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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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
You can add Gesture capability to Mozilla. Just get This.
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.
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
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
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...
"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.
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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
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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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.