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Opera 7 for Mac OS X Preview Released
apetime writes "A preview of Opera 7 for Mac OS X has finally been released. The new version brings Mac Opera up to date with the latest Windows and Linux releases, including the Presto rendering engine, Opera Mail client, Opera Chat client for IRC, and integration with Mac OS X's Keychain and Address Book. After fears of cancellation when Safari came out, this is great news for recent switchers and Opera fans, and another great browser choice for Mac users."
Competition is always good... we can all see what happens to innovation when people say "what good is Netscape when IE is already on my computer?"
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
I'm not saying the developers aren't providing a useful product, it just raises a question in my mind of how worthwhile it is.
Looking at this release, it's not a bad program, but it just feels... bulky. The interface isn't remarkably clean... like a large number of crossplatform programs, it's a sort of bastard, unnatural amalgam of design ideas that don't sit very well with me, at least.
In addition, I continue to not understand the point of writing one application to do several tenuously-linked tasks. Safari, Mail and Address Book are all separate apps, as an example. It's cleaner to provide well-defined applications to do certain functions, and integrate them through communications interfaces than it is to just stick functions X, Y and Z into one ball.
Take, for example, Slashdot itself. Try viewing it in several different browsers. Everyone I know find that Opeara and IE tie for first place in making the site look good, with Mozilla/Netscape 6+ as a close second, but Konqueror as a distant third.
Opera, besides its excellent rendering engine, also has the tabbed interface working in its favor. Sure Mozilla has this too, but Opera lets you reopen the browser after a crash or application close and have all the pages that were open at the time of the crash or close. This is a lifesaver at times, for example when your cpu cooler dies and the system overheats, causing it to halt. When you repair the system and return it to operation, you can reopen Opera and have all the pages you were looking at before brought back without having to manually reopen them or hunt for them.
I'll take Opera and Mozilla over the others any day.
Take, for example, Slashdot itself. Try viewing it in several different browsers. Everyone I know find that Opeara and IE tie for first place in making the site look good, with Mozilla/Netscape 6+ as a close second, but Konqueror as a distant third.
First flaw... you're saying it's possible for /. to look good. It's easy to use once you figure it out, no question, but the designers completely ignored aesthetics (which I'm fine with.)
Second, more important flaw... IE, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari render /. exactly the same for me, with the only difference being that I don't see ads while using Safari. Safari handles all the pages I visit well enough to certainly never think there's a flaw in the way it's doing things.
Opera, besides its excellent rendering engine, also has the tabbed interface working in its favor.
As does Safari...
Opera lets you reopen the browser after a crash or application close and have all the pages that were open at the time of the crash or close.
I've used this feature in the past and hated it. To begin with Safari crashes so rarely its essentially never, and on top of that I'm not sure I want to have everything I was looking at open automatically for the next user if I was too lazy to close all the windows before quitting. Sure, some people will say I was looking at pr0n or whatever, but there is plenty of private stuff accessable through a browser (email, for one). This is a feature that's nice for a small group, definitely not for me.
I'll take Opera and Mozilla over the others any day.
Safari isn't perfect, there's room to grow yet. But the only one of your arguments that held water is a niche feature, and you completely ignored rendering speed, actual browser speed (Mozilla can be downright sluggish... Firefox is pretty nice though), how well it conforms to Apple HIG and whether or not it uses the OS graphic libraries (I'm an OS X themer, so that's important to me and everyone else who applies system themes).
After taking the time to look through the new Opera for a good comparison to Safari so I could write this, I've become more convinced than ever that I picked the right browser as my default.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
Though I'm not entirely sure what the Opera 7 browser brings to the Mac world as I'm mostly a PC user, nor could I say how it stacks up against Safari, but I can vouch for it's performance on Windows.
1. It's VERY customizable. Aside from the hundreds of skins you can download... Buttons, toolbars, panels, etc., can be dragged anywhere you want. There's even a window you can open with all the possible buttons that you can drag'n drop onto where you want them on thr browser. This may not be as much of a selling point for Mac users (i.e. iTunes brushed metal look vs. Winamp's nearly unlimited possibilities for it's GUI/appearance), but being able to alter the browser to fit my needs, instead of having to learn to adapt to the browser's limitations, was very much appreciated.
2. Want to search for something on google? Type "g query" in the toolbar, and you're here. Amazon? "z query". Ebay? "e query". I can barely program, but even an idiot like me figured out how to alter a few lines of code so "t query" gave me the results at thesaurus.com for a word I needed synonyms for.
3. DAMN GOOD implementation of mouse gestures--which of course are highly customizable. I can open windows in the background, open links in new windows, go back a couple pages, with the quickest of movements. I barely even touch the navigation buttons.
4. This is what F12 quickly lets you do.
5. It's frickin' FAST.
6. I can turn off images/stylesheets with a quick click.
7. Userful for when web designing: Opera shows current size of window in it's title bar. Also, checking if a page's code is validated can be accessed by hitting ctrl-alt-v.
Of course it selects all the text in the string. Not too often one's wanting to actually insert text instead of type a brand new URL that reuses the window.
A second click sets the insertion point. Groovy.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
For those wanting an *exhaustive* (and yet likely incomplete) description of what it has to offer, look here.
Oh, and the trolls whining about bloat should get a clue. It's only 3-4MB, browser, mail, and everything else included. It's one of the least bloated apps I've ever seen (possible exception of windows/total commander). When your browser alone is twice that (firebird/fox/?), I don't see what grounds you have to complain.
And while I'm at it, although Opera *is* ad-or-payware, might I mention that it does its advertising in the best way possible: a context sensitive Google text ad in the toolbar. Not annoying at *all*, and it can even be useful occasionally.
And I could go on, and on, and on. But I'll just mention that the default configuration (both UI and otherwise) is halfway braindead (popup blocking *off* by default, when it's one of the main selling points? wtf?), so just make sure to customize it (which is rather simple, and takes only a few minutes).
And since this is a Mac forum, some good OSX-esque skins are Safrad (which I use myself, not because I want to emulate a mac, but because it actually looks good), Sofa King, and Lars Kleinschmidt's various OSX and iMac skins. They're available here. (Oh, and by the way, this is a preview release, and there is supposedly a new default skin in the works, just so you know.)
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
I'm quite in the habit--wether it be in a word processor or browser--of triple-clicking to select an entire string/paragraph.
I hate Grammar Nazi's
You don't have to buy Opera. I haven't. I like the ads, and I click on them now and then. They've managed to get contextual text ads, and google searches into the ad bar, so it's actually kind of handy sometimes. They're even less obtrusive than in windows.
/. to reload every 15 minutes, and every time I check, there's new news. It's a minor feature, but I appreciate it. It's even better now that it works on a tab-by-tab basis. I have several tabs that automatically load themselves at different times. (In the early implementation, everything had to reload at the same time, or you could only reload one tab...it's actually useful now.)
2 things:
1) You misunderstand what I mean by 'inline find'. I don't want a popup panel so that I can type what I'm looking for, I want the search to find items AS I type. If I'm looking for the word 'encyclopedia' on a page, in Opera, I use the inline find, and it's found the word by the time I've typed as far as 'enc'. With Safari, and most other search dialogues, I have to type the whole word, or hope that when I type 'enc' in the panel, I find what I'm looking for right away. Actually, I'm probably terming this incorrectly. Opera's find isn't just 'inline' it's also incremental.
2) 'Reload page every n minutes'. For news and weather sites, I love this feature. I just set
Like I said, I love and appreciate Safari for what it is, a small fast browser. It's light on the bloat, but does a lot, which I can respect. I've gotten to Opera and all the little conveniences that it provides, so I'm going to stick with it, even though I realize that in comparison it's an overly complex monstrosity.