Slashdot Mirror
Opera Releases Version 7 For Linux
Wee writes "I happened to notice this morning that Opera 7 for Linux has been released. New features include fastforward and rewind, the ability to take notes in conjuction with web pages, a cookie manager, a password manager, and a very serviceable integrated email client called M2 (which was previously only available for the Windows version). Version 7 of Opera also represents a complete code rewrite, from the rendering engine up, and the improvements are fairly significant. Mirrors for debs, rpms and tarballs are on Opera's download page."
Does this version still display the MSN homepage in Sweedish Chef?
All of that new functionality, and I still can only send the equivalent of postcards -- Opera's M2 Email client doesn't have any support for PGP or GPG at all.
:)
While their initial betas were pretty shaky, this "gold" build is very stable and looks terrific. Once they get the PGP/GPG thing sorted out, I'll have to evaluate it against Mozilla and see which I like more
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
No, but its definitly worth paying for.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
True it may not be open source, But No one claimed that it was free software. Heck, the title for slashdot even says, News for nerd, Stuff that Matters. It dosent say, all free software.
Great. By releasing this newwer version of Opera, they are helping them get themselves more credit in the browser market. This will make it harder for designers to make the point that IE is the most used browser, so we will target only them, an idea of the past. Its hurting the Microsoft monopoly. I support this move all the way. It will make content more execessable to Linux users, but in the process will force people to make their information accessable to everyone without IE by weaning away from their IE only technologies (like VBScript, ActiveX controls, ASP.NET objects designed just for IE, and a number of other MS only techs). I don't personally like Opera but I use Mozilla (mostly the Firebird/Phonix version).
No.
To fix this, you have to "rpm -Uvh openmotif21-2.1.30-6.i386.rpm" from one of your Red Hat install CDs (yep, the older openmotif21 RPM is not installed by default on Red Hat 8.0). Sadly, this crucial dependency problem is not mentioned on either the download page or the FAQ, but is buried in their knowledge base here. Hope this helps folks struggling out there...
I used to use Opera a lot. Primarily due to the fact that I could have it open up with all my web pages at once. Now that I can do this with Mozilla, I no longer use Opera. The only thing I still miss are the mouse gestures.
Warning! The slice of pizza I had for lunch wasn't free either.
Some things are just worth paying for.
The days of journalistic integrity are gone. How does the NYTimes manage to maintain their position at the top of the newspaper food chain? Well, they make up stories, but thats an exception (well, they and Fox). How does Slashdot afford all those fancy newfangled features, like "graphics" and "icons"? Simple. By allowing their opinions to be bought by Opera.
It gets a lot of play because it's a cool piece of software and a lot of people use it. Their licensing model is about the very opposite of Microsoft's: use it for free and look at a small ad (that your eye will not notice after a week), or pay a bit and don't see the ad. I somehow can't see Microsoft adopting this.
No, it's not free. So what? This is a geek news site that discusses things of interest to the community, not a Free Software site. You don't complain when articles about Unreal Tournament and Neverwinter Nights get posted, do you?
As a user of Opera since v.3.something, I'm nothing but impressed by how it's improved. It's a lot better at getting to most sites, especially if you tell it to pretend to be IE in the agent string. I don't do online banking, so I can't say how well it works everywhere. I sometimes have to use IE on a page it doesn't like, but it's damn rare.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
# ln -s ../../X11R6/lib/libXm.so.3 /usr/local/lib/libXm.so.2
# ldconfig
# rpm --nodeps -ivh opera-7.11-20030515.4-shared-qt.i386.rpm
Works perfectly, as far as I can tell.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Have you tried Optimoz Mouse Gestures?
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
I'd have to venture that part of the problem, if you want to call it that, is that a good portion of users that use "fringe" browsers don't WANT flash, and so don't encounter any problem. I certainly don't need advertisements barking at me, so I would consider having Flash not work a bonus.
Just a thought.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Check out the Mozilla Mouse Gestures project. I don't use Opera, so I'm not sure if it reproduces all Opera gestures, but knowing Mozilla, there will be a very awkward but powerful way to customize it the way you like... - Eric
It's good software. Being closed or open doesn't matter to many people as long as the software is good. Quite a lot of Mac software (including the OS itself) isn't open, yet you'll see plenty of it here for that same reason. Opera is incredibly fast, very stable and secure. It's not IE, and so represents choice. It's cross platform. It's highly configurable. Lots of people use it, especially those not quite "in the mainstream" (geeks; Slashdot's target audience). Pick one reason I guess.
As far as needing another browser for MS-centric stuff, well I suspect you'd have the same problem if you used Moz, Konqueror, Netscape 4, or anything that isn't IE with MS Money and such (in fact, you'd probably have issues even with older versions of IE). I've seen some issues with sites and online apps that cater exclusively to IE. And since IE isn't available for Linux I have no choice but to find alternatives. Ecommerce hasn't been a problem, however. I've shopped online at about every major ecommerce site you could probably think of without any issues I can recall.
Is this one of those nested advertisements?
No. They may exist, but this isn't one of them. At least nobody paid me to submit it. I literally happened to go to opera.com this morning to insatll the beta of version 7 on a new machine and saw the press release about 7 going gold. Figuring that other people on Slashdot might like to know about it (see above), I submitted it. I also recalled seeing the 7 beta get a mention a few months ago (which is what caused me to go an grab the beta, actually) and I figured folks here would like to know about the final release version too.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Opera Software ASA
Waldemar Thranes gate 98
NO-0175 OSLO
NORWAY
Haven't you hung around these type of people before? The more obscure a product and the less people use it, the cooler you are. Example:
.. 1998. Besides everyone knows the GPL is evil. Personally I'm using Mac OS X on my iBook. I bet you don't even know how to unload a kernel extension. Hell, my *wife* uses Linux.
circa 1998:
Bob: I use Windows.
Bart: *nose in the air* Hmm. I hope you enjoy your indentured servitude, Gatesophile. I bet you can't even compile a kernel. Hell, my *mom* uses Windows.
circa 2002:
Bob: Linux really is great, I think I'm giving up Windows for sure.
Bart: *nose in the air* Hmm. Linux is all right, but monolithic kernels are so
circa 2005:
Bob: Wow, you're right Mac OS X Bobcat 10.5 is awesome, I love how my PowerBook's desktop automatically transfers to my iPad whenever I unroll it.
Bart: *nose in the air* Mac OS X? Please, it hit its peak at 5% market penetration. Now it's just another piece of closed source software. Personally, I use GNU/HURD. Hell, my *son* uses Mac OS X.
Bob: I bet you use Opera don't you?
Bart: I certainly do. Version 10.0 finally supports CSS style sheets. I bet you don't even know what that is, trendmonkey.
I've been using, and paying for it, on Windows since version 4.x. I've been using it on Linux since the day the first technology preview came out. I think I've had a good amount of time to see it evolve, along with all the other browsers. For me, Opera has always been on the cutting edge.
Opera had tabbed windows five years ago. Opera (I think) invented mouse gestures. Opera was the first with a cookie manager and had settings for privacy issues before it was an issue.
Opera has had a popup blocker for longer than anyone.
If all these features sound familiar, because Mozilla/whatever has them, it's because those 'other' browsers are just now catching up.
There is a new feature in this version of Opera called 'FastForward/Rewind' that, astonishingly, works really well. I would expect Mozilla to pick this up in about a year.
If you don't like the look and feel out of the box, you can change just about anything regarding Opera. I like having my location bar on the bottom, so that's where I put it. I have my tabs down there, too. I can put my button bar at the bottom, but I prefer it on top. I don't like skins, so I turn them off. It's a browser how I want it.
Back in the day, Opera sold itself on size alone. When Internet Explorer and Netscape clocked in at 10 megs plus, Opera for Windows fit on a floppy (sans Java, of course.) It's not currently small enough to do that, but it is still much smaller than any other browser, and takes less resources. It is not a memory or drive space hog. It is small, fast and sleek.
For this alone, it's worth paying for. Mozilla/Netscape are still whores to M$ as far as I'm concerned, and even Phoenix/whatever is getting too big and klunky.
Innovation in the browser market costs money, and I'm more than happy to put a few bucks into Opera. The tradeoff on price is that I don't have to have my browser core dump a few times every day, and I don't have to beta test software for them. This software is consumer grade, not nerd grade, if you catch my drift. I love it, and you should love it to.
Maybe it's because I've been running it so long, but I've never had any real problem running plugins, especially Flash. When you rpm your opera, it tells you the Motif version you are missing. A slashdot user of average intelligence can search opera.com for download links to motif. Or follow the link posted previously. Plugger and all it's various codecs work flawlessly, as well as the Acrobat Reader plugin and RealPlayer. Perhaps the only thing I have trouble with is Microsoft specific languages (.asp) but if you're frequenting places that are dumb enough to expect everyone to have a M$ OS, maybe http://www.ilovewindows.com is a better web site for you to frequent.
-mattyj
Opera has a lot going for it.
In the past, Opera made a name for itself by being a smaller, faster browser. That's still true, but now it also has a superior feature set that elevates it above all browsers.
Som of the better features include:
Sessions - allow you to open up many different pages at once, either at startup or at any time;
Mouse gestures - semi-intuitive mouse click and movement patterns that allow you to go back (hold down right mouse button, click the left one), go forward (hold down left mouse button, click the right one), etc, that greatly speed up the browsing experience;
Notes - just what the name suggests; this lets you save and enter snippets of text to and from a browser window;
M2 mail client - integrated mail client with spam filtering and POP3, IMAP, and ESMTP support;
Wand - a fantastic password manager that saves lots of time when logging into sites;
Transfers - a decent download manager; and
Fast Forward and Rewind - lets you navigae forward automatically using the most obvious link (which can great but can also be a bit hit and miss sometimes).
That's not an exhaustive list, it's just some of the features that I've found in Opera that make me love it. Yes, some of these features can be found in Mozilla but, equally, some of them can't.
And while Opera might not be free, it's not exactly a rip-off either. True, there is an ad-supported version that won't cost you anything (and that doesn't impact on your surfing speed - check out the Opera website to find out why) but when a product's this good and "just works", why not support the developers by buying it?
If you haven't already tried Opera then do it right away. Give it a month or two and you'll never want to go back to MSIE, Netscape, Mozilla or whatever else you've been using.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
[checks to see if Satan is skating]
Please help metamoderate.
Or you can use Mozilla and take out the word "about".
I'm tolerant of people overestimating the Law of Accelerating Returns to say that we'll be in flying cars and talking to our quantum computers real soon now, but HURD working in 2005?!?
http://my.opera.com/customize/skins/index.pl?cat=O pera%20style&author=0&perscreen=10&skip=0&search=& show=new
Enjoy! If you don't like those particular skins, they have a lot of other ones, many of which look quite nice. Also, although the button layout and such is different from older versions, it's pretty easy to rearrange them as you like. I don't understand what you mean by "dumbed down the configuration interface," though -- it seems pretty much the same to me..
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Looks like the support has improved but there are still some areas that need work.
Opera also support yet another innovative feature. If the feature is enabled, it analyzes web pages to present a navigation bar where possible. For example, when I browse this Slashdot topic, I have a small navigation bar with these links:
Home (goes to news page)
Search (goes to search page)
Previous (goes to previous topic)
Next (goes to next topic)
Author (goest to all Slashdot stories written by Timothy; i.e. the author of this topic)
Pretty cool, and the user can furhter customize the bar if necessary to have more buttons.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This is possible because Opera has two great features:
1. On Windows at least (I have no idea about the Linux version), it installs cleanly to a directory. There are no hard coded registry keys or such. Everything is under the installation directory.
2. It has a great crash recovery feature. If a PC (or just Opera) crashes for whatever reason, I just relaunch it and it will get me back to exactly where I was before the crash, and all the pages will load from the up-to-the-minute cache.
If you want to do the same, here is the trick:
1. Install Opera to a directory in your USB memory stick, ie, K:\Opera
2. Configure all that you want.
3. That is it. Now, the only thing that is hard coded in the installation is the drive letter (K in the example above), so when you go to the other machine, just issue the DOS command "SUBST G: K:\".
This will give you a new drive named K: pointing to the actual USB drive, which is G: in the example.
Now I have my favorite browser, my links, and the web papges I was reading last all in my key ring. Can't say I can do this with any other browser.
Have fun.