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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!
surfing pr0n in an Xterm. w3m forever!!
...that Opera is the fastest browser doesn't actually make it faster (although some religious types might believe differently).
-- SIGFPE
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.
It needs work, but Dillo is the fastest graphical browser I've ever used. As fast if not faster than a text-only browser like lynx, links or w3m. Galeon feels incredibly slow next to Dillo, and Galeon usually feels pretty fast to me.
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.
From reading the article, I get the feeling that the real reason for the rewrite is not to get better speed, that would just be a side effect. It sounds like it had to be rewritten because they were running up to limitations in what they could do by just extending their current engine. These things happen from time to time with larger projects.
"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.
Yeah, I love it. I'd probably laugh if it wasn't so pathetically sad. Everyone I know that actually runs Linux/Mozilla and knows what they're doing(i.e., not a 12 year who installed Redhat off a bootable CD and considers himself "a linux user") completely agrees that I.E. is a great browser.
What's also funny is the ammo mozilla/opera users use in their arguments:
I.E. user: The compatibility with today's plugins and scripting languages is unparalled.
Mozilla/Opera user: We have pop-up killing!
I.E. user: The image renderer is awesome.
Mozilla/Opera user: We have pop-up killing!
I.E. user: Not to mention that while an open standard is best, you will find most webpages catered to users running I.E.
Mozilla/Opera user: We have pop-up killing!
I.E. user: You got a lot of pop-ups, don't you?
Mozilla/Opera user: All day, everyday, wall to wall pr0n and warez sites.
I.E. user: My god....
Mozilla/Opera user: 1337!
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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
For quite a while I used Opera 6, and I loved it. It was fast, and its tabbed browsing was fantastic. The mouse gestures were an unbelievable leap in the speed of web browsing. But I started to get a little ticked off that it blocked all popups, because I liked getting them when I clicked a little javascript button. In order to get these little windows, I had to dig through the extensive preferences menu and temporarily turn on popup windows. It soon began to get tiresome.
Then Mozilla 1.0 came out. I downloaded it, and I've been using it ever since. Mozilla could use some of the things that Opera has, like mouse gestures, but it is more stable (Opera had the habit of crashing when I had more than a dozen windows open) and at least as fast. That's right, Mozilla's rendering engine is at least as fast as Opera's "fastest on earth." Not only that, but it rendered many pages more accurately. With the release of 1.0, Mozilla is a very mature offering, and it makes Opera seem a little less professional, despite the hefty price tag.
Unless the new engine is considerably faster than Gecko, I for one will be sticking to Mozilla. Good luck to the Opera guys though.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
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.....
Microsoft.
That's right M$. They have academic licensing programs that, provided your school has subscribed, allow students to by M$ products for next to nothing. Windows XP for $15 is a damn big student discount.
Did I just plug Microsoft? Jesus Christ!
"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 don't want a "platform", that's what my OS is for. I want a web browser. I don't want a bunch of useless shit clogging up what shiould be a small and nimble program. I don't want email or news on my broswer, I've got programs that were DESIGNED for those jobs and do them much better than any bolted on afterthought I've seen on browsers.
This, IMHO, is what screwed Netscape into the ground - the idiotic desire to not be just a wen broswer, but to be a platform for accessing everything on the Net. It turned Netscape 3.x, a lithe and nimble program, and turned it into the bloated, slow, anf buggy monster that was Netscape 4.x.
If what you want is a "platform", use AOL.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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!
I don't use the other browsers at all so, as far as speed is concerned, that's where I notice it most.
_khl
Damn fine until you realize you can't block popups or have tabs.
Download.com gives this list of popup killers for IE. Seems like you can block popups quite easily.
Tabs is a little harder, but you might like to try BroadPage.
See, it wasn't that hard?
Sailing over the event horizon
I used Opera on Linux and it was OK. But when
I've installed it on MacOS X I was suprised how
crappy it is. Apparently they do not put much
effort in MacOS X version.
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.
Yes. In every version up to 5.something, which was the last time I tried to use it. On the plus side, Opera recovers fairly gracefully and doesn't hang your PC when it crashes, like some browsers I could mention, but just the same, I think I'd rather use a pre-4.0 version of netscape than ever bother with opera again.
I can't understand why anyone would pay for Opera.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
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.
It's less than half price last I checked, and you only get one major version upgrade before needing to repurchase. I bought Opera 4, and I had to buy again when 6 came out.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
Good points. I feel I can make a good review on the subject since I do use (have to use) IE at work everyday. And yes -- if I wanted to I could install Windows and use IE at home. But since I don't, I can compare apples with apples. Yes -- before Mozilla stabalized (I use galeon) I did have a few flustered moments....But nowadays the things that IE does not do right, as listed above...are just WAY to big of a pain in the A** to ignore. Granted if IE could block popups, have tabbed browsing, zoom in zoom out, custom download manager, etc....Then maybe my only leg to stand on would be "They do not have a version for my OS of choice" (as it was a year or two back) but nowdays their really are better browsers than IE. Imagine that!
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I use Opera, but MyIE really impressed me as a GUI for IE's engine. Tabs, popup filters, etc; it's just a shame you can't use Gecko in it
If you want to block all popups, you can do it in IE by killing Javascript, or you have have a proxy kill the Javascript which does the popping up. What makes the "kill popup" feature in Mozilla so invaluable is that it only blocks "unsolicited" popups - it will let Javascript pop up a window in response to a click, but not otherwise. So you kill the ads, but pages still work as designed.
The ability to pause and resume downloads more flexibly (like Opera's download manager -- which Mozilla's download manager is heavily inspired by -- does) is in the works (Bugzilla # anybody?) and will hopefully get added sooner or later.
You can add Gesture capability to Mozilla. Just get This.
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?
Wow, wait to give examples and back that up with facts. Here's your helmet.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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."
It is also lited in the "quick preferences" option in the file menu. It is very handy.
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?
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.
There are front-ends for Internet Explorer that have features that you want, one I know of is CrazyBrowser. Note that I still think Internet Explorer is bad in general however.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hmmm, I didn't notice your name signed at the bottom of the original FAQ document like you've done in your post.
I've seen it a dozen times...
As someone who has moz/opera/ie/netscape4 (ugh hate admitting that) on the same box, opera DOES load the fastest.....in terms of from when i double click it to when i can open a page.
followed by ie, followed by ns, followed (in a year) by moz.
i prefer browsing with moz, but the mouse gestures are far too kludgy. (sorry optimoz, you dont cut it)
so i use opera for the most part...and IE when i must. (and sometimes...even with moz...i must...damn frontpage)
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
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.
Idarubicin wrote:
> And it really is the fastest (of IE, Moz, and
> Opera) browser on earth.
if small footprint is your main concern, ie you're less concerned about fancy sidebars, etc, you would do well to look into some of the alternate frontends for mozilla's engine. i've been playing with dillo recently, and while it doesn't do much more than display web pages, it does this a lot faster than mozilla on the same machine.
ofc, this might require an adjustment to the os you're using...
Sitting Walrus Blog
if you like ie6 but are missing features like tabbed browsing, a fully configurable pop-up blocker etc., try the crazybrowser (what a stupid name). it's basically an third-party upgrade for the ie. it's free too!
http://www.crazybrowser.com
i used to surf with opera, but since 6 it got unstable when viewing more than 7 tabs.
sic luceat lux
The thing I really, REALLY like is their implementation of the "innerhtml" construct (and outer, too, I suppose) in javascript, allowing you to rewrite from scratch ANY tag. That has more recently been added to several other browsers. I think they did that well from the start.
That has made a world of difference for my DHTML quick coding.
Of course, there was a bit of memory leak problem as a result of that...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
>is the ability to Cancel a download, click the link
:)
>again, and have the browser (usually) pick up where
>the previous download attempt left off.
I can understand this need. Why not go a step further and request that it also utilize multiple sources so it can improve throughput and download reliability?
By the way, isn't lynx faster than Opera?
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Does anyone else have this problem? I downloaded Opera 6.03 rpm yesterday and put it on my Red Hat 7.3 box. Run Opera and I get a segmentation fault. Opera 6.02 works perfectly on the same box. Opera Software has a ghawd-awful system for reporting bugs (in my opinion) but I did go through the pain of reporting this and haven't seen anything yet. My report doesn't even show on the list of reports yet.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
My experiences with Konq are quite to opposite. I really dislike the redirect pop-ups. With Opera, if you have it running in MDI view, right clicking on a link can let you open it in another browser Window, and it is instantaneous. Otherwise, you can set it in a mode that spawns a new copy of Opera for each page you visit. That is obviously going to be slower than tabbed browsing.
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.
It's not just the rendering speed that is fast. The GUI is fast too. Of course, a banana slug will look fast when you are looking at Mozilla's GUI, but Opera is pretty snappy in its own right.
The cache handling is probably one of the most noticeable places where Opera is fast. No browser I have seen can whip out a page from cache like Opera. Since my browsing habits involve hitting the "back" button often, the snappiness is noticeable. Moreover, caching is highly configurable. No matter how slow your Internet connection, cache performance makes a difference.
Opera also has some UI conveniences that makes its featues very accessible. The quick preferences menu lets you toggle popups, plugins, GIF animation and proxies by hitting F12 and a click. Toggling image loading is a mouseclick away. My favorite feature is the button that toggles author/user mode styles: on pages with lousy fonts/colors, you get instant readability with a click. All these, too, save time and makes things fast.
[Mozilla rendering the MARQUEE element], 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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but W3C offers recommendations, not standards. Sure, documents containing MARQUEE elements will not validate against the W3C [X]HTML DTDs, but does that invalidate the choice of a browser builder to support use of an element not in any W3C Recommendation?
The W3C certainly has nothing to say about this w/r/t the HTML 4.01 Recommendation:
The W3C notes concerning invalid documents suggest that when "a user agent encounters an element it does not recognize, it should try to render the element's content." Seems to me that it might be in the best interests *to* recognize the "market leader" and render the content of a MARQUEE element (even in "strict mode"). That Mozilla would render the content as does MSIE, rather than as a static string of text, just means that certain Mozillains are making the most of a bad situation.
That situation being the simple existence of MARQUEE at all, not the ruination of some imagined, inflexible W3C Standard. Read the published recommendations a bit more closely, and you'll find that there is a surprising amount of leeway.
1: It's not free (in any sense). If I give you a non-itemised phone bill do you assume all the long-distance calls were free?
2: IE still can't render a fucking .PNG image correctly, and its CSS2 is a lot spottier than MS claims.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
As for tabs, try NetCaptor , which I haven't used myself -- but it looks like it adds that capability.
Normally, I'm not a Micro$oft fan in any way -- but I have to admit that IE generally does a better job at rendering the kinds of pages that actually live on the net.
Standards are nice, but if people are already failing to follow them, must we continue to have "nearly as good" or "works if the web author had followed the standard" browsers? What's the point of staying to a "standard" that isn't used? I'd rather be able to READ what's out there.
Just another way MS is not responsive to customers, their usability experts say it is better, so the customer can go to hell.
Well, if usability experts say it is better, then that - on top of the rationalization you also provide - is a perfectly sane reason to go the way MS has chosen. Except for the original poster, I have never heard anyone IE sucks for lack of MDI.
Actually, to play devils advocate, you can use proxomitron and have better popup/popbehind/popexplode/etc. filtering than any browsers attempt. Then add crazy browser for tabs...
:)
But.
I use Mozilla, but email/news/web browser runs as one task, if it crashs, the whole mozilla instance crashs.
Always something aint it?
"Our old engine wasn't that bad," Tetzchner said.
Sorry, it is. OK, so it has decent CSS support (Well, CSS1 anyway). However, its DOM support is at least as bad Netscape4's CSS support is. DOM today is what CSS was back in 1998, somewhat used, but not to the extent that it could be, mainly because of legacy browsers.
Also, they compare rewriting the rendering engine to writing Mozilla. Hello, they're producing a non-embeddable, platform-specific web browser. Mozilla.org produced a platform. Take a look at Komodo if you don't believe me. Sorry, but it's apples and oranges.
And this "fastest browser on earth" crap is getting annoying. Anybody can create a fast browser, but both Mozilla and IE can do far more than Opera can, and I can't help but wonder how DOM compliant this new Opera will be. Will it be up to Mozilla's or even IE's capabilities? I doubt it to be honest.
When it comes to not paying for software, you may soon find out that few things in life are free. You pay for MSIE when you pay for Windows. Mozilla is free, though. And both Opera and Mozilla are vastly superior to MSIE in my opinion (security, stability, user interface features).
Clever signature text goes here.
Not only that, but Opera are trying to be a contender in the embedded device market, where memory and CPU power is limited. This is why speed is important.
Clever signature text goes here.
Does'nt it bug you when some dolt puts a banner ad on his pages without the height and width parameters coded? The page can't display until the image arrives because there is no information to tell the browser how much space to allocate. And insult is added to injury when you get a timeout on the download of the bloody ad. Y'unnerstand what I'm saying here?
[FURY ON]
You can't see the bloody page, because the BLOODY AD WON'T LOAD!!
[FURY OFF]
(Pant, pant, pant!)
If there is one feature that is missing in IE or Netscape or 'Zilla that would be a boon to all, the ability to kill the download of some ad, or button graphic would so enchance my web browsing, that I'd . . . I'd . . . Gawd! I'd even pay money for that!! (And I'm of Scottish descent!)
Clever signature text goes here.
No, I don't mean the browser... I mean opera needs a seperate mail program.
I love Opera's browser. The biggest advantages over the other ones have been listed but one thing I haven't seen is that opera has nice PNG support built in. I don't think IE did until recently.
The thing I love about IE is that it's packaged with Outlook Express. In all it's virus/security flawed glory. I love it. It's fast and it's easy to use and the mail filtering is the best I've seen for a windows client.
Eudora just doesn't do it for me. Too slow to fire up and it just doesn't flow as nicely as I'd like. Opera's current mail system isn't too bad, but it's just not as powerful as OE.
The program doesn't necessarily have to be integrated into the browser.
I had a bunch of ideas I sent to opera about an awesome mail client but they never responded.
Another thing I'd LOVE to see is a calendar collaboration tool. Does anything like this exist as an external package that runs sharp and is easy to use? (under windows)
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I was looking at this the other day for a cross-browser web application which relies on DOM. If you look at this W3C DOM Compatibility Table and run your eyes down the Opera column, you'll see that it supports only a handful of the DOM features listed, and is by far the least DOM-compliant browser. This new version is a much-needed improvement to bring Opera into line with Mozilla, Explorer, and Konqueror.
Uhhhh... WSC standards?
In Opera, you can toggle images using the G key on your keyboard. It actually has a huge list of keyboard shortcuts, which is really nice. Ctrl+G to apply your own style sheet, etc.
Clever signature text goes here.
*sounds of crickets in Redmond*
I thought so.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Cute, but what's stopping anyone from putting in a bid with the local Board of Education to use open source? People don't learn about new things by osmosis, you know, someone needs to tell them.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Everyone take a deep breathe. Now exhale. I am not the great satan here guys... ;-)
;-)
Let me clarify...
My comment was taken slighly out of context in the CNET article. I believe in standards and we test against Opera and Mozilla on a continual basis and I'm no MS fan. Let me repeat, I believe in standards 100%.
I was trying to make the point that now that Microsoft has achieved browser market dominance (with proprietary extensions included), strict adherence to standards is EXACTLY what Microsoft hopes non-MS browser developers will pursue as doing so necessarily creates incompatibility with IE. This in turn leaves users with the impression that non-MS browsers are broken or not as advanced when they fail to render pages in the manner IE has led them to expect.
I don't like Microsoft's tactics at all. Period. But unfortunately, at this point in the game, a browser's market penetration is more a measure of end-user acceptance than it is one of developer acceptance. The point I was trying to get across was that non-MS browser developers should co-opt Microsoft's proprietary extensions strategy and use it against them! By supporting all of the MS extras end users wouldn't perceive non-MS browsers as lacking. As a developer I can appreciate the fact that this would take some work. It's not a perfect solution, but the sad fact is Microsoft isn't going to change it's ways and no amount of name calling will change that.
Just trying to think of ways non-MS browsers could turn the MS tide. Does this make any sense?
-Monte Hurd
Systems Architect
Starphire Technologies
Hey, it's 7 in the morning, mkay?
Thanks in large part to the WaSP & friends, we've reached a bit of a cease-fire. Everyone's writing browsers to standards, and some people are adding their own little features. As long as Microsoft supports the standards, I don't care how many new features they add. This means that I can markup a page to standards and it works, period. I get goose-bumps just thinking about it.
If a web site uses new proprietory Microsoft features, then they can catch hell from the community. We don't have to get Microsoft to stop making the Kool-Aid, we can settle for getting individual web developers to kick the habit.
Playing follow-the-leader with the richest software company on the planet is a Bad, Bad business model. It's not competing, it's not "turning the tide" - it's a sure-fire recipe for getting buried.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Mozilla has zoom. Ctrl +/- zoom in and out.
But that doesn't zoom images. But fortunately, you can get mozilla to zoom images with a bookmarklet from the Pornzilla 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?
I am sorry, but the windows taskbar as a tabbing system does not cut it. If you have used mozilla or opera tabs for even as much as a day then you will know what I mean.
At this very moment I have over fifty web pages open. Can you do that with IE? Without going insane? I didn't think so. I'll tell you how it's done: I have four GNOME desktops, two of which contain three browser windows each, and each browser window contains about ten tabs. I keep all my slashdot pages in one window, all my nytimes pages in another window, etc.
The multiple-desktop to multiple-window to multiple-tab hierarchy allows for, essentially, three levels of tabbing, as opposed to the puny (and for all practical purposes unusable) one level of tabbing that Windows/IE provides. Not only do you get an order of magnitude more open pages, but managing those pages is much simpler too. Whereas Alt-Tab in windows cycles through your browser windows and all your non-browser windows in some random and ever-changing order, the corresponding Ctrl-PgUp/Dn keys in mozilla cycle through your tabs in a much more predictable fashion without your non-browser windows getting in the way.
The tabbing feature in mozilla is not a toy. It's a killer feature, and one that makes me unable to stand using IE for any length of time anymore.
The zooming in Mozilla is text-only, at least it is in version 1.0. On Opera it zooms everything including images. It would be a nice feature to see added to Mozilla.
Best Slashdot comment ever
MDI tabs are just a weak substitute for your window manager's poor handling of many windows. I have used Mozilla (on Windows) with tabbed browsing and it is no better than IE. Why is having a tab of 15 pages on the top of your browser better than having a tab of 15 windows at the bottom of your screen? Windows XP can automatically consolidate your IE windows into a single taskbar item. The list of IE windows is available when you want it, but it does not steal valuable vertical screen real estate all the time like Mozilla's tabs.
cpeterso
If you're being honest, and you actually configured X at the age 8, I have the utmost respect for you.
My only claim to fame like that is successfully installing E when I was about 14. Damn I felt 1337.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
I never used Opera much beyond playing until I got my Zaurus. While the thing is pretty much non-configurable, it does work well, and pages look surprisingly great considering how small the screen is. I'm hoping that this new engine will be coming to my little box too.
Actually, the free basic version of Opera doesn't have standard Cydoor technology in it. As evidenced in this mailing list message, Opera did work with Cydoor, but only for the purpose of designing a totally new system for delivering ads. Cydoor never coded any of the advertisement software in the browser. Opera has a pretty extensive description of what their advertising software does. It explicity states that there is no spyware, and even gives, in great detail, how the system works. I use Opera daily, and I've never seen any evidence of spyware, so I doubt highly that there is any need to worry.
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Dillo is faster.
Follow me
I use Mozilla on a 512 MB 1.8 Ghz machine, and also on an older 400 Mhz, 256Mb machine. I don't notice any appreciable difference in page load speeds between the two of them. They are both plenty fast enough, going into that range where I stop caring about the speed (once it's down below 1 second). Mozilla seems to work just fine for me. I'm wondering after reading your post (and many similar ones here) whether my experience is atypical. If I was just reading one post claiming Mozilla is such a dog I'd assume it was just FUD, but *everyone* besides me seems to be having bad experiences with it, and I don't understand what I'm doing differently.
I used Opera as well, but had trouble getting it to interface properly with my java SDK for applets, so I've gone back to Mozilla. As far as speed goes, I consider the two a total wash.
Yes, Opera had MDI first, but since you originally had no choice in the matter and HAD to use MDI, that wasn't an advantage. Mozilla had non-MDI (which many people, myself included, prefer) first. Opera added non-MDI at about the same time Mozilla added tabbed browsing, so again, that's a wash between the two. At about the same time, they both gained the ability to let the user choose which way to make it work.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Mozilla is fast. It just is. I really don't quite comprehend what is going on with the systems of the people who are complaining about Mozilla's speed. I suspect many of them haven't even really tried it recently. I've been using Mozilla daily on a variety of machines and a variety of operating systems without any speed problems at all for well over a year now. Hell, even my wife doesn't complain and she's much less tolerant of computer problems than I am.
In the last 3 years I've spent copious time on 1Ghz Athlon (Mandrake Linux & Win2000), a 300Mhz Thinkpad 700 (Win2000), and an SGI Octane SSE (250Mhz). Only the athlon would be considered even moderately fast by today's standards. All have adequate amounts of RAM (256M+) but are otherwise unremarkable. Mozilla was/is my daily browser on each of them. And it is fast. Faster than IE 5.5 & 6 and faster than Netscape 4.7. And certainly more than fast enough for daily use. Never mattered what OS I used, at least after about version 0.92. It has and continues to work great.
Except in cases where folks are stuck with a very old machine I don't know what they are complaining about. (Mozilla does take some resources so it's a *bit* much for a P90 with 64M of RAM) Opera has a lighter footprint and no question is a bit faster and if it suits one's needs that's great. But mozilla doesn't have a speed problem that I can see on anything vaguely resembling modern hardware.
Do you use the middle button to paste URLs to content area? I don't, so I use middle button for gestures and added user_pref("middlemouse.contentLoadURL", false); to user.css. Also, I modified gestimp.js after installing Optimoz so that the gestures I want to use are easy to make. Just modify those addGesture() calls: for example, addGesture("LRL", "Close Document [1]","closeDoc();"); tells that if I move Left-Right-Left (kind of wipe out) the active window closes. If you want to make some interesting gestures you might want to disable the default action for the middle mouse button over a link. See info about hidden Mozilla prefs.
Oh, and if you make any changes to gestimp.js make sure to back it up or it will be lost after you upgrade Mozilla and/or Optimoz.
Also, if you have a recent Mozilla installation you probably want to open html.css too and remove the support for marquee and blink.
I never had any problems installing Optimoz either. You probably have some problems with the Mozilla installation itself. I installed my copy of Mozilla without root and run it without root. If you installed Mozilla as a root you might need to install addons as a root too and even start Mozilla once as a root.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
Now all they need to do is but a candy coating on it to make it look pretty and less intimidating to the average user to use.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Yeah, I just noticed a couple days ago. There was some blinking text on a NOAA page, and I thought, "Java? JavaScript?" I felt the icy hand of death on my spine when I checked the source and found a blink tag. Man, that's evil.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Mozilla does NOT support DOM better than IE. DHTML is faster in IE by a large margin (getting smaller but large nonetheless). Feature-wise they are about equal. Speed-wise there is no real competition.
Posted from Mozilla July 30th nightly build.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
This would be a huge mistake for any competitor. Why would you want to jump into line with MS?
Because a web browser is simply a document viewer. If a web browser can't view certain documents, because they happen to be written in non standard MSHTML, then the web browser is a failure from the users point of view. That's the number one thing users care about is can this view my document or not? If it can't, from the users perspective, it is broken.
The ideal browser should be able to `embrace and extend' nonstandard code - i.e., allow pages written in MSHTML to render properly (even perhaps applying different rendering rules if a document has no DTD, like IE does) but follow the spec for labelled documents in its entirety and as close to the cuttign edge as possible.
"Oh, you want to write a badly written MSHTML website? We'll render that - we need the marketshare to stop IE becoming the only feasable web browser. What's that? You want to use SVG graphics? Then stick to the spec, and we'll render it."
Hello, they're producing a non-embeddable, platform-specific web browser.
Hello. You'll find Opera in more embedded devices than Mozilla will, because its smaller, uses less resources, and uses the existing OSs toolkit rather than requiring its own. Its also almost as cross platform - there's Linux, Windows, MacOS, Solaris, and QNX Opera plus quite a few more.
If you're talking about Mozilla `producing a platform' (ie, XUL) then that's not a feature most users and I imagine embedded developers want or need.
The latest IE versions, if you have "enough" memory by an algorithm that it determines, open each window (not it's children) in a separate process. No, it won't kill explorer.exe.
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
I'm sorry... I didn't clarify...
I do use opera for my browser and OE for my mail.
Alright. 5 minutes later, I just fired it up and setup two accounts. I think they meant for it be a feature, but I don't like how it creates a new set of mailboxes for each account. I can see how it would be useful, but a lot of the time, the only reason I setup multiple profiles is so I can send mail out as Matt@domain or webmaster@domain, etc. whereas they all go back to the same account.
It let's me nest new mail folders so that's good.
I had a bit of trouble deleting them using the delete key but I was able to drag them to the trash.
The filter seems exceptional, they have an awesome feature OE doesn't that lets you filter off of custom headers. All they need is regex filtering!
Viewing headers is easy, however... I can't highlight them with the mouse (or any other way) to copy them onto the clipboard.
The address book seems pretty decent, other than not being able to nest address books I didn't see any problems.
Mozilla mail does seem to load just as quick as OE. Maybe even quicker!
Thanks for turning me on to it, I might give it a whirl for a while and see how it goes. It might not take too long to wean me off of OE.
If anyone from the Mozilla team is reading, I'd like the ability to attach aliases to each account. So I could have as many @.com as I wanted per one set of mailboxes and just check the master.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Well sure, but you see, we want images, not just image tags. :)
Dyolf Knip
something that MS and Netscape have supported since IE4 & NS6 and that Opera still doesn't have support for (remember: the DOM includes APIs for changing docment properties, not just displaying them). Let's hope that they've got it right this time.
Unlike the image renderer in Mozilla, the image renderer in IE 6 doesn't even support alpha-transparent PNG images.
Oddly enough, IE has a renderer that supports alpha transparency in PNGs, they just chose not to have it work automatically. You have to set the image to a transparent gif and then overlay the PNG with some funky directdraw filter. (at least, last time I checked)
"First off, some of what this guy is saying is totally false. Opera IS cross platform. Opera IS ALREADY embedded in more devices than Mozilla."
My point was Opera has to be ported to each toolkit, and behaves differently to some degree on each platform. It can't be an insignificant effort either, considering how long it took for version 6 for Linux to come out.
"Of course the other side of the "Mozilla created a platform" argument if they spent less time creating a platform and more time creating a browser... Don't get me wrong, I think what they did is great and very useful (as Komodo proves), but it wasn't absolutely necessary to create a platform to create the browser and the time they spent out of the race benefitted IE greatly. If Mozilla 1.0 had come out 18 months after they started, the browser market would probably be a lot different than it is today."
Nah. The main reason Netscape got such high marketshare in the first place was because every consumer ISP bundled it. Netscape's market share collapsed because:
1) They lost their main distribution channel
2) IE was already on every new desktop, so people just used that.
3) Netscape 4 sucked.
Of all of those, I'd wager 3) wasn't as important as the other two. Of course, Netscape wasting 18 months trying to produce version 5.0 on the old codebase certainly didn't help. Thus, they felt they had to shift their focus, especially since they no longer had the resources to port to many toolkits.
"I'm not sure what the "Mozilla and IE can do far more than Opera" refers to."
Well, it's quite simple. Mozilla has a complete and powerful DOM engine. It's so powerful, you can create full-blown applications using it. It's so powerful, somebody created XHTML2 support using nothing but XBL. IE has a powerful DOM engine too, just about powerful enough to also allow XHTML support to be written.
Opera's support for DOM is very, very poor. I've used simple DOM stuff to toggle hiding and unhiding of elements and Opera couldn't even do that. I had to create a fall-back version anyway since I had to support Netscape4, but I wouldn't not have done it just to support Opera, unless somebody volunteered to do it for me. Their fixed position support (In CSS) either doesn't work on their Linux version or at all. Come on, Konqueror 2 supported it, although IE doesn't for some reason.
I do use a 64 MB and windows 95 PC but with a fast internet connection. I did try an upgrade to opera 6 and i went back to opera 5. Version 6 was too memory hungry for me.
/. .
The biggest problem with opera(5.12) is that it sometimes uses too much "system" resources. an example for this is when i get moderator access at
But i am worried that there are no more security updates for opera 5.x
Just wanna mention that you can do this in Opera, too.
Oh, and Opera (and IIRC Mozilla) comes with a nice download manager - why doesn't IE have one?
I started using Moz 1 on my Win98 P2-350 a few weeks ago. In many ways, it's nicer than IE (particularly in the various content types it lets you block selectively) but the fact that that damned splash screen pops up for more than ten seconds every time I load is enough to keep IE sitting on my quick launch toolbar right next to Moz. If I want to look up a single thing quickly, I've often got the answer from IE before Moz would even have loaded.
Now, if the new version of Opera manages to keep the small footprint and high performance that it's famous for, while also having the useful features I can get in Moz but not IE, then hell yes, I'll pay them money for it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Speaking as someone who helps run several small web sites, I don't see any justification for claiming that browsers have not advanced since generation 4. For a start, I now write most of those sites using XML, and run a script using XSLT to turn them into HTML/CSS for download. Today's browsers support far more of CSS far better than anything in generation 4 ever did. Several of them support the XML/XSLT natively as well, although for portability reasons we only use that internally for now. These advances alone are enough to put today's tools far ahead of the late 90's models when it comes to producing and updating web content.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Sorry, but I think you're wrong on all counts. If you're developing a commercial web site, you develop it using the most cost-effective techniques. That means you make sure it works for most people in your target audience first, and if it's too expensive to support the few exceptions, you don't bother. This is simply good business sense.
Right about now, well over 90% of hits on most commercial web sites are from people using a recent version of IE. Those using alternatives such as Mozilla, Opera or whatever number a few percent each, if that, yet to support these things properly (including all the overheads of testing all your development on each platform, etc) costs a lot. For many web sites, that spending simply will not give a good ROI and thus is not justified.
You may not like the fact that people write IE-specific web pages, but that is the de facto standard, and for now it is a far more important one than anything the W3C produces. Yes, it's a vicious circle, since no-one will move away from MS as long as they have the market share and they'll keep the market share until people move away, but that's life. If you're running a commercial web site, you work with the way things are, not the way you'd like them to be.
Quite rightly, the only way this situation is going to change any time soon is if someone demonstrates that the "standards" are actually more useful. To do that, they need to produce a superior alternative browser to IE that also does a good job with "IE-specific" extensions. That browser would have a chance of gaining market acceptance, and if it could do more using the W3C standards than using MS techniques, people would start to realise that and move towards them. But in the meantime, there's no point coding for a standard that most people don't follow on purely ethical grounds, if you're in business trying to make money (which most IE-specific web sites are).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Nope. Outlook Express has certainly been vulnerable to an embarrassing number of exploits, but it's a distant #2 to Outlook itself. Despite the similar names (that's a rant for another day) they're completely different programs.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Thanks for the tip. I'd thought about setting up my own style sheet, but I kind of like seeing s. I've only seen one in about a year browsing with Mozilla, and now it's cool to see how little the tag is actually used. Maybe if people start using it again I'll have to disable it; right now it's like a window into a forgotten world.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Yes, u're right. Heh.
You caught me not paying attention to the details of my own post. *GUILTY*
I use 'ur' not only because I can type it much faster, but it also saves me from having to check between your and you're. Unfortunately, I'm a little obsessive about keeping those two correct, so 'ur' saves me a lot of thought-bandwidth.
Thanks for being tactful about it. My sig doesn't apply to you.
Okay, that's not terribly interesting to know. Im not that insightful today.
"Derp de derp."
Please stick with your 15 inch black and white TV and your Vic-20. There is nothing to be had for you.
I will continue to use opera on my bleeding edge ultra fast computer, and enjoy my surfing more.
Also: If you buy Opera, you get Mulberry half price. If you buy Mulberry, you get Opera half price.
If you want both, make sure you buy them in the right order.