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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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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?
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Only thing I miss from Opera in Firefox is the zoom. The Opera zoom is really nice.. it's like zooming a PDF (or.. well.. just about anything else with a proper zoom, really) - everything scales up together. Firefox just changes the font size.
Does anyone know of a Firefox extension that can do this? I've tried Imagezoom, but it doesn't really work too well (particularly scrolling on large images), and anyways, it only zooms up the images seperately
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
All the good features in Firefox (gestures, tabbed browsing) were around for a long time in Opera. Likewise, if you've ever used GMail, you have used an imitation of Opera's M2 mail client. Opera still does many things far better than Firefox (zoom, quick-change with the F12 menu) and you don't have to download a zillion extensions to match Opera's sub-10MB download.
Opera is an innovative company that puts out an outstanding and lightweight product. Google and the Firefox team have a lot to thank Opera for.
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Apparently being pro-Firefox involves being anti-everything else. There's no need for all the antagonism and martyrdom.
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.
> Besides, I know of very few people who use Opera,
> while almost everyone I know uses Firefox
Hmm. I know of very few people who use X while almost everyone I know uses Y...if this is logically valid, shouldn't we all still be using IE?
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