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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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The question every firefox user is asking: Does it render slashdot correctly?
release date on the dmg download for the Mac is April 18.
Two comments:
1. It is very fast.
2. Keychain integration, so all the web site passwords from your other keychain-enabled browsers (firefox, safari, etc.) on your Mac will be remembered.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Here are the links to the Opera web site and downloads.
screen shots here
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
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.
I use mouse gestures all the time... in Firefox.
Brand loyalty. It's strong with Opera. It's also the only reason I can think of.
Insert offensive troll-style sig here. Please mod or respond appropriately.
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.
The linky got me a proxy error, so here are some others.
...and what is up with OperaMan?
Product page with download links etc.
The Register
The Google
This Like That - fun with words!
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 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"...
This is actually the first Opera version to work on my machine since i tried Opera 5 or something, and i'm all in love now... It's fast, safe and the rendering is nice... Great release..
Bits of News Giving you the latest bits.
What are you on? The first time you start it up it asks if you want google ads or generic ads. That's the only time you're ever nagged about the ads, you're certainly never "assaulted". I also have yet to even be asked about registration. Only "nagging" could be that under the help menu there's a "Register Opera". Apart from that, nothing.
If you want adblocking, use a custom style sheet, not as good as adblock, but it can be done.
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.
No stopwatch. Less features than Mozilla. Lame.
Anonymous poster. Someone who is blind to anything not open source. Lame.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
(This is a partial repost from my own blog entry on Opera 8
Opera is giving away free licenses to people who help spread Opera. That's right, you can get a free license for an ad-free Opera, provided you do the following:
[1] It's actually getting them to visit my.opera.com, but: People should really, really try Opera 8. It's quite brilliant, and in many ways sets the standard for what a web browser should and should not do.
http://virtuelvis.com/
... 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.
Can't you do all of that with firefox? I have the deverloper toolbar and the first dropdown menu is "disable" on it is "cache, cookies, image animations, images, java, javascript, page colors, popup blockers, referral logging, and styles (which is another submenu consisting of all styles, embedded styles, inline styles, linked style sheets, and an individual style sheet selector).e nsions/morei nfo.php?application=firefox&category=Developer%20T ools&numpg=10&id=60
e nsions/morei nfo.php?application=firefox&version=1.0&os=Windows &category=Navigation&numpg=10&id=39
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/ext
you can also use mouse gestures with a FF extension:
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/ext
and finally, I don't get your drift on the broswer has to get the ads somewhere. What do you mean?
My favorite feature of Opera is the preview in a mobile device option. Now that is handy (to me as a web developer).
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
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.
For more information, click here.
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).
You're referring to developers who are working on the Firefox user interface. Most of Firefox is the Gecko core that's shared with Thunderbird, the Suite, Camino, etc. There are more than ten full-time active developers who work on various parts of Firefox (several of whom work at other companies such as Red Hat), plus hundreds of part-time volunteer developers.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I use mouse gestures all the time... in Firefox.
Yes, and so do I. However, I suggest trying them in Opera, the whole feeling and responsiveness is like from another planet. On firefox they're sluggish and lag, Opera responds now.
There's also bunch of other little things that matter. Like going back/forward in history with Z/X, fast tab-switching with 1/2. The whole F12 menu with possibility to turn plug-ins off.
And then there's 'space' which is 'smart-forward' and is a real life-saver with those image-dumps.
Unfortunately not everything is good, adblock is completely missing, and is sofar opera's biggest failure.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
Apparently being pro-Firefox involves being anti-everything else. There's no need for all the antagonism and martyrdom.
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.
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.
The three main reasons I use Opera rather than Firefox are
o Firefox is a dog on my machine, whereas Opera is *really* fast
o Firefox is a dog on my machine, whereas Opera is *really* fast
o Firefox is a dog on my machine, whereas Opera is *really* fast
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.
http://virtuelvis.com/
what about a browser that "just works"?
i've used firefox but it just feels sluggish, even with the tuning programs (why is that even needed?)
and it crashes
and just feels like.. a beta
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.
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 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).
Opera: Download a 5MB program, don't use features you don't like.
Firefox: Download a 5MB program, download a 500KB extension, install, restart, download a 1MB extension, install, restart, download security update for extension 1, install, restart, lather, rinse, repeat.
Opera is better. Besides, I never trust Adblockers: they too often (read: more than zero times) throw out the baby with the bathwater. With an adblocker, you would never see any photos from my local newspaper.
For more information, click here.
Opera's press release. Google cache.
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.
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.
The license key you recieve when you do that is not valid for Opera 8 .
That is a limited offer for Opera 7.x that ran in a german computer magazine.
http://virtuelvis.com/
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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-- INSERT --
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?
They don't "also" work at Red Hat. Their job at Red Hat is to work on Firefox. Google recently hired two top Firefox developers, too, and IBM just posted a job offer for a Firefox developer.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
> 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?
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
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.
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...
Here's a link to the Swedish University Network (SUNet), who mirrors the files from Opera.com.
There are lots of more compelling features. That was just one
I could go on a lot longer, but these are some of the features that Firefox doesn't do properly, even with extensions that attempt to do (some of) the same.
http://virtuelvis.com/
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.
Screw IE.
Meh.
I think he means for Opera. Before v8, Opera had different licenses for different operating systems. Basically, if you bought it for windows, you used to have to then buy it for Linux if you wanted to change.
The terms have since changed, likely due to the changing market conditions. One license is now good for an entire household's computers, on any OS.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
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.
If you fuck up and close a tab you wanted, you can undo. In fact, as long as you haven't closed opera, you can open any closed tabs that you had in the session.
You also miss the new features like User js, ERA, SVG Tiny support, and on windows 2k+ (and I assume soon on phones) the voice control and reading.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
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.
That's not the case anymore, recently Opera switched to a single license system. You can use the license on all your household computers, whatever the OS you are using.
If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson
So you didn't actually try Opera 8. The UI has been simplified, the default install now has less buttons and menu items than Firefox....
If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson
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.
Use the proxomitron or some other ad blocker and keep using Opera.
I find proxomitron works much better than Adblock even though it looks like it`s not being developed anymore sadly.There are plenty of alternatives though.
Now the only feature I would like to see in Opera is the Flash click to play thingy like firefox has.
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.
http://ftp.tiscali.nl/opera/ -- if you can't download it from www.opera.com... I can't... Only I do know we have a mirror.. ;)
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Edward TLS
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.
While I tend to install Firefox on end users computers because it's free I myself use Opera.
As has been noted by others in this thread once you have Opera installed your pretty much done save for configuring it the way you like it. With Firefox you have to install a number of plugins to get that same level of functionality and hope that they will run with the current version of Firefox.
But the real point I want to make here is that while Opera does not have a native ad blocker in place I have always simply used my hosts file as a universal ad blocking mechanism. Dan Pollock maintains a great one on his site and I've yet to find a false positive in it.
The best part about going this route is that all programs on your machine get the benefit of blocking these ad servers or whatever else you care to put in the file. So if you ever have to, , use IE on a website that refuses to work with anything else you are still protected.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I lag
It's strange that noone of the ./ crowd has mentioned that Opera is the best browser for porn.
With the smart use of space button, and ability to load the images in succession as they are linked on the page helps a lot when you are just too... uhm... distracted... to use the mouse.
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.