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Opera 7 to be Released for Mac OS X
hoist2k writes "CNET is reporting that Opera 7 is going to be released for Mac OS X. I might have to take advantage of their discount for buying the Mac, Linux, and Windows versions all at once!" Opera 6.02 is slated for release on Thursday (the download page currently has Opera 6.0 for Mac OS and Mac OS X, though it erroneously says it is only for Mac OS). Opera 7 is expected "soon," with no word given in the CNET articles for whether it will be for Mac OS X only.
Because it's good software that's well worth the money. The same could be said about Windows, and yet I still paid for Opera, even though IE, Mozilla, and Netscape are all free.
not on the mac though.... i agree opera on windows is a top notch browser - but the mac version is well behind other FREE alternatives right now.
i'm glad to see opera developing on the mac platform - it's great to see so many competing browsers for a change - but i just don't think they have what it takes to be considered even one of the top 3 browsers on the mac right now.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
The only thing missing from Camino and Safari (or any browser, for that matter) is the filtering power of iCab.
Use iCab for a week, and use the filtering power.
Want to always save cookies from Slashdot, refuse cookies from Doubleclick.net, and expire others at the end of the session? Done.
Want to identify to your bank as Netscape 7.0 and all other sites as iCab 2.9? Done.
Want to filter out images coming from a server named *.ads.*, or images that link to *.sponsor.*? Done.
Want to allow your favorite anime site to open new windows on opening, allow a pictures site to open pictures in new windows on clicking, and refuse pop-ups from everyone else? Done.
Yes, I realize that Mozilla can do a lot of this, but iCab provides a relatively easy to use graphical interface to all of this.
I think the world would be a much better place if people took a look at iCab's Filter Manager.
[I still use iCab for about 60% of my browsing, with Safari taking up the rest. iCab is just getting too slow and is not compatible with enough stuff]
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
When Safari was first released and the Opera team made some moronic pr statement about what Apple should do.... Well in all my years I have never once seen an issue so one sided, and this page will become a repeat of all thats been said - Opera, its good for windows, far behind the free on mac, a shitty port trying to penatrate a highly biased market.
The only way this makes any sense is to conclude that they arent making a dime on the Windows side of things and are fool-crazy and desperate enough to develop and sell something we all told them to shove up their asses.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Download it from here: ftp://ftp.task.gda.pl/pub/opera/mac/602/en/Opera_6 .02_en.smi.sit
I'll agree that Opera 6 for Mac sucked, and sucked hard. I downloaded it about as soon as it got out of beta, but it still felt like a beta version. It was slow and unresponsive, and it crashed a few times (in very little time, and crashed HARD). I went back to Camino (which back then was still called Chimera, I think).
However, Opera 7 on both PC and Linux has been a HUGE improvement over O6. Hopefully these improvements will carry over to MacOSX. Afterall, they have a lot of competition on a small market with Macs (Mac users, however, seem to pay for shareware more readily than PC users). If they still want to compete, it must be because they feel they *can* compete, and they are confident that their product is better than the other parties' offerings.
So anyway, I'd wait till I see it before I say that it's going to suck.
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
Identification options?
URL Filtering?
Privacy options?
All with a "relatively easy to use graphical interface?"
Have you tried OmniWeb yet?
OmniWeb has all these great features and more. The Omni Group is a cool company; I recommend you check out all their cool applications. You can get a one-day trial license at the store. They update OmniWeb much more frequently than the iCab developers. They're working on a WebCore-enabled (Safari's core) browser now. I liked iCab a long time ago (four years or more), but it was too stagnant and buggy for me to stick with it.
I don't really want to rag on Opera as it is given for free (assuming you don't mind a small ad), but there really is no room/place for it in the Mac market. Safari, Camino, Mozilla, Omniweb... the list goes on. While the OS X browser scene was once so barren that IE was one of the best choices (thank you Omniweb for saving me from IE), I would use any of those browsers I mentioned for daily use if I needed to. (I'm basically using Safari, with a little Camino still.) Hell, even Phoenix/Firebird is coming. It renders like none other, although the dev team has violated certain unbreakable rules at this time. (COMMAND-H SHALL HIDE THY CURRENT APPLICATION!!)
On the other hand, Opera for Mac is a piece of shit. I admit having never tried it on Linux or Windows, but I can't see how anything related to its Mac version could be considered a passable browser, let alone one worth paying for. The UI is neither intuitive or graphically pleasing. The customization in other browsers is not present. There are no tabs. It renders well most of the time, but fails miserably on some tables in my experience.
If they were smart, they would quit whining at Apple for releasing a superior product and stick to the Linux/Windows market. Until there, I'm just happy it is their money being thrown away, not mine.
And there was much rejoicing in the land.
And then they ate the developers.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
This means Apple won't be going out of business! I know well over a kazillion individiuals who were waiting to buy a Mac, anxious to use it's unique suite of photo, movie, and DVD tools, not to mention the Apple Music Store, but when they found out that there was a fast, reliable broswer that WASN'T skinnable, they became suspicious.
"No Opera!?" they said, "No thanks!"
On report of this news, Smith Barney raised Apple stock to a new "Super-Buy" rating, and gave candy to everyone.
Leave me alone. I'm on NyQuil.
iCab is just getting too slow
Hmmm...could it be all the filtering rules it has to process just to open a URL?
I like Opera, a lot. It's my primary PC browser and my primary Linux browser. My main computer is a mac, and while safari is my primary mac browser, I still use Opera a fair bit.
I'll never register Opera though because, even with a 35% discount for registering for multiple operating systems, I think it's just cheap for companies to charge you more than once for their software. A good example of a company that does not do this is Blizzard, who ships the Mac and PC versions of their game on the same CD.
Obviously their are additional costs in developing for multiple platforms. But there are also three potential ways to increase revenue:
1. more platforms means more potential users, and thus more sales
2. multi-platform users will be thrilled to use multi-platform software, increasing the chance of a sale
3. sell multiple copies to multi-platform users
Number 2 and number 3 are in competition. I'm not thrilled to pay for the same software 3 times over. I'd have registered long ago if it was one payment for all 3 operating systems. Personally, I think Opera would make more money if they didn't charge for multiple OSs.
---
I support spreading santorum
And the only thing missing from iCab is ...
/really/ weak rendering engine in a very, very long time.
Remotely good CSS1 and CSS2 support.
Good JavaScript implementation.
Good interface.
Multithreading.
Tabs.
iCab is a dinosaur. It hasn't had any improvements to its rather--okay,
It's a good thing I can filter all of those sites I can't render properly! Whew!
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
I once tried to convert someone by this messy, :D, but :)
lengthy and biased comparison of opera 7
and firebird. Unfortunately, I failed
still.. Opera rules, and personally I would not
even consider using an apple before opera software
had a good opera browser on there.. which apparantely
they still don't? Sounds stupid, but it's true. OS X
sounds very tempting in some ways, but no way in hell
am i gonna even think about making a switch unless
opera's on.. and the GOOD opera..
Just trying to make the point that for many, the browser
has become more important than the OS itself..
Documentation (Opera 2 - Firebird 1):
Firebird's documentation is good, but getting there is
confusing; the only place help takes you to is the release
notes, and from there you have to browse around till you
find the link for a third party site documentation.
Not good enough. Opera has good, accecible documentation,
and it is also off line: you can pick contents, keyboard
and mouse help directly from menu.
URL accecibility (Opera 2 - Firebird 0):
I don't neccesarily like to have an adress bar up as that
wastes my space at low resolutions. In opera, pressing
f2 brings up a dialog box with dropdown history and
autocomplete. In Firebird, I cannot find anything similar.
A real shame if you ask me, and even IE can do this.
Mozilla has this, though.
GUI customizability (Opera 2 - Firebird 1)
Opera's GUI is very configurable, and a joy at that too.
You can zoom the big set of buttons, customize the text
position, add and remove search fields as well as status
bar fields and a field for clock and zoom. And unlike
Firebird, you can do drag and drop all these elements,
unless you choose to lock them down. Opera also has a
navigation bar, and all bars can be placed in different
places. Not even a contest actually.
Skin (Opera 2 - Firebird 1)
It is more of a hassle to both download and change skins
in Firebird. Also, Opera has the very cool feauture that
you can change the colour scheme of any skin, as well as
turn special effects on and of.
Tab (Opera 2 - Firebird 1)
The tab interface in Opera is simply better. Besides just
looking better, they have better mouse and keyboard
accecibility, and a visual changer as well. Also, it is quite
limiting that in Firebird you cannot choose to open a tab in
foreground. Firebird's reload tab options are a little more
accecible than opera's though, but opera on the other hand
has a handy close all but active tab function.
Status bar (Opera 2 - Firebird 0)
Love this one. Opera's only shows up when a page is loading,
as under normal circumstances, that's the only time you'd need
the status bar! So, this saves space, but if you don't like it's
customizable. Also, opera's can be placed both at top and bottom, and shows lots more information than firebird's. Oh, and many use the status bar for checking out where a link points to and stuff: but in Opera, you can have this information show up in tooltips, so as I said I really love Opera on this one.
Mouse gestures (Opera 2 - Firebird 0)
Well, firebird don't have them by default. Opera's are almost perfect and even customizable. The downloadable gesture plugins for Firebird don't quite do it for me either.
Update notification (Opera 0 - Firebird 2)
Firebird has customizable notification of site updates. Opera has no such functionality.
Context functionality (Opera 2 - Firebird 1)
In Opera, mark something, and by right-clicking it you can search it through a search engine of choice, translate it, or look it up in an encyclopedia or a dictionary. Instead of pasting a link and then pressing enter or clicking go, you can just choose paste and go in the context menu. Double clicking a word also brings up the context menu for easier access. Otherwise the context menu's in Opera are much more filled with options, and at least
OmniWeb has all these great features and more.
On your advice, I downloaded OmniWeb and gave it a try for about ten minutes. From what I can tell, OmniWeb cannot do half of what I listed in my original post.
These comments are what I was able to find after playing around for ten minutes. I migh tbe wrong on some of these, but I was not able to figure out where to change some of these.
Want to identify to your bank as Netscape 7.0 and all other sites as iCab 2.9? Done.
OmniWeb only seems capable of changing the value globally. You are not able to set it on a domain by domain basis.
Want to always save cookies from Slashdot, refuse cookies from Doubleclick.net, and expire others at the end of the session? Done.
Am I only able to do this when the server tries to save a cookie? I would rather be able to set these up (and edit the filters) in a seperate window. OmniWeb seems to allow me to edit and delete cookies, but not work with the cookie filters themselves.
Want to filter out images coming from a server named *.ads.*, or images that link to *.sponsor.*? Done.
OmniWeb does seem to be able to do this. I do like iCab's ability to filter an image from the contextual menu, though. Right click "Image:Filter..." and set it up right there. OmniWeb also apparently only has default ad image sizes, where iCab will filter based on any size you want.
In addition, OmniWeb seems to only be able to filter based on the server the image is coming from, and not the server the image is pointing at.
Want to allow your favorite anime site to open new windows on opening, allow a pictures site to open pictures in new windows on clicking, and refuse pop-ups from everyone else? Done.
Once again, this only seems to be a global setting, and not changable based on the site you are looking at.
OmniWeb also does not seem to support tabs.
In all, OmniWeb's filtering power is pretty weak compared to iCab's. I suggest you download a copy of iCab and see aht I am talking about.
[Note to everyone else who is responding to my original post - I am not saying everyone should use iCab. It is slow, and not compatible. I mention these two problems in my original post. Instead, I was writing to suggest that other browsers would come a long way if they were to copy some of the features found in iCab.]
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
While the parent does at a glance seem to be a troll: sweeping statements, needless vulgarity and mean spirited ranting, in this case the man is correct. Opera is a piece. When they said they were leaving the mac community in unison the community responded with raging apathy and honestly if you cant find a good browser (hell, a great browser) for the mac platform today then you probably work for the opera team.
Well If my choices are between: Cyberdog, Netscape 4, AOL, Opera, and MSN for OSX.....I guess I might pick Opera, but I sure as hell wouldnt pay for it.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
I'm sorry but OmniWeb cannot even come close to matching the control power that iCab provides.
iCab is a control freak's dream. iCab is the benchmark that all others must follow when it come to features.
I personally love it for its comprehensive contextual menu options and its compressed web archives but there is so much more in the thing.
There is still a fair way to go but for a one man show, it's a miracle it got this far in such great shape.
I happen to be a registered user and as such have access to the Betas, and believe me they come thick and fast. There may be a perceived delay on the Preview releases but that doesn't mean development is not forging ahead at a rapid pace.
The latest betas have some much wanted ('trendy') features in them. Version 3 promises a lot more on the compliance front but I don't know when that is planned for release.
If your requirements put features over near100% compliance then iCab may be what some people are looking for. I'm perfectly happy to see some wonky sites (because of iCab's CSS shortcomings) in return for its productivity boosting features.
That of course is if the sites you visit regularly work well enough in iCab (around 95% of mine do).