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"Fastest Browser On Earth" Cuts Crud
gabec writes "The guys at Opera have been rewriting their rendering engine over the past 18 months, tossing out legacy code and making the browser more DOM compliant with the intention of making the self-proclaimed "fastest browser on earth" even faster. They claim to have succeeded, according to this article on ZDNet.. Fun stuff.. ;)"
They need a few things, IMHO. The frist is a hotkey to enable/disable popus (which they may have, I haven't looked very deeply). The second is a mozilla-like "kill all popups I don't request" option. They kill *all* popups, which interferes with my webmail programs, surveys, etc.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
First of all, this is bait for trolls to speak about IE and flaming OS zealots to scream about mozilla
.01seconds to render the pictures on a screen.
Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.
I think we're better off improving the features (like removing pop-up adds, etc...) than to try to squeak out another
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The guys at Opera have been rewriting their rendering engine over the past 18 months
Was rendering speed ever a problem, in either Opera or IE? Back when I used a double-digit MHz processor maybe, but even on a Pentium II 333 I don't give page rendering speed a second thought.
"World's fastest browser" smacks a whole lot of the "Pentium IV makes the internet faster" nonsense. The bottleneck, even on a slow processor, is the network connection.
Actually, I.E. will always be the best browser. Say what you will about Microsoft, they make a damn fine internet browser.
Damn fine until you realize you can't block popups or have tabs. But then again -- maybe I am the only one who does not liked popups and thinks 1 window is cleaner than 15 windows.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Mozilla > Opera
Mozilla wasn't built for only browsing. It was built as a platform, for further development in the open source community. Thus, speed is not the main focus, but useability, and modability. Opera on the other hand, is zoned in on being a hella-good browser. They don't mess around trying to incorporate extra packages and options that are just not necessary for average users. The problem is, average users use IE...
By the way, if you get the student discout, it's half price to buy opera, sans banner ads. And, unless i'm mistaken, that purchase lasts a lifetime.
But ultimately, Hurd concluded, Opera and other Microsoft competitors would do better to support the technologies that the market-leading Internet Explorer browser made available, rather than focusing on industry standards
Mozilla does not attempt to cater to the IE crap-nuances. Opera does. They actually write code that basically says 'click here to emulate IE f0rk-ups.' Oh, i do like opera more than mozilla or 'scape, for my little pitiful uses. I LOVE the glorious plethora of shortcuts, both mouse and keyboard
But ultimately, Hurd concluded, Opera and other Microsoft competitors would do better to support the technologies that the market-leading Internet Explorer browser made available, rather than focusing on industry standards.
"What these other browser makers should do is stop complaining about what Microsoft is doing and start supporting what Microsoft is supporting," Hurd said. "People out there aren't reading these specs; they're using IE."
This would be a huge mistake for any competitor. Why would you want to jump into line with MS? You would have no opportunity lead. You would just play catch up and never be able to offer the customer a superior product.
Follow the standards and anyone can lead the market if they implement them better. They will also avoid being blindsided by new MS "standards".
-- My HARDWARE, My CHOICE.
tabbed browsing.. zoom function that zooms both text and images.. mouse gestures so I don't even ned gui buttons for navigation.. no pop-ups.. author/user-mode toggle that is useful for those pages with unreadable text/background combination etc.. skinnable.. the adress bar turns into a status bar when loading a page (more screenspace ^_^).. very customizable..
Each time I have to use mozilla or IE it gets uncomfortable, if only for the mouse gestures that makes surfing that much more enjoyable, and perhaps the lack of the zoom (really handy lots of times).
CSS2 and DOM are hard problems - IE's rendering engine needed a huge amount of work to get it halfway right in IE6. A lot of Opera's size and speed advantage comes from cutting corners.
(Statement of bias: I'm involved in Mozilla.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I've designed pages with popups.....I admit, popup advertising is annoying, but having the larger version of an image appear in a popup when I click on a button....or poll results, or a movie clip, or ....etc,etc,etc is a interface feature I like and employ. I don't like having to leave a page or having an entire page of content be regenerated for 1 small thing.
And I hate tabs. They are annoying in the photoshop toolsets, they are annoying in the macromedia toolsets, they are annoying in NN/'zilla since they take up more window space on the smaller resolutions I have to design for. I like having pages in seperate windows so that I can resize them however I feel apropriate for comparing the data I'm looking at. I want to be able to place them on different monitors and desktops without opening another instance of the application. Or so I can send only 1 window to the alternate monitor and/or desktop without sending them all.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
"Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference. .01seconds to render the pictures on a screen."
I think we're better off improving the features (like removing pop-up adds, etc...) than to try to squeak out another
Featuritis is what brought us bloated, slow browsers such as IE and Mozilla, while I'm an avid Mozilla user, it's comparatively slow and resource-intensive.
Opera has ALWAYS strived for performance , correct HTML, and truly useful features. Opera pioneered the MDI browser concept, as well as accessibility features such as full keyboard browsing, configurable page zoom and many others.
Best of all, they've ALWAYS done this without adding bloat to the browser. It's always been lean and mean, ever since the 1.x versions (I helped with some language translations so I know about this firsthand).
Keep in mind that many places still have aging 486 or P5 systems with little ram or hard disk to spare. On systems where Mozilla or IE won't even download due to lack of disk space, Opera installs and runs completely flawlessly, and absolutely flies when compared to the two leading browsers.
I just want to be able to do as much as possible, as easy as possible when making a webpage. I'm a TA at our local college. The universities official policy is to use Netscape as the main browser because of its integrated mail system (which doesn't screw up as much as outlook does).
However, a lot of instructors who use the web heavily (as in the course I teach, for example), require the use of IE. Why? Because it works more. Its more forgiving of browser errors; it has more built-in features; certificate setup is easier.
Me? I installed Win4lin so that I could continue to use MS. If someone else makes a browser that I can run js animations in just as fast, and that will work as easily with (private) certificates, and has as advanced a parser, I'll switch. And if I am browsing for mere text, I'll use galeon.
But when page displaying must be top-notch, I'll use IE. If everything that MS did was done in another way on another browser that I liked equally (or even other cool things that I liked using), I'd switch. I'd REALLY like to have a reason to cut out microsoft. But they still have the best, IMHO.
Think about this: the reason that people should do things the way Microsoft is doing them is not because Microsoft is doing it, but because Microsoft has implemented some good ideas. Personally, I think they should leave the OS and application businesses to people who know what they're doing, and just make and sell their browser.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
It's pretty amazing how much better the products get when even a small amount of competition is allowed to happen... I wonder what computing would be like if all software had such an opportunity.
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
They talk to one web developer and this is the schmuck they get? My lord, is it any wonder the web is such a mess when professionals who should know better spout tripe like that? For the first time ever web developers can actually markup their documents to the specs and have a reasonable expectation that they'll display correctly in all the leading browsers.
Look, dammit, specs are good because they don't change with every minor revision of the program. Do you really want a web that Microsoft can lead around by the nose? News flash - IE has bugs. Should developers make their markup bug-compatible with IE, then change all their sites every time Microsoft releases a new version or bug fix?
Besides, he's contradicting himself. He complains that Opera doesn't support all of the DOM - why not instead complain that Opera doesn't support VBScript? That's a Microsoft "standard."
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I.E. user: The compatibility with today's plugins
Mozilla supports the Java platform, Flash, and QuickTime. What else do you need?
and scripting languages is unparalled.
Mozilla supports the HTML DOM better than IE does.
The image renderer is awesome.
Wrong. Unlike the image renderer in Mozilla, the image renderer in IE 6 doesn't even support alpha-transparent PNG images.
Not to mention that while an open standard is best, you will find most webpages catered to users running I.E.
Netscape Communications, the company that bankrolls the Mozilla Organization, is not being sued for antitrust violations.
And what about Outlook Express, the joke of an e-mail client that comes with IE? Wasn't that single program responsible for most of the e-mail worms that have plagued Windows machines on the Internet in the last three years? Yes, Microsoft eventually posted patches, but Mozilla's open development process (nightly builds from CVS) got them to the public sooner.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.
Rendering speed, yes. All three of them render pages in a heartbeat on virtually any hardware.
UI speed is something else entireley. On a 300Mhz K6 with 160MB RAM running FreeBSD 4.0, I can out-type Mozilla by a fair margin. This may not be the most modern hardware, but that is just plain ridiculous. It makes the app unuseable, which is a real shame. Galeon runs like a champ, as does Netscape 4.
Even on my dual 1Ghz P3 running W2k, the Mozilla UI is awfully sluggish. This is ridiculous.
On my 85 Mhz Sparcstation, IE5 is a bit slow but at least I can't out-type it.
I don't think thats happening with Opera or Mozilla...yet.
To some extent, it is happening with Mozilla.
For those not familiar with the project, the MS-only MARQUEE tag was recently checked into Mozilla. So now, Marquee is supported in Moz & IE only.
It was originally only to be put in Chinese builds, since the top sites in China seem to have a near-fetish for using Marquee, but it managed to expand into all builds; and not just in quirks mode, but in strict mode also. That upsets me greatly, as strict mode should really only support W3 standards, of which marquee is certainly not. Also, marquee is a blow to usability, as it makes it hard for people who are not totally fluent in a language to read text. Frankly, I LIKED not seeing Marquees, as they drive me up a wall. Unfortunately, the 1.1. builds after checkin of this tag do not have an option to turn off Marquees.
This, IMHO, is one instance of Mozilla playing a bad game of catchup to IE. Fortunately this hasn't happened too often, but everytime it does, it's a blow to W3 Standards, and an acknowledgement of Microsoft's market share.
Actually, innerHTML just duplicates functionality already in the DOM specifications. Of course, since IE didn't support DOM, nobody coded it that way. Thus, everyone had to code it IE's way if they wanted it to work in anything but Mozilla. Now IE6 supports the DOM functions analogous to innerHTML, but those pages have already been written using innerHTML. It's just a tactic: support the standards, but make sure everyone gets used to using your proprietary stuff BEFORE you support them.