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

[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

[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.

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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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).

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.)

"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.

Choice words for a choice browser

[Flakeloaf]

We're forced to use Mozilla at work 'cause IE has more holes than a Peter North fan club. On a Win32 platform it's unstable with many instances running (I suspect they're all the same process), crashes for no apparent reason, takes forever to load and is fugly.

I can't blame it for crashing when it tries to load certain sites, since many people are obviously using Bill's Malformed HTML to generate IE-friendly (read "IE-Only) web pages.

Even with the kind of vulnerabilities that made me want to dump IE in the first place and flaky Javascript support, I'd still use Opera if I could.

Unfortunately, MS is the VHS to everyone else's Beta. Inferior technology, bloody annoying to use, but way better market permeation. Bleh.

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

[TheLocustNMI]

for upwards of 80% of the Earth it is, and frankly, it's getting bigger. I work for a web-development company, and the last couple of projects that we have designed and developed have revolved around IE, and IE only -- why is this, you say? Well, because of certain things that MS has built into IE, and IE's overall "acceptance" by commercial customers. Granted, most of these projects are intranet applications, but it makes no difference! To the consumer, more and different browsers are a "good thing", but to web-development companies, and the folks who write applications for a broad number of people, one browser is a "good thing". Integration with MS services (like that god-awful MS-only authentication thing), better embedded plugin support, and the fact that many dotNET web-apps *may* have a hard time running correctly in Moz and Operea all contribute to smaller-mindshare browsers low acceptance ratings.

Now, before i denegrate my ENTIRE character, let me say that I am a staunch anything-other-than-IE-and-mostly-Mozilla supporter. I use Mozilla 95% of the time (and mostly IE when i have to A) fill out my timecard on our IE-only intranet at work -or- B) pay my Capital One card :) ).

So, what can we do to help? Advocacy. Get folks using Moz or Opera -- your mom, your brother, your sister, your dog, whatever. Brief them on how Moz came to be -- it's free as in speech, ma! Or, we could just wait for MS to cock-up IE... :)

What 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?

[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?

[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.)

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.

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: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_.. ...

What Opera doesn't do...

[Anonymous Coward]

DHTML. It has huge dom issues. It's not a bug, it's simply an non-implemented feature. Check out the Dynamic Threading on kuro5hin.org in Opera. It doesn't work, not because of bad coding, but because Opera simply doesn't support all the stuff necessry to make it work.

Opera also has some strange negative text-indent behaviors (you have to double it!), and a few other odd quirks (but every browser has those.) It's definately better than IE in most things (24 bit PNG transparency rules!), but my browser is Mozilla. (Oh, and Mozilla is also free.)

Opera vs Crazy Browser

[Mr_Silver]

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

However, I have found Crazy Browser which is a replacement for IE using the IE rendering engine.

In fact thats what I'm using now and for a 690k download, it's lovely. Full support for websites (even those with iffy HTML), tabbed interface, Windows XP theme support, popup filter and a really nifty feature which indicates when pages have changed in your links list.

It's also free (as in beer). Having access to the source doesn't bother me (and 90% of the population) in the slightest since I wouldn't understand a word of it or really look at it.

I appreciate that this is a geek site and therefore most people won't touch IE with a barge pole but if you do like IE (and I do) but want tabbed browsing then check it out.

As far as I'm concerned, it does everything that I'd use in Opera, so therefore I don't really see the point in paying for Opera. Granted they've done a fine job - but it's just not for me.

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: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.

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).

Don't read the news?

[xrayspx]

Go to CNN.com with Opera 6/Linux. It's a shame.

I use Opera 90% of the time under Linux, it's great, fast, looks great most of the time. However one major feature that it lacks is a "delete URL" button, like the X> that Konq has. When you're cutting and pasting a URL in, you can't then highlight the current URL and delete, because then you have to go back and RESELECT what you wanted to paste. It's a pain. Much easier to select, hit X>, mid-click.

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

[xtremex]

It all depends on your target market. At my last job, we had 45% of users using netscape or mozilla. Why? I have no clue. They also happened to be on Solaris or IRIX machines. Which was another oddity. Hollywood uses IRIX. We weren't marketing to the film industry.

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

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.
  

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!

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: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.

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.