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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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