Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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
screen shots here
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
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!
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"...
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.
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.
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
No browsers pass Acid2. So far, the development version of Safari comes closest.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
It supports SVG 1.1 Tiny, yes.
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).
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...
~
~
~
-- INSERT --
> 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!
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/
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.