]

* Finally my favorite: the little author/user mode toggle button.

Amen. That is the SINGLE feature I wish Mozilla had. Besides that single feature, Mozilla 1.0 is better than Opera IMHO.

Most pages fonts and colors (and CSS) are fine, and overriding them seriously impairs navigation. (i.e. Slashdot completely black with light grey text, the green bars, different coloration of heading information, all is defeated).

However, too many morons use white backgrounds with black text! Just because books are white with black doesn't mean it works with a huge monitor. Reading a PDF or HTML doc with black on white colors on a monitor is like trying to read the label on a flourscent light bulb !!! That is the kind of travesty that user mode fixes, and that's the single reason Opera got the registration cash out of me. Now, I use Mozilla, and pine for the user mode option...

Besides that, I miss nothing. Odd-ball bookmarks, uncustomizable main toolbar, cluttered menus, strange categorization of options (javascript is under programs eh?), and most importantly, Mozilla goes anywhere I want it to. Any system can have Mozilla ported to it (although the OpenBSD developers are doing their damnedest to prove me wrong).

All right, I know this is nit-picking

[argStyopa]

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.

Whatta Maroon

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

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!

Opera works well, except on some secure pages

[hether]

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.

Re:Opera isn't complient

[scrytch]

How about, "The web was designed for interoperable standards

The web was designed in order for CERN to make papers available on demand. To this end, a hack on SGML was created that wasn't compliant with any SGML "standard", and a whole new protocol was invented (HTTP/0.9), one that could be implemented in literally minutes.

There might be standards now, and they're good ones [1]. The web most certainly was not "engineered"
with such standards in mind. It's a pull model for arbitrary MIME docs. Get used to the fact that it's not all text/html.

Oh, and "bloody clueless and lazy" might get your fire and brimstone rocks off, but it pretty much shuts off rational discourse. Not that it appears you wanted that...

[1] ones that Opera, I might add, has one of the worst available implementations of (read: DOM. It's read-only for crissakes).

List of other browsers (200+)

[gnasby]

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.

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

[Lumpy]

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...

Re:IE browser of choice

[thunderbee]

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?

YES

[Bastian]

/. 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.

Opera has lots of missing standards support

[starvingartist12]

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.

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

[kawika]

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.

Free opera is loaded with spyware

[macdaddy357]

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.

Re:Free opera is loaded with spyware

[hkmwbz]

Quit spreading FUD. Opera has documented every aspect of its ad implementation:

http://www.opera.com/support/supsearch/supsearch.c gi?options=index&name=570

Not only that, but anyone with a brain (and a packet sniffer) can analyze the traffic and see that they are telling the truth.

And the code in Opera which handles ads is 100% written by Opera's own people. It uses no external code.

And while they are partnered with Cydoor, that's no problem since Cydoor has "cleaned up its act considerably", according to this site:

http://www.cexx.org/cydoor.htm

So get your facts straight please.

Re:Free opera is loaded with spyware

[splitfyre]

There is an option within the preferences section in Opera that allows you to specify what type of advertising you want it to serve up. However you can also choose to refuse those ad popups as well from the File menu in Opera.

Re:Intentional Blocking of Opera by Sites

[SystemFork]

You're insane, just hit F12 in Opera then select, "Identify as MSIE 5.0"

From that point on, any webservers you visit will think you're using IE. It's a great way to get around uppidy webmasters who shut other browsers out completely before testing to see if they actually are broken.

You just don't get it

[D_Gr8_BoB]

wget -O -

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

[nick_davison]

"Write correct, clean code and you won't have any trouble with Mozilla-based browsers."

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.)

FUD

[hkmwbz]

You should really take the time to get educated about this. Not only is Opera's ad implementation carefully documented, several independent people have analyzed the traffic between Opera and the ad servers. No spying.

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.

Re:Uh, No, still wrong

[Arker]

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.

standards aren't enough

[Tumbleweed]

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?

Re:IE browser of choice

[Junks Jerzey]

As most people use software that adheres to specific IE compatibility, which relies on closed protocols and standards, then yes you can write this one off on Microsoft leveraging their position.

No, no, no, you're missing the point. If you create a web page that follows the standards to the letter, then there's a much better chance that it will display correctly in IE than in Mozilla and Opera. We're not talking about closed standards at all.

A few points:

[Andy Dodd]

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)

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. :), is up there at the top, WAY above NS/Mozilla or IE.

Designing sites which work in Mozilla and IE

[Nicopa]

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:

• Both support document.getElementById, but IE4 only support document.all. If you care about the old IE you must use a tiny function which will try both.
• Event handlers in Mozilla get the event object in the argument instead of window.event. So you need to do function handler(event) { if(!event) event=window.event;
• Mozilla is very tidy and bind objects only where they need to be. IE binds objects everywhere, so something like window.myForm won't work in Mozilla, you should the old and standard way.

That's almost all the most seen problems. It takes no extra time to support both browsers.

Hidden Mozilla Prefs

[mr3038]

copy the link and middle click ANYWHERE

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.

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

[rhizome]

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.

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

[Arandir]

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.

the latest Opera's

[DABANSHEE]

are stable as..

While Moz is still a bit young.

Eh

[DABANSHEE]

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.

Some of us have to work in the *real* world

[HelpfulPete]

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.

Opera had MDI befoe Moz was born

[DABANSHEE]

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.

yeah but...

[grappler]

...can it parse XML and do XSLT transformations? How about MathML and SVG support?

Re:Opera isn't complient

[Codifex Maximus]

• How about, "The web was designed for interoperable standards
  1. The web was designed in order for CERN to make papers available on demand. To this end, a hack on SGML was created that wasn't compliant with any SGML "standard", and a whole new protocol was invented (HTTP/0.9), one that could be implemented in literally minutes.
  2. I believe the writer you are responding to meant that HTML was designed for platform transparency. Your reply is nothing more than a dissertation on history.

Oh, and "bloody clueless and lazy" might get your fire and brimstone rocks off, but it pretty much shuts off rational discourse. Not that it appears you wanted that...

• True, not a very edifying statement - "bloody clueless and lazy" but nevertheless true. Coding specifically for IE and disregarding the standards is nothing more than being "bloody clueless and lazy" - not to mention being bloody irrational; after all, you are shutting out potential users who are following standards.

This reply constucted using standard HTML.

Best Opera Resource

[wideangle]

SearchEngineWorld's Gigantic Opera Resource

Notable is their Opera 7 wishlist, which includes a wish for configurable keyboard shortcuts. (yes please)

Re:Uh, No, still wrong

[crisco]

Hmm, you could be right, I didn't start using Opera a great deal until v5 came out, although I did use it some previously. When I originally wrote this up I used the evolt browser archive to check my claims, unfortunately they don't have the 32 bit installer for 3.6. v3.51 didn't seem to have it but I wasn't feeling all that great when I was playing with the old versions so I could have missed it. A check of Google Groups seems to indicate spring of 2000 for the first mention of a Window Bar. Of course, it's first incarnation could have been named something else and have been overlooked in my search.

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.

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

[Codifex Maximus]

I have a question...

If Opera users are changing the reported ID of their browser... doesn't this also effect the usage standings as reported in the blogs?

My guess is that Opera usage is largely unreported.

Yes, you can put form elems in tables

[tmoertel]

W3 validators say I can't put form elements in tables!!!! Hello?

You can put form elements in tables. What you probably did was hose up the element nesting by placing your FORM inside of your TABLE. If you look closely at the validator output, it will tell you where you hosed your nesting.

If you inspect the HTML 4 Transitional Document Type Definition, you would see that FORM elements may contain %flow; content -- which includes both inline elements and block elements like tables. So if you want to do it right, place your TABLE inside of your FORM, not the other way around, and then place the form elements inside the appropriate table elements.

Easy as pie.

Re:Browser of Choice?

[White Roses]

Yes, well, I suppose I deserved the Flamebait rating. Shouldn't post angry.

But really, what I meant was that IE for the most part is just there. I don't think most users actively choose it.

Re:Not that anyone will read this far down...

[hether]

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.

Re:I use Opera

[Wonko42]

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.

Mozilla does this too. In fact, I think even IE does this, if I remember correctly.

What a horrible review

[Wonko42]

Opera is great and all, but Jesus Christ on a toasted bagel. Why did this review get posted? It was written by a moron who seems to think "Sandskrit" is a language and $62 Canadian is worth more than $39 US. What's more, the review tells us nothing new about Opera and the pageload "benchmarks" seem to have been done by a guy holding a stopwatch.

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.

benchmarks..

[skt]

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.

Opera Lies

[gusnz]

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).

Re:Uh, No, still wrong

[Arker]

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.)

Other Alternative Browsers

[PRickard]

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.

Have you actually read the specs?

[Crag]

As someone else pointed out,
form
table
tr
td input
/td
/tr
/table
/form

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.

Re:Have you actually read the specs?

[danox]

http://thatsnice.org has a big table around the whole page. plus it doesn't validate as the XHTML 1.0 Traditional it claims to be.

my site http://brownplanet.netforce.com.au is an example of purely tableless site. and it validates as XHTML 1.0 strict!

Re:Have you actually read the specs?

[Crag]

bah, Christian must have changed it since the last time I checked. Once more I must savor the taste of fresh foot.

What standard are you talking about?

[Crag]

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?

5.12 Re:Opera Memories

[leuk_he]

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.

Please mod this parent up...

[Sits]

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.

Troll?

[crisco]

But I'll bite anyway, to keep some basic facts straight.

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.