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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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In all honesty, for the past 3-4 weeks firefox has been rendering slash properly for me.
v1.0.2
Anyone else out there, or am I just lucky?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Opera 8 works really well. I haven't had any issues so far. The speed seems on par with Firefox.
One impressive point is that Opera stays up on their security patches. Version 7.0 only had 35 issues since 2002 and they were all patched relatively quickly.
I read a Slashdot article a while back saying there were 6 (?) Firefox developers, only one of which was active. Opera is an actual company with actual revenue and a commitment to their product.
Having tried Firefox, and having used Opera for a long time, I can honestly say that yes, it is worth it to pay for a nice bundled browser package, even if you could jerry-rig a free browser to have most of the same functionality. I'm willing to bet that a few years from now, Opera will still be around. I have my doubts about Firefox.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Once you get used to the mouse gestures, you end up trying to use them everywhere (file explorer for exemple).
;-)
Other features I use all the time are the "disable CSS", "disable Java", "disable plug-ins" and "disable Javascript" options in the quick-access menu (F12). Stupid websites java menus (when simple CSS could do the job), or Flash all over the place, or javascript that messes with the status line (or, god forbid, have crap following my cursor) almost force me to use Opera.
Give me the same features that Opera has in the F12 menu and the same mouse gestures in Firefox, and then *MAYBE* I'd switch.
As for the ads, well... The browser HAS to get them somewhere... If you follow my drift.
And Opera changed a LOT since version 5. You comment about "the last time you tried Opera" is akin to me telling your that "Linux still doesn't have a GUI"...
The real question every firefox user has is does it have an adblock replacement yet. The filter thing they have just isn't good enough. I know this is a heated subject on the Opera forums. Talks of social agreements and ads and the like but I fail to see how it's any different than a popup blocker.
I paid for Opera 7.5 and can use the 8+ series without paying for an upgrade (it's considered an upgrade to 7.54 since there was no 7.6) but I am having a hard time living without a nice adblock utility and therefore use firefox 99% of the time. I am glad to see version 8 has nice XMLHTTP request support though which was my only other reason for not using opera.
After all the bluster from the leader at Opera about making the next generation of IE do the last standards correctly. I would think that his next product would pass the test? Yes/NO...anyone who owns Opera 8 please report if ACID2 passes on Opera8.
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Having tried Firefox, and having used Opera for a long time, I can honestly say that yes, it is worth it to pay for a nice bundled browser package, even if you could jerry-rig a free browser to have most of the same functionality. I'm willing to bet that a few years from now, Opera will still be around. I have my doubts about Firefox.
Last I checked, Opera had about 1/23rd of FF's users. I dunno, maybe that's off... but I think Firefox has passed the flash-in-the-pan stage.
As for the rest, I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but what does Opera have that I would really want in my Firefox? I mean, from your experience, what does Firefox really lack that makes a browser worth paying cash for?
... in fact I was an Opera fanboy. There are still features i like in it that i'm not sure have been emulated using firefox extentions, such as the zoom, fastforward and changing styles on the fly. Even the mousegestures, to me, seem more polished. But... They've taken a pretty firm stance against including an adblock feature (nevermind that they were the first browser with popup blocking, i believe). There is filter.ini, but it's not the same. It's hidden, and you can't block an image with a simple rightclick. It accepts wildcards, but i don't think it accepts regular expressions. For me blocking ads is more important than the rest of those nice features. I don't care if that makes me a "thief" or whatever. I understand them taking the stance they do, afterall, they DO serve their own ads. But, as long as they don't have a good blocker, i won't be using their browser.
I can't get to the page, but I think this is the first browswer with a svg (Scalable vector graphics) renderer. If so, this could be quite the interesting release...
Believe it or not, there are some people who like the idea of using non-MS products, and also like to pay a set amount of money up front, to establish a market.
Opera needs an ad campaign featuring a giant viking woman in a horned helm and bullet-proof brassiere, surfing that internet cloud from slide #17 on a winged horse.
The mist parts. Below, a large herd of "e" creatures on a hillside.
She swoops down, and waves her axe. A large black rectangle appears on the ground adjacent the herd of "e"s. The upper left corner of the box has a grey "c:\welcome\to\troll\tuesday" printed. She waves the axe in a sweeping backhand, and the "e" creatures are flung into the black abyss. She hurls the axe at the X in the upper right corner of the grey rectangle. She smiles.
(can anyone identify the powdery residue at the bottom of my coffee cup?)
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
At 100Mhz, the Mozilla series of browsers lags when simply typing in a text box, because of the non native widgets I suppose. Obviously, this is unacceptable when I can type as fast as I want in other browsers without issue. Firefox also gets a bit tight running more than one tab in 32MB.
On the other hand, Opera 8 is amazingly fast. It easily makes a 300Mhz PII feel like a 500Mhz+ running Firefox. Also, the new interface is very compact when registered, and even the text ads in the free version are rather slim.
Does any of this make a difference on a P4 with 256+MB of memory and a 1280 or higher resolution? Probably not. But slow computers is a niche Opera serves very well.
With Opera, you have most of what you need at your finger tips with no extension hell, and with a tiny download which has an excellent security record (currently, it has no unpatched vulnerabilities, while Firefox does).
The main thing about Firefox that bugs me is the plugins. 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. These appear to be third-party plugins. God knows what code's in them, or if they'll break if you update Firefox.
My second main complaint with Firefox is the horrendously huge Thunderbird. Again, Opera has it's own built-in mail client.
The things that keep me using Opera are:
That's about all I can think of right now. These things, to me anyway, make it worth the purchase price.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I always test my sites with Opera, Firefox and IE.
http://virtuelvis.com/
Actually, Opera has SVG Tiny profile support. It's ported from their cell phone browser and it's a long way the SVG complete profile that Mozilla is shooting for. Also, Firefox 1.1 will ship with SVG support in June, though most of the animation features are not yet available.
As for Opera having functionality built-in, it's really just a difference of approach. Opera gives you everything and you can shut off what you don't want. Firefox gives you the basics and a simple extension system to add any extras. I prefer the Firefox approach because I already spend enough time minimizing systems. I can easily see how one could prefer the Opera approach, however.
I realize it's not a fixed price, but I donate annually to the Mozilla foundation for the same reason. Honestly my donation to MoFo is more than Opera would cost me, but I consider it a genuinely usefull charity and a little extra tax writeoff is fine by me. Hell, even my parents donate to MoFo because I suggested they do so if they find the software useful enough.
Opera state on their website that:
"We've cleaned up our front yard. The Opera 8 interface is designed to make the advanced functions easy and effective to use. Menus, toolbars and other elements have undergone our "slim and clean"-routine. The licensed version has the largest browsing area in the industry."
Admittedly I haven't had a chance to try Opera 8 yet (still waiting for the server to settle down), however if they can get the screen real estate you can achieve with the Firefox-based K-Meleon (in which you can have every single item, including menus, on the one line), then I'll be impressed, and probably switch back. I doubt that they'll be able to back the above claim up, however...
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I usually bring up the case of Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc -- a harrowing story of the man who single-handedly invented business computing as we know it -- but Opera is a good, closer case study.
It's so simple. Opera comes up with the conceptual innovations (say, mouse gestures or tabbed browsing), and then someone can hack up an extension in XUL to duplicate the functionality. Why would someone cough up the bucks to support Opera's R&D? I know I don't.
Granted, futile software patents are granted everyday, sp. when there is significant prior art already, but incentives are really being distorted here. Why would a company even invest in R&D? They can always just begin a company with no significant investment.
This is a schumpeterian collapse scenario, and it's dangerous for the future of technology as a whole.
It's pretty scary. Tell me, what open-source app has come up with a really new concept, if as minor as mouse gestures?
You just described the Mozilla Suite.
If you're looking for a fully integrated browser then you're looking for the suite. Firefox doesn't include those features because that's the reason it exists in the first place: to provide a stand-alone browser without the fluff with a standard, simple interface.
Screw IE.
Meh.
If you want ad/malware-blocking you can install a local web-proxy like Proxomitron to add this to whatever browser you like. To speak in "Firefox language" consider it an ad-blocking extension to Opera, or IE or Mozilla, or Lynx or telnet for that matter. No need to put something as basic & genericly useful as ad-blocking in a browser is there?
Plus, if this isn't enough, you can always install a custom hosts ad-blocking file or a custom ad-blocking user-css file. After all all modern browsers support user-css. I'm using Firefox as we speak, but I've used Opera for a long time and I never had a problem with ads.
As for the rest of your post. Opera comes as big bundle, but noone is forcing you to use anything you dont want. It's not like we are talking Realplayer here!
Incidently I've never had any troubles upgrading Opera either. Why should you have troubles upgrading a browser anyway?
And Opera is faster & more responsive than Firefox has ever been. Using Firefox I still feel impatient every now and then knowing how fast Opera did respond in similar situastions.
So why did I switch from Opera to Firefox? Gmail and my online-banking didn't work in Opera, and I refused to use IE. In the end I got too fed up having to switch browsers. And I needed to get my mail checked and bills paid.
However Im not so narrow-minded I can't see the market for Opera. In fact if there is one thing I hate about Firefox: it's the lousy cache. Loisy crappy only to IE cache. When I press back in Opera, Im back when the mousebutton is released. When I do that in Firefox on my 1GB 2.4GHz P4 I still have to wait several seconds. Which is totally unacceptable.
And for all you Firefox fans out there. Remember all these features like tabed-browsing, popup-stoppers, user-agent switcher, plugin-control and stuff like that which you use to promotote Firefox? Remember how Firefox copied those from Opera? Nothing wrong with reusing a good idea, Im not saying that! But dissing Opera while getting your main attractions from it at the same time... Well, it just smells bad.
Yours sincerely, a less zealous Firefox user.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I used Opera for four years, from 2000-2004, then switched to Firefox for 2 main reasons:
1) Smaller menu bar at the top
2) I felt like a change
To be honest, though, Firefox was a bitch to set up with my three favorite features from Opera:
1)Mouse gestures - the Firefox extension's all-in-one gestures default to different gestures than the opera ones, which was annoying to fix, but not a big deal. Opera's defaults are more intuitive, too.
2) Save session. It took me awhile to find a good working version of this for Firefox, but I loved resuming my session when I closed Opera.
3) Quickly turn on and off pop-ups with F12. Still no good solution in Firefox, as far as I've found.
The fact that Firefox needs an extension for single-window mode is also kind of stupid and annoying. Other people have said this above, but good grief, people, Firefox owes a LOT to Opera. In fact, in a comparison I like Opera more. It's not IE. Firefox is NOT the end all of browsers; it's on par with Opera. Once I get bored with Firefox, I'll probably switch back. And the ad is a small price to pay for promoting a good product. It's a small bar, and if you hate it that much the inevitable crack takes maybe 1 minute of Googling to find.
I personally use Mozilla Seamonkey, which I've been using since 1.3, and even before with Netscape 6 and 7.
You "can" customize Firefox, if you know XUL well enough. Firefox has User Javascript (Greasemonkey) too, as well as Mouse Gestures and so on. But they've been there in Opera for a long time.
Firefox is popular because it is riding on a huge trend, spread via blogs, news sites and general grass-roots marketing. That's something that Opera doesn't have. And even though I'm a long-time Mozilla user and supporter, I'd personally still use Opera rather than Firefox. But I still have my trusty Seamonkey.
And that user with mod points happens to be me, and I'm in a particularly bad mood right now, so -1 to you! Except in posting this that will be undone. Ah well. Opera's a neat little package--does pretty much everything I want it to right out of the box. While it sorely lacks Firefox's extensibility, every time I install Firefox I find myself having to install at least 5 or 6 extensions to get it to work more like Opera (like getting tabs right). Granted, Opera isn't free. But the fact that I was actually willing to pay $40 for it is a testament to its goodness. I don't think I would pay $40 for Firefox (granted, at $0 it's a bargain). (Note: This is not a Firefox bash. I use it gladly anywhere that Opera is unavailable.)
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?
In the hospital that I work in, Opera users are 'faithful', they are 'fanatical'. I had to experience this first-hand when a request came in to set one of our in-house web forms up so that the user could add to a field, but not delete anything. Guess what, you cannot override the backspace functionality in Opera. You can do it in every other web browser in common use, but no Opera. So, I got the rath of the Opera users. I told them that I would be more than happy to make Opera work properly with the form if they would tell me HOW to make Opera work properly. This went all the way back to the Opera developers since the hospital pays a lot of money for a site license. The developers response was that Opera does not and will never support overriding the backspace key because there is no valid reason an honest person would ever want to do that - even if that person was a programmer for a hospital that specifically asked for a page on their in-house web forms to be set up with the backspace key overridden.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Other smaller things I also liked, like how link addresses pop up in a tooltip on mouseover. This allowed me to cut out the statusbar without travelling blind. It can still show during page loads, but doesn't take up space during viewing. A nice touch too was the way tab favicons shrink as more tabs open up, allowing more room on the row.
I've been a diehard Firefox fanboy because of the customizability (and full Gmail support), but I'd like to see some of these features in upcoming releases.
And did Opera influence Gmail? It certainly handled mail in the same way long before Gmail did.
Did Opera influence Firefox? It's right in your face when you start it: That Google search field? Opera was the first browser with such a search field. Oh, and popup blocking? Opera was the first browser with a popup blocker too (it used to be an option called "allow pages to open new windows" or something similar to that).
Opera has indeed had a significant influence on the market. Many features we today take for granted in other browsers were invented by Opera.
And it continues! Opera's SSR solved the problem with normal web sites on small screens. And now Minimo is trying to do the same. But Opera came up with it, and did it first. In fact, most of the things Minimo was bragging about in a recent ZDNET story were invented by Opera specifically for mobile phones.
Clever signature text goes here.
I lag
Opera!
You need to get a more diverse group of friends ;-)
As for me, I will NOT switch to Opera.
Well, that's fine. Opera isn't for every one. It's certainly not for people who don't use the web at all. ;-) The casual web user would also not be greatly advantaged by using Opera. As for me, I will continue to use FireFox, Links, Amaya, Maxthon and (from time to time) MS IE. My browser of choice will remain Opera.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Neither mouse gestures nor tabbed interface to multiple documents were invented by Opera. They "only" brought it to the browser world in a good way. Software patents would have prohibited that and maybe would have lead to several applications, each with one killer feature, but none with all of them.