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Opera Gives That C64 Feel
howcome writes "Opera yesterday relased beta2 of the forthcoming 7.0 version. Opera now supports mulitple user style sheets and by selecting "Nostalgia" from the menu all web pages suddenly resemble Commodore 64 (screendump1 screendump2) from 20 years back. Also, there is a handheld emulator to see what a page will look like on a handheld device running Opera. To get you through Christmas, you can also use the "fast-forward" button. Try it on Google (screendump)!"
I have fond memories of dialing up with the 300 baud modem hooked up to the old vic 20. When will I be able to relive that experience?
Predictably, the images are down.
Opera just made a mistake, in my opinion, with that. I liked how they kept the browser streamlined and stripped down; this new feature is, possibly, a sign of creeping featurism and surrender to the forces of software bloat.
Oh well. I guess if I want a simple browser, I should stick to Lynx.
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
Yeah, but Apple still happens to add value, to various respective industries...
Like Final Cut Pro->iMovie, DVD Studio->iDVD, and the iPod+iTunes combo, among other things.
GPL Deconstructed
they've already lost 24 bits
Does this mean that someone is working on a cart based Linux distro? Can't wait to do tar backups on my cassette!
have you even used opera?
the engine is still faster then anything else I've used, and I've just about tried them all (especially on older hardware).
and as for opera not being the best... it's got quite a few people who've *actually* used it for awhile who believe it's far superior to anything else out there right now.
One of the first things to go onto my machine is opera, no matter what OS I'm running.
Sure, the c64 thing is silly... that's what it's intended to be... probably a coder just having some fun one day threw it in there as comic relief.
get-a-grip (not the shoes)
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
Maybe with the C-One us 8-bitters can get closer to a real 8-bit Opera browser... :-) Of course it would probably have to run under Wings or Wheels though
Never say it's impossible, it will just make people want to prove you know nothing.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I realize you are trolling here, but things are slow at work, so I'll just go ahead and answer anyway.
If you can't be the best, do something kind of zany and creative in hopes of keeping your business afloat.
Okay, maybe you have not used Opera lately, but many people, including smart people like Joel Sponsky, would argue that Opera is the best. Considering what a small market they're dealing with (those people who don't use IE and are willing to pay for a web browser), the fact that they're still around should be enough evidence of this.
Hey, I guess they figured it works for Apple and could maybe work for them.
Apple is simply meeting a niche demand for stylish computers that are almost as good a price/performance value as competing PCs. You pay a small premium for a stylish design, which is worth it to many people (e.g., people who wear nice athletic gear or drive Mitsubishis).
I think you're either a) jealous that you can't afford Opera or an iMAC, or b) one of those Linux freaks who thinks they have a right to get everything for free. Either way, you're definitely not older than 16, so come back when you're grown up. Thanks.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
"Try Opera, and stay awhile... staayyy FOREVER!"
The new Embedded Opera looks fantastic for PDAs and cell phones, it basically reverses the zooming features and doesn't drop anything(except superfalous images), CSS, javascript, it's all in there. I hope us Zaurus users can get a free upgrade, I'm finally getting 802.11 for it in a few days ;)
put the what in the where?
Have you been using Opera recently? Like over the last couple years? The new betas are really pretty speedy and also smaller than the 6.x release versions. I just downloaded the last beta and the latest production release. Here they are:
[wee@host tmp]$ ls -l
total 6836
-rw------- 1 wee wee 3588280 Dec 18 16:06 ow32enen605.exe
-rw------- 1 wee wee 3397867 Dec 18 16:05 ow32enen700b2.exe
My boss and I were talking about this very topic. They've apparently re-written the rendering engine from the ground up. We suspect that they use the same engine in the desktop versions as in the embedded versions. Then they tack on JavaScript and Java and the various UI bits to make each platform-specific release.
Whatever they do, they haven't succumbed to to creature feep. They've done just about the opposite: they started fresh and the result is a faster, leaner browser. Of course, I've only used the windows version a couple times, but it was noticeably nimbler than the 6.x Linux versions.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
It's amusing to see retro styles like this coming to our modern computers. All those fancy blinking lights and millions of colours and yet people still enjoy and actively use styles that are supposed to represent 16 bit or 8 bit GUIs or CLIs.
Maybe it's more evident for me to see these trends because I wish I was back in the days Amiga began, though at this age, with more programming knowledge and a wad of german Marks to buy Amiga from commodore. Then I'd hire this aspiring student from Helsinki Uni called Linux Torvalds, lock him into a room with an Amiga 500, some computer running Minix next to another one running some BSD unix, a bunch of programming tools and with an infinite supply of an odd mixture of Guiness/Red Bull. After a few months of hyper-evolution, Linus would crank out a basic kernel and a few nicely ported programs, including word processors and other office relics that were used back in '83, along with some basic GUI. (Think of xfree68x 0.0.1)
After this, program developers would be VERY interested in the Amiga, a system running mainstream office programs based on the proven reliability of unix. Game developers would start to prefer the graphical powers and the motorola processors of the Amiga and Microsoft would be out of business before they even started. Or they'd start to develop for the Amiga, ruining my whole fantasy as it would simply turn the tables, making Amigas with Windows XP mainstream in 2002 and x86 based pcs a rarity, only to be maintained by a bunch of zealots who would make religious fundamentalists blush... :( Dammit, I hate it when I kill my own fantasies! *sob*
Hate me!
How many times is this?
Enough. It's enough times now. Please, dear sweet Jesus, enough.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Use IE and Passport and you can browse like it's 1984.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
No amount of filtering can make slashdot look good.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Why would I want that? lynx is the best way I can think of to browse the web as a handicapped person would. Also, I don't want to open up another browser besides Opera to get that functionality.
Sex - Find It
...for old Raquel Welch movies, not crap rendering. ;-)
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Opera needs MS mouse scroll wheel support, and this is the main reason I wont use it. The response the developers posted, "use autoscroll" on MS mice.
Get with the times, wheel mouse work with Mozilla/Phoenix/IE and Netscape, how about supporting it in Opera?
BTW, I hear it works fine with logitech mice, but all I have is m$ rodents.
see this for well thought out appraisal of opera's ui, particularly vis-a-vis mozilla's ui.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
I'm quite impressed with this second beta. With betas like this, IE7 better be damn good to not get yawned at
It was called Impossible Mission. I was on a retro 64 kick about a year ago and downloaded Vice (a c64 emulator) and several game disk dumps from www.lemon64.com (sadly, they no longer host the actual game disks. I think they ran into legal trouble). Impossible Mission was one of the ones I downloaded.
The truly sad thing is that I was able to beat it again. The first time I tried it. That's just...creepy.
"Destroy Him, My Robots."
*step* *step* *step* *BZzzzzzzssszzszzzt*
*step* *step* *jump* "AaaaahhhhhhAAaHHhhhhhhhh..."
That game was way ahead of it's time.
I'd love to see a modern 3-D viewpoint version of it. I think with a behind-the-avataor camera viewpoint like Tomb Raider it would work well. And of course, the guy would have to do a flip every time you jumped, for no aparent reason.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Don't worry, you can turn all of them off. All I have is the commands (without icons), window tabs, address bar, and status bar. You can turn off the icons, move things to the top or bottom or turn them off altogether, whatever you like. Once you register, the ad at the top goes away and the whole thing takes up no more real estate than any other useful app.
I completely agree with you about the clutter. It's one of my biggest bitches about most modern software - everything is lousy with button bars, speedbars, coolbars, iconbars, minibars, whatever. The first thing I have to do after installing something is turn pretty much all of it off. KDE apps are particularly bad offenders here - the default layout of KWord gives me something like 8 lines of text. What really bugs me is that 80% of these buttons are useless. Does *anyone* ever use the toolbar icons for cut/paste/new file?
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
The nostalgia feature is great.. and completely useless. No wonder people don't take this web browser seriously.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
HyperLink
The Wave (under geos on c128, so it's cheating)
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
What happens when it loads a page bigger than 64K?
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
The parent post did refer to Opera for the Mac. Have you actually used it before? It's terrible.
Version 6.0 was just release (it's a Carbon app that runs on 8, 9, and X), and it's horribly slow, ugly looking, and uses non-standard keyboard shortcuts. I had very high hopes for Opera on the Mac, but this release has all but shattered them for me. It's almost the exact opposite of Opera 6.0 on Windows.
I've been using Opera on Windows for the best part of 4 years, and swear by it. However, I don't even bother with it on my iBook. Perhaps when they eventually release Opera 7 for the Mac (which will be a *long* way off) things will be better, but I'm not holding my breath...
Have you ever built a web page or designed an interface? From your comments I'm going to assume the answer is no, and that you are either a DBA, marketing dude, or otherwise non-interface aware individual.
I do a lot of interactive consulting, and I can definitively say Opera is the worst of the four major browsers available (four being IE, NN, MOZ, and Opera). Why?
1) The "opera speed" is a factor of page caching choices made by their dev team. To that end any browser cna achieve an increase in parsing speed if their willing to put logic behind a caching system and virtually force users to employ cached data.
Remember that generally techies bypass all caching and force the browser to "always download a new version of the page", so folks who want to guarantee they get a current page don't get this speed gain. The reasons date back to the early caching fiascos of the major browsers as THEY attempted to make use of caching to "increase their speed."
Yes, most folks leave these elements active by default and will have faster browsing, but at what cost? It is COMMON for new elements of a page not to be detected, and then the user has an outdated page.
2) Opera 7.0 is a catastrophe. I've tested the browser against a whole bunch of DOM standardized code (DHTML, Javascript, etc.). It doesn't even implement BASIC rules properly. window.open properties? Not supported. Page x/y positioning and detection? Not supported, or when it is it's only in relation to an interior "window" that totally defies standardized browser behavior.
I was beginning to support Opera in all my scripts, but after testing the betas I've been forced to acknoeldge I won't do so going forward. The differences betwen 6.01 and 7.0 are ENORMOUS, and 6 is actually MORE standards comliant the 7!!!!
Thanks god opera's market share is small enough to ignore. If it works for them fine, if not they can scream at Opera's dev team.
-rt
I have used Opera since it was launched many years ago and I currently use Phoenix on Gentoo Linux here at work in production. Both are great browsers, but Phoenix is still lacking in some sense.
One feature I miss in Phoenix is handling both the select-buffer and the cut-and-paste buffer in Xwindows, it only handles the select buffer. Opera does and I need it since I do a lot of cut and paste between web-pages and an internal tool written in Java (only supports the cut and paste buffer)
Another issue, which is a bug in Phoenix is downloading UNIX compressed files (.Z). Phoenix does not save them at all.
I can go on and on with differnces, but I don't need to. Both browsers are good and I'm sure Phoenix will be even better as their development goes forward. Browser wars are stupid. Test several browsers and pick the one that covers your usage. It may not be the same as everybody else chooses, but so what?
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Where is the giant banner add offering something I don't care about?
All joking aside I wish Opera the best, but I couldn't imagine using it when there are other viable options.
Great game, so much fun, and surprisingly full of stuff to do and explore. Or maybe it was just because I was like 8 years old.
... You broke your Shuba!
In any case, I loved that game so much that I bought the book. There's an entire series, in fact. The book really explains what was going on in the game. It's an interesting read if you're a Below the Root fan.
Random and weird software I've written.
Was the C 64 really around 20 years ago?!? It doesn't seem like that long ago when I was playing Bard's Tale on one. Jesus, 20 years ago, that makes me... oh I'm depressed now.
The majority of websites today seem intent on popping up these annoying other windows, which I never requested. Strangely, in Opera I never see this problem.
If having needless application windows showing up all the time is your idea of perfect, you can keep it - I'll take my 'imperfect' browser any day.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.