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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.. ;)"
...that Opera is the fastest browser doesn't actually make it faster (although some religious types might believe differently).
-- SIGFPE
Ah, but Opera is far more than a browser for Windows. It's also a browser for cell phones, terminals, PDAs and more. Some of these *are* double-digit MHz machines.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
True enough for the mythical 'average user' whose desktop machine is less than two years old. As a university student who is working on a four-year-old PII-300 at home, and a PI-133 with 64 MB of RAM at work (age unknown), every last cycle is precious. Particularly since I'm usually multitasking.
The footprint--in memory, in terms of clock cycles eaten, on my tiny hard drive--of my browser actually a very important consideration for me, and probably for others. The F12 for quick menus (to kill popups, mostly), the clean file transfer monitoring box, and the tabbed browsing (fewer windows on my task bar) are worth their weight in gold.
Opera has also been quick to respond to bugs and make critical fixes--something that some companies are loathe to do. (Ahem. Microsoft. Certificates. Ahem.)
And it really is the fastest (of IE, Moz, and Opera) browser on earth.
~Idarubicin
"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."
Wow does not that quote stick out like a sore thumb from the company that prided themselves on following the published standards? To me that is a scary way of looking at things.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I don't use the other browsers at all so, as far as speed is concerned, that's where I notice it most.
_khl
I don't know about Mozilla, but Opera has this. It also seems more stable (and perhaps less bloated, although I haven't quantified that statement) than Mozilla as well. You also get a pop-up killer feature, is my favorite feature of Opera. My next favorite is the fact that Opera starts to download a file while you are choosing the location to save it to. More often than not, the download is done before I navigate to where it should be.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
What's also funny is the ammo mozilla/opera users use in their arguments:
/me can see the "troll" mod already
As a webmaster I find myself hating IE more and more. Yes most of the webpages out there are designed for IE cause IE kills the standards. I can't get CSS to display properly on IE, but just fine in Moz. If i "hack" my code I can get it to display, but then it is nolonger w3 certitfied! What a pain!
Further more, It's not just that Mozilla/Opera has "Popup killer" it's that it is customizable. For example, I don't want IE resizing my damn jpg's and png's to fit the screen every time, yet I have not found a way to turn it off.
I'm tired of Microsoft making a new "hack" onto something great as webbrowsing and not standarizing it cause most people use there products anyway. I don't see the world as Microsoft sees it
Well this post has gone the wrong way.
Ah fsck it, I'm out
~nemith
Well, I see you have the whole age discrimination thing going on here; you must be quite insecure, having to blast on about how experienced you are.
;).
;).
My first successful install of Linux occured when I was 8 years old. I was more than happy to read the documentation that came with the distribution, learning the concepts behind the tools I would shortly be using to create disks and begin my install. After installation, I proceeded to go into some sort of RTFM frenzy (;), after which I configured X, which, at that time was quite a difficult task; compared to the whipper-snappers with their auto configuration tools of today.
But, you know what? After my rant, I think I will not say some stupid troll statement to you now.. I think you're right. I was a child Linux-user in the era where it was a very exclusive operating system; now any moron can stick a CD in and have it running in 40 minutes. So, in effect, you are right. I'm sure that rejected twelve-year olds would hop on the boat to consider themselves prodigal after running through a GUI-installer
And to think, I spent my childhood playing xevil and xbill
Thanks,
-J.S (only left here so if Kon stumbles onto this, he knows it's me. AXR is almost done).
quote----> more accurate that IE in rendering!
This just provoked a thought in my dull brain:
How exactly is(should) www-rendering (be) defined?
What I mean is, assume the designer of the original page wrote the page, using IE to view it as he/she wrote the code. Now, he or she gets it looking as intended. They then use a couple of other browsers to test it's compatibility, and publishes the page. In this case, wouldn't the standard against which to compare be however IE renders the page? Or, to put it another way, IE would BE the standard, and therefore would render it 100% accurately.
Simply change which browser the original designer started with, and in that case that browser would render 100% correctly.
Obviously I'm missing something here, and being very dense, but I'm tired and don't see it myself. What am I missing? How can rendering-accuracy be quantified?
Some moments of light in this article, then not...
"This is a fuller implementation," Tetzchner said. "We could have improved support with the old engine, but it would have been more difficult. This is a more future-proof solution."
OK - that's a smart thing, imo - realizing that the legacy code is a dead-end and doing something about it.
"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."
Uh-oh - now they're dead. Here's a news flash; every company that ever tried to to "follow" MS's lead ends up getting served up in the MS cafeteria as stew. They will forever be behind, in the dark and ultimately out of business if this is their plan.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
Hmmm, curious. I've not played with Opera for a while, but I'll assume it _is_ the fastest, since I've heard that so many times. (and very little opposition to that statement)
But of the ones I've used, I find the speed goes:
Mozilla IE NS6 NS4
NS4 is _dog_ slow for anything other than simple HTML pages, and usually looks like hell. IE is admittedly pretty close to Mozilla. I hate the interface, the anti-standard stance, and the company, but it's fairly fast.
Any version of NS6 I've seen has been such a disaster considering that it's based on Mozilla, that I've quit telling people it exists.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
There is an HTML tag for "open link in a new browser window", I believe. Except that in that case, it leaves you with all your menus, browsing control buttons, scroll bars, window-resizing abilities, etc. etc. Too many times I've had an unreadable popup window appear because I'm using a bigger font than they expect and it doesn't line up with the graphics, but they turn off all access to scroll bars. Grr.
I don't understand why people force users to open things in new windows, anyway. Maybe this is just a feature of *n*x-based browsers, but with Mozilla, Netscape, and (my fave) Galeon I can middle-click to get a new window, and I often do; saves the reload that often comes with hitting the back button. But that decision should be mine, not the page author's -- if I'm not coming back to the original page, I'd rather open the new one in the same window. (Is this a middle-click thing feature of Windows browsers, too? eg. Windows Mozilla? I'm pretty sure IE doesn't do this...?)
As for tabs, they're handy for when I open a page that does have popups. The popups go in their own tabs, and I can safely ignore them (if they're ads or whatever) and just close the whole window when I'm done with the page -- the popups all vanish with everything else.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
Okay, this was flamebait, but I have to say that IE on Windows is good enough for everyone...
I don't speak from personal experience, since I don't use Windows. I was teaching a class recently where Windows was the only working desktop OS. My students, relative computer novices, ran into these awful pop-ups all the time. When I had them try Opera or Netscape, these same pop-ups were far less devistating.
Actually, I think the "better" way would be to have an icon in the status bar when pop-ups are disabled, which will let you know that a page tried to open one (or more)... Then, you could click on the icon, get information about what windows(s) were requested, and retroactively allow them to open, without reloading the page...
Will Opera 7 be free of spyware in the basic version, or will they still want me to cough up $40 for my privacy? The current version has Cydoor integrated into it.
How ya like dat?
No mention of Lynx?
It seems to be good for browsing documentation, help files, etc. The current help programs for gnome and kde take about 6.022x10e23 hours to load =/