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Opera 8 Released
bonch writes "After a series of beta releases, Opera 8 final has now been released. Read the announcement complete with download links. The new Opera sports a streamlined interface and several rendering improvements."
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...how relevant is Opera really? The big news, of course, is Firefox. The last time I tried Opera (version 5), I was seriously disappointed, and it had all those annoying ads at the top. Why would anyone use this when they can get free browsers that are as good as, or better, without the adware? Plus, any features that Opera would have that might distinguish it (mouse gestures, I believe) very few people use.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
I know that Firefox is all the rage these days, but Opera has a pretty faithful user base....or did I miss a slash-think programming update, the one where we're supposed to badmouth and laugh at Opera?
News for nerds, editors opinions that don't matter
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I use firefox and I'm not asking that question.
You're grossly misinformed.
Apparently being pro-Firefox involves being anti-everything else. There's no need for all the antagonism and martyrdom.
The good thing about Opera is that it is fast. Its Javascript implementation, for example, is vastly faster than IE or FF.
The bad thing about Opera is that it has bugs. It probably has less bugs than FF or IE, but it does have them, and they are different from the FF and IE ones. As a "real world" web developer you're going to put some effort into avoiding the IE bugs, and probably the FF bugs too, but are you really going to work around Opera bugs? The problem is that 20 lines of standards-compliant code mushrooms to 200 lines that do less when you want it to work on three different browsers. That's unmaintainable.
Also, while workarounds for IE bugs are normally only a google away (often at dean.edwards.name/IE7/) and for FF bugs a bugzilla search finds the answer, for Opera you normally have to work out what's gone wrong from scratch. (www.quirksmode.org/bugreports/ is one place you can look.)
The result is that Opera users see more messed up pages than FF or IE users. Their reaction is normally to accuse the site of "not being standards compliant" - wrongly.
So my message to Opera is: fix those bugs! (Starting with all the ones listed at Quirksmode.) And my message to users is: please use Firefox as well as Opera.
I still wouldn't discount Opera. It has a strong presence on all platforms, and that's important as it provides a single, interface across all platforms, and this will become important as workplaces and homes, too, become more cross-platform.
The rise in Firefox usage has three major reasons:
1. security reasons
2. Seamonkey's perceived bloat
3. trend
Security is never a guarantee. Trends don't last. And Seamonkey, especially 1.8x, is as fast as Firefox, while providing more.
Opera, like Seamonkey, has a strong core userbase, that have been using that product for a long time. I do see however, Safari trumping Firefox, if Longhorn fails to deliver, and with the continued strong showing from Apple with the OS X products.
But we are not talking Microsoft here, who make a minor change and then sell it for megabucks.
Opera 6 was very different to Opera 5. Opera 7 was very different again. And the minor releases weren't just bug fixes - they often introduced new features.
There isn't really much of a difference between Opera and Firefox, especially when you use the plugins with Firefox. But Opera had a lot of these first. Most users of Opera are old users, using it since before Mozilla and Firefox.
I like Opera. It does everything that I want it to do. One the rare occasion when someone write a page specifically for IE (and they are become more rare now!), I still have IE. I also have Firefox installed so that I can use it from time to time.
But a browser is a browser - I can see the web pages I want to see using anything. I'm used to Opera, so I'll continue to use it. I know the shortcut keys for it. I know where certain preferences are located, should I need to change them.
It's a good product, and is well written. OK, I paid for it, but only because I thought it was worth paying for - I even bought a Linux licence, although I rarely use it on Linux (I rarely use Linux itself, unfortunately).
Before you can start saying that a product isn't worth trying or using, you need to try it out. Opera 5 and Opera 8 are not comparable, so try out Opera 8 (you can do it for free) and see what you think.
I won't have a problem if you prefer Firefox, but it would be nice to know that you actually tried the product.
T.
I read a lot of comments here about comparisons between firefox and opera, and why one is better than the other and so on. Some of the comments then discuss the sizes of the businesses ,and how viable they are, and so on.
Please, don't forget that the desktop user experience is only _one_ dimension to the problem - remember that Opera aims its business at the embedded/mobile market by producing a light and fast browser. Don't forget that supporting embedded and mobile devices is more than just "porting to a new platform", so if Opera is well engineered from the bottom up to support this area, then it's leagues ahead of Firefox in that game.
There are many, many, many other markets for webbrowsers other than your desktop - phones, kiosks, consumer products, set top boxes, etc, etc, etc. This is a pretty big market, and probably has a greater revenue stream. Sure, firefox may quote user/download statistics: but just how many of them have resulted in cash back into the business? In addition, remember that someone like Opera may not be able to quote (or even know) its total user base because of commercial confidentiality issues.
If you're a business looking to integrate web browser, I think the nit-picky user issues may be traded off against cost and technical issues, and that's where Opera may have an advantage over Firefox (and over IE/CE).
Features such as tabbed browsing, and mouse gestures come standard with Opera, where with Firefox (at least when I tried it), you're required to track down and choose what plugin you want.
Just a minor correction. Firefox comes out of the box with tabbed browsing. The plugin is just for more options in controlling the behaivor of it.
I think the thing that Opera is better than Firefox in is speed and polish. It's very fast and the UI has been well thought out. Things in the browser work in ways you didn't even know you wanted them to...
As I mentioned above though the lack of decent adblock utility with it is holding a lot of people back. I know there is an adblock.css to use and there is the filter thing but installing and using them are an eyesore compared to how nicely polished the rest of the program is and they in no way compare to the ease of adblock for firefox. I can't wait until one shows up for Opera. I'd use it and not look back.
well, since firefox is actually a descendent of mosaic/netscape/mozilla, which *used* to have 90%+ market share, you could say that the power of the open source methodology has enabled it's leading browser to *lose* 85% market share...
;)
;)
however, this would be interpreting the figures in a startlingly unrealistic and selective way, wouldn't it? i'm not including the mozilla suite, or other appearances of gecko, etc. kind of what you're doing with that ridiculous figure above that looks at one measure of success only -- apparent desktop penetration
why do i say this? opera has an ever-increasing share in the mobile market, an area in which it is light-years ahead of the competition, and for which opera actually *makes money* -- yes, that's real money. firefox has 0% of this market. perhaps it will pick up some eventually, i understand there is a project heading in this direction. so what else... well, opera's rendering core now underpins the latest iteration of rendering for the newly revealed Adobe Creative Suite 2. hey, guess what - they got paid money for that too
so, from what i'm seeing, opera isn't exactly struggling. they have over 200 employees, they have revenue, they have direction, and thus far every interesting new browser feature seems to have originated with them. the mouse gestures, the tabbed browsing, etc. opera did it first -- and i am quite happy to see them provoke yet more innovation in the browser market. heck, even something as seemingly simple as page-zoom has yet to be implemented as effectively on anything else (not counting font scaling -- seriously, the way opera does it is far, far better than anyone else's efforts)
don't think i'm not also a firefox supporter though. i actually have firefox installed, and have written a few extensions for it, the most widely used of which is DeviantLink, which will reach its 10,000th download shortly... http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/10222974/
nevertheless, my preferred browser is opera, i paid for it and enjoy it's superior responsiveness, but i also support and use firefox. indeed, i have encouraged many friends and colleagues to install firefox instead, depending on their requirements. what i really object to is the "all your base are belong to firefox" mindset. it owes a hell of a lot to opera, and it's sad to see people forget that. competition is good, innovation is good, and opera represents the best of that mindset...
Your posts says nothing useful about open vs. closed. All it does is to draw conclusions from dubious arguments. As you can see, Mozilla struggled for years before they stripped down the browser and the MSIE warnings started to appear everywhere. Rather than a simple factor, this whole thing is a matter of combinations of factors.
Also, Opera actually has to sell a product to survive. It has to make money. Firefox was primarily created to grow quickly, and since Mozilla gets dontations from huge corporations like Nokia, IBM, Sun, and so on, they don't have to worry about sales. They get the money anyway.
Opera needs to focus on the bottom line, and maybe, just maybe, it's more important for Opera to have enough money to keep up development, rather than throwing it all out just to grow and make nothing.
Clever signature text goes here.
The application itself has embedded ads (free version of Opera), do you expect they will block ads from everyone else?
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
I found that like many things, you don't appreciate Opera until you've actually experienced what it has to offer. It is one of those things that takes a paradigm shift. 30 Days to Becoming an Opera 7 Lover http://tntluoma.com/opera/lover/7/ After trying out all the features pointed out on this site, I was hooked for good. Anyone interested in Opera should read that. No, it doesn't have to take more than 1 day to go through the guide. Yes, everything there should still apply to Opera 8. New features added since then are listed in the changelog and discussed by fanboys all over the forums. A few things I really like about Opera: -To search for something on Google just type "g something" into the adress bar. You can enter in any operators you would type in Google. Several different sites are built-in and you can add your own. -Text entered in forms is kept even after leaving the page and coming back to it (for times you get an error or need to get info from another page) -Many great skins, all of which you can instantly change the color scheme for. -Quick, sorted search any feild of any bookmark, email, note, or address book entry -Press F4 for quick access to a panel that gives quick access to search, bookmarks, mail, contacts, notes, transfers, window/tab manager, history, IRC chat, and info about the page your visiting. -Completely customizable toolbars and ability to create buttons. -Don't load images or only load from cache. -Disable sound, GIF animations, java, plugins, referrer logging, cookies, or proxies by pressing F12 -Auto-saving of sessions -Mouse gestures, but not just the click-drag ones. To go forward simply hold down the left mouse button and tap the right one. Or hold the right and tap the left to go back. This is by far the greatest user interface invention EVER.
If no browser passes the Acid2 test how was the reference rendering made?