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Opera 9 with Widgets and BitTorrent Now Available
ZarK writes "Technical Preview 2 of the upcoming Opera 9.0 browser is now available for download. In addition to the general bugfix and rendering improvements there's also new features, like x-platform type widgets, improved content blocking, bittorrent support, thumbnail preview of tabs and more. Improved functionality also comes in the fact that a good lot of the scripts from userscripts.org will now work, advanced settings have improved in opera:config, and more browser customization is available at the opera community. However, some clear indications that this is still an alpha release is the experimental support for NTLM which breaks the proxy functionality for some users, and the fact that widgets are always on top."
Finally! A browser with native support for BitTorrent downloading. This is certainly a positive thing, especially given the superb functioning of Opera's download system, at least compared to other browsers. Good move, Opera.
- Frans.
Well, I've got to admit, my knee-jerk reaction to this was so what. The main browsers are already so intrenched in my habits, from the way I author html to my day-to-day use of the browser that it is unlikely I will care about another application unless it captures a significant share of the market thus forcing me to care about any quirks it may have in behavior and compliance to standards. But after reading the list of features, I find myself thinking I might be interested in some of them. Site-specific prefs are an interesting idea; A torrent client would be handy; the ability to change the default search engine is nice too. It looks like I'll try it out.
Now that Opera has removed the ads from their browser, and added these other features, it has become a real competitor to Firefox.
The Firefox developers will really have to step up to the plate with the upcoming Firefox 2.0 release if they want to retain the marketshare they currently have. Firefox will have to show some pretty serious speed improvements, and far better memory management. It can't leak memory at the rate which the current 1.5 releases do.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"However, some clear indications that this is still an alpha release is..."
Nightmarish grammar aside, the biggest clear indication that this is not final is the "Opera 9 Technology Preview 2" title on the linked page. Also, there is the fact that it is Opera labs, not the main site. Contrary to what the title would lead you to believe, this is just an open beta.
The big splash is the widgets. I am of the opinion though that the widget concept is being overdone completely. Now, you can have start.com widgets running in your Opera browser with widgets on your OS with widgets (either OS X Tiger's dashboard/Windows Vista Beta Sidebar or via third-party stuff a la Konfabulator/Superkaramba/Object Desktop). Enough alreay. How many different ways do I need to get my local weather forecast?
I've been using the FreeBSD release today, and my gosh, does it ever fly! It doesn't feel as responsive as Konqueror, but it still is a fantastic browser.
The email client is vastly improved, and it feels much quicker than in previous releases. It was quite quick at listing my 1800 MB mailbox, and it's now possible to scroll through the entries at a rapid pace without delay.
The opera:config feature is quite nice, and presented very well. It's far nicer to view than the comparable about:config capabilities of Firefox, yet just as easy to locate and modify preferences.
Overall, this release is an improvement over the last, while still retaining the small size and high responsiveness that Opera is known for. I give it an A+.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Opera has been a worthy competitor for a long time, but what keeps amusing me is that they pack 10032894208492 features, and a pony, into the browser, and it still does not feel bloated (not compared to some apps, that have two features and a eye candy interface which makes your eyes fall out).
Don't like using one program for browsing, mail, and bittorrent? Then don't. Just use the browsing capabilities, and the rest of the features will be sufficiently hid away.
Dvorak on Doomtech
This really won't matter until all BT clients support web-seeding, that is, seeding peers via HTTP without the need for a dedicated client doing the seeding. Then every website, even those hosted on shared servers, will be able to easily provide torrents to their vistors and in turn their vistors will already support BT without extra software to install. AFAIK only BitTornado supports it and I really dislike that client. This is a crucial step for BT to really prove itself to be useful for more legitimate purposes.
Heh..
In reference to the previous ver 8, the CEO promises to swim from Norway to USA, with a brief stopover for mom's hot coffee in Iceland. That is, if the download reaches 1,000,000 in 4 days..
Apparently it did! I remembered downloading a copy, in a bid to see such sport, but alas..
Press Release
Previously, it was reported that the attempt failed due to various reasons, including physical condition. Let's hope he's is fitter this time around.
Yeah, no malfunctioning support raft.
Swim Attempt Report
Sincere regards to Opera Team..
-PS Crazy stunts like these are really fun!
Will sys-admin for food
As a programmer, I also wonder how they designed the engine to be soooo fast, that even makers of other browsers cannot figure out how to replicate what makes Opera fast, into their browsers. Can anyone enlighten me?
This could change the perception and add a new twist to the RIAA lawsuits against P2P users...simply because P2P would now be given credit for helping all kinds of content providers overcome their bandwidth problems.
Think...seeding/leeching CNN homepage
This release of Opera offers excellent support for CSS, CSS2, and even CSS3. Many have suggested that it is, at this point, superior to that offered by any existing browser on the market. Of course, this is the cutting edge of their product line, so one would expect it to be at the top of its game.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Question: why has Opera managed to incorporate Bittorrent support into their browser, yet the only torrent plugins for Firefox are in a horrendous state of pre-development? WTF is going on here?
The Opera preview is very nice, and they've done very nice work packaging it up. You can download it just about any way you'd want it.. deb's, rpm's, etc. I like the preview of the tab when you hold your pointer over it. I like the built-in mouse gestures. They've implemented Ctrl-Enter to complete www.***.com's (though Ctrl-Shift-Enter and Shift-Enter don't do .org or .net), Ctrl-T now makes a new tab just like Ctrl-N.
My only complaints at this point are the fonts/default interface and the format for reading RSS. I love Firefox's drop-down live bookmarks. I don't want to switch to a mail-reader type page to check headlines, and I've never been into the sidebar. I've heard complaints about Firefox's implementation of RSS, but I think it's spot on. Firefox with extensions does everything I want. Opera comes sooo close to having all the features I want even without extensions, but the default UI feels congested and I can't filter my news the way I want to. If I wanted to read news in a mail reader I'd subscribe to email lists.
Here's to hoping the final version fixes some of this.
I just tried it and the results look very good next to the reference image.
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
I tried this out today, and I'm sold. After seeing stats on how Opera is significantly faster than Firefox in almost every category, I finally decided to check it out. While I miss one or two extensions (Bugmenot and Forecast Firefox), I can do without these. Other than that, the built-in mouse gestures, keyboard + location bar shortcuts, ad block, torrents, better download manager, fast forward (hit the button or press ctrl-x and automatically go to the next page of google search results, next part of any article, ...), and so on means that out of the box it is a firefox killer, and much faster to boot.
While we're on the topic of bonus links, here are some other useful resources for people who just downloaded Opera 9.0tp2:
Widgets user guide
Search engine customization tutorial
Content blocking tutorial
Setup info for tab thumbnails
(Regarding that last one, I am still convinced that tab thumbnails are kind of silly, and that Opera's tiling function is already much more useful. See here: The Problem with Tab Thumbnails)
I can't even imagine how Firefox users can stand the inferior back/forward navigation buttons, and how much delay they present.
With Opera, (pre 9.x, even,) you just click back, and the previous page jumps right up; fully rendered and ready. --With Firefox, you have to wait, and get to listen to the processor throttling up, as if this was Java 1.2 on Win95..
Firef*cks be gone..
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
I am loving the SVG implementation in the Opera 9 Previews, I update information on my blog. TP2 includes several fixes to the SVG implementation over TP1 and TP1 was a HUGE leap from Opera 8.x. Opera now covers more SVG functionality than Firefox 1.5 does, and is faster on my PC.
Opera is the new native SVG implementation to beat.
Something Witty Goes Here
1. It is fast. Very fast. Firefox is dog slow in comparison. At least on my Linux system.
2. It is lean, very lean. 4.7MB and tonnes of features. How do these people do it?
3. It is easy on memory. Firefox has bad memory leak problems. Earlier today Firefox was taking up 300MB+ on my system. I close all tabs and it did not free any memory. Enough is enough. This is the primary reason I am ditching Firefox.
4. The keyboard shortcuts are sane and there are lots of them.
5. It is more standards compliant than Firefox.
6. It now works with maps.google.com.
7. Did I already mention that it was fast?
After quickly looking through v9 I can't see how you can set the default lifetime for cookies to the current session. Sure, there's a nice interface for viewing current cookies, but for me this is a showstopper. Too many sites use cookies to operate, and I'm happy to have them track me for a few minutes, but not between sessions.
Still, competition is good, and this is certainly good competition.
If I went to Opera, I'd be doing it for... tab preview.
And performance.. That's a biggie. But then you lose the warm fuzzies of using an open source program, as well as the guarantee that the program is absolutely not installing any spyware or compromising your privacy. It's always a tradeoff.
Here are some additional links with more information and screenshots, so you won't have to wade through all of the Opera forums to find them:
http://virtuelvis.com/
This was released yesterday, you could have gotten it from snapshot.opera.com This is also when I submitted the story using the new browser wth links to the change log. Though it seems you only get stories posted by Scuttlemonkey if you have a paypal account.
2006-02-07 13:35:26 New Opera Preview Out (Index,Software) (rejected)
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
I downloaded the stable Opera 8.5 a few days ago, and I have to say (as a current Firefox on Windows user) that Opera has an awful lot going for it. It's fast and seems a lot less bloated and quirky than Firefox, plus I've been finding a few features I really like.
But the one issue that kind of blows it for me is the page zooming. I happen to be one of the many people who due to eyesight issues often increase the browser's text size. One thing I love about Firefox over IE is that it has an easy hot key to up the text size (Ctrl-+). In Opera, there only seems to "Zoom", which although it has a greater amount of control, has the unfortunate behavior of stretching the graphics in proprotion to the text (FF and IE leave the graphics at their regular size no matter what the text size is). While I can appreciate that idea in theory, in practice most web graphics are simply not designed to scale that way, and the result is that if you want to browse with enlarged text (which I often do), you have to suffer with ugly, pixelated, and often overlapping images. Not to mention that the text itself renders oddly in many zoom levels. And there doesn't seem to be any option to change it.
It's bad enough that I think the vast majority of people who use enlarged text would reject Opera because of it. And that's a shame because Opera has so much else going for it.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
You can find "Flashblock" for Opera too.
Clever signature text goes here.
Been using this now and tried to find all the hidden goodies, and here's my few tips. Note that all shortcuts mentioned are only tested on Windows:
Hm.. well that's what I've found so far
From http://labs.opera.com/news/2006/02/07/2/
Emerald Astrology
Not sure if this has been shown yet, but I noticed this about 5 hours after testing out Opera9: http://tektek.org/misc/opera9.png Kind of a neat little add-in, not sure how much use it will be to me though.
That isn't quite true. We have been sceptical to XSL-FO, and we still are, but have been neutral/pragmatic on XSLT. Server-side Opera.com has been using XSLT for years and I think there should be different best practices client-side and server-side and I don't think the usecase for client-side XSLT is reducing server load, but when it is used for the benefit of the user it can be a good idea.
Clever signature text goes here.
Check it out dudes - amongst widgets they include bash.org reader (by Opera!). Can you imagine this in MSIE or even FF? What's next? - out-of-the-box porn grabber? Those guys are cool, I guess... (And they know how to program effectively).
I have a difficult time calling Firefox a truly open source project. Sure, the source code is available, and you can redistribute and modify it, and all that. But when you truly look at it, it's a mess. Somebody could easily sneak malicious code in there, and to be honest, most programmers wouldn't be able to tell if it was malicious, or if it was part of the software.
While it's less likely that an open source program includes malicious code, it isn't something we should rule out completely. That holds especially true for overly complex codebases like Mozilla, where it'd take years for one person to completely audit the source code. The source code is available, but it's not truly accessible.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Have you scrutinized every single line of Firefox source? No? Then you really don't have that guarantee. Don't get me wrong, I love open source -- I was a Gentoo dev until I got sick of the politics, and now I contribute to various projects. But it's a bad idea to claim that "open source = no malware", because you can't make that promise unless the code has truly been audited.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
All the features firefox has were in opera before they were in firefox. Why would this be any different?
For your information, you can simply use the + - keys on the numpad (or on the main keyboard section) and it will scale text. Also, next to the zoom dropdown (where you can select the zoom with your mouse), there is a button called fit to window width - give it a shot.