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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?
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"...
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... 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.
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 8 is even faster than previous versions as well. I have no idea how you can be talking about "bloat" and "more buggy", when clearly, they are fixing stuff like mad, and with three betas and countless previews in addition to that, Opera 8.0 is an extremely solid release.
Instead of fixing bugs? What are you talking about? Loads of bugs have been fixed during the beta tests. It is nothing but a blatant lie to claim that Opera has been fixing bugs instead of adding new features.But so what if they add new features? It's a good thing! Opera is expanding. They can afford to hire more devs, both to add new features, and to fix bugs.
Opera has always had a built-in e-mail client, so the point is moot. Except Firefox has lots of bugs of its own. Just recently, 1.0.3 was released with critical security fixes, whereas Opera is the only browser of the "big three" with no unpatched vulnerabilities.Clever signature text goes here.