Opera Seeks Developer Input For Opera 10

taskforce writes "Opera Watch is reporting that the folks Opera Software are asking web developers for input on what they think the most important features are which could be added into the next version of the Opera desktop browser. Considering what has been added in Opera 9, what do you think would be most important for the browser from both a developer and a user standpoint?"

Comments

Extensions

[slack_prad]

API for extensions !

Re:Extensions

[m50d]

God no. Say byebye to being the leanest and fastest browser around if that happens. If there are features people want, just add them to the main browser. The only useful thing I've seen done with extensions is as a trick to reduce your apparent bug count - have hardly anything in the main browser, if anyone asks for a feature say grab the extension, then disavow responsibility for any bugs.

Re:Extensions

[CaptSolo]

A way to extend Opera's user interface the same way as FireFox extensions can.

Re:Extensions

[SillyNickName4me]

Opera is relatively fast but not the fastest, and lean? well, not in featureset or looks for sure. It has a relatively small memory footprint for what it does of course.

An API for extentions would mean it can be made even leaner since you can effectively strip off functionality that is not used often and put it into an extension for those who need it. Result, even smaller browser.

So, did you hae any real reason for your response?

Re:Extensions

[Marsell]

Opera is relatively fast but not the fastest

Compared to what? http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html

An API for extentions would mean it can be made even leaner since you can effectively strip off functionality that is not used often and put it into an extension for those who need it.

I'm curious what the point of that is though? The English install is 4.6MB, and you'll find this of interest: http://my.opera.com/FataL/blog/show.dml/298429. If you ignore the multi-language installer, Opera's install size has increased about 500kb over the past five years.

I'd like to point out that such a degree of integration allows a sharing of code that isn't possible with extensions. That's why the size increase has been so tiny despite the significant difference in featuresets between 6.0 and 9.0.

Re:Extensions

[Bogtha]

Compared to what? http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html

It's worth pointing out that the person publishing those benchmarks is an Opera employee. Not that I think they are fabricated, but it's always good to know potential biases.

Re:Extensions

[MP3Chuck]

"It has a relatively small memory footprint for what it does of course."

But does it even have that? I hate to sound like a troll (and God knows that's how I'll get modded) ... but I've been browsing with FF for about an hour and it's currently at about 68MB. I opened up Opera just now ... opened up a few tabs, browsed to a few of my "usuals" and after a bit of clicking around it's right up there at 53MB. A couple big Digg threads and it's in the 60's. To its cretit, however, it does seem to release much more memory than FF does when I close a tab.

Re:Extensions

[Chris Graham]

The Opera devs couldn't possibly add everything everyone wants, for time concerns and other reasons. An example is as a webdev I like to be able to right-click on an open page and say "View in FireFox" or "View in IE", but placing information about other browsers into Opera for all users would be an uglification for most of them. Making it optional for that kind of thing would result in option explosion. Therefore it makes most sense if someone like me goes out and finds an extension for what I need, so that the majority aren't disaffected.

Re:Extensions

[jgrana]

What can be done in Opera with extensions that can't be done with widgets, its own internal ad-blocking system, and UserJS, which supports most Greasemonkey scripts? I'm just thinking of the extensions I was using before switching to Opera full-time from FF. ForecastFox is covered by a widget in 9, AdBlock's replaced by the ad-blocker, and I've gotten the GM scripts I'd been using running with very little trouble.

Re:Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

The WebDev toolbar does everything I need it to do...

http://operawiki.info/WebDevToolbar

Very useful.

Re:Extensions

[m50d]

An example is as a webdev I like to be able to right-click on an open page and say "View in FireFox" or "View in IE", but placing information about other browsers into Opera for all users would be an uglification for most of them. Making it optional for that kind of thing would result in option explosion. Therefore it makes most sense if someone like me goes out and finds an extension for what I need, so that the majority aren't disaffected.

And so instead of an option explosion you have an extension explosion, with all the fun of the former plus having to search around the web, differently organized sites, and having to trust individual authors. Just having the option, hidden away appropriately (advanced tab, or config file only if it's really unlikely to be wanted) is a far better way.

Re:Extensions

[imboboage0]

I understand where you are coming from, but I think your view is too far on the extreme side. Extensions are not always bad. Sure, they can be a developer's nightmare sometimes, but I think it's worth it.

Case in point: I use Firefox. I love some of the extensions. Two examples of these are the GMail notifier and ForecastFox. The Gmail notifier checks my email FOR ME, so I don't have to waste my time looking at it if I have nothing new. The developers of Opera may not be willing to implement this feature, as not everyone uses GMail. However, I don't know what I would do without it. It is definitely one of my main reasons for using Firefox. Secondly, ForecastFox checks the weather for me. It will tell me about severe weather alerts without me having to watch the news for 10 minutes to actually get to the weather. Also, a final extension that _could_ cause issues, but saves me great trouble: IE Tab. It allows me to view pages inside the Firefox browser using IE's engine. All of these extensions help ME, which is why I use them.

For some reason, I can't see all of these useful extensions being added to Opera 10. It just won't happen. This leaves many of us with other browsers such as Firefox for our browsing needs as they can be expanded out past the 'stock' browser configuration. Until Opera has extension capabilities, I won't even think about switching.

Re:Extensions

[Traiklin]

The most used extension for Firefox is Adblock.

you know how fast Opera/Mozilla/anyone would get sued for having that feature as default?

The widgets are ok but they clutter up the screen something feirce. I installed the weather one (only one that appealed to me) and it's more of an annoyance then a helper. It covers up a good chunk of the screen (enough to cover a 5 line block of text) and then when I put it to hide there is no way for me to just click to bring it back to the front so I can check.

Where as with the weather extension for firefox it just sits nicely down in the lower right of my screen for me to hover over and see what the weather is or if it's going to be severe weather I am told about it in a little popup.

after that I have the Video Downloader, Tab browser preferances & image zoom. The Video downloader won't be installed as default cause it would get the opera people sued again (since it allows you to download videos from places you aren't allowed to), the other two could be done by default.

so out of the 5 extensions I use 3 can be done by default (if not already done by default, I never use Opera that often to find out) but 2 would get them sued for being installed by default cause it would be their responsability, where as being extensions they can't get sued because they didn't make the extension.

Even when I used to have a ton of extensions installed (before I got calm and got only the ones I needed) Firefox never went slow for me because of them. Sure it slowed down but that was because i either opened a page that had Java or a Windows Media embeded player in it (still can't figure out what screwed up the WMEP but whenever I reinstalled windows it would fix it) and I used to have 15-20 extensions.

Re:Extensions

[jZnat]

I don't know if this helps, but in Konqueror, the "Location" menu (what is normally the "File" menu in many programs) has options to "Open in foo" where foo are all your installed browsers. For example, mine shows that I can view in Firefox or Lynx (!) since I have them installed.

Re:Extensions

[jZnat]

AdBlock is included by default in Konqueror now, and since Opera has a similar install base, I don't think they'd get in trouble for doing it.

Re:Extensions

[SillyNickName4me]

I'm curious what the point of that is though? The English install is 4.6MB, and you'll find this of interest: http://my.opera.com/FataL/blog/show.dml/298429. If you ignore the multi-language installer, Opera's install size has increased about 500kb over the past five years.

And the size of the installable package I am currently downloading from the opera site is 5.1mb not 4.6mb (FreeBSD version, English language, and no, it is not the statically linked version). That said, the size of the install package is interesting, but by far not as interesting as the memory footprint or actual disk space used after installation (not that Opera does bad in those usually, but I rather think that modularizing it more and only loading the actual modules used will help the memory footprint)

Re:Extensions

[Wildclaw]

This should be possible with the current opera. I'll describe how to add a shortcut key that launches the current webpage in internet explorer. If you want to add it to a gui element (like the right click menu) you will probably have to edit an ini file. Anyway, here is how to add it as a keyboard shortcut, step by step.

* Goto Tools->Preferences->Advanced->Shortcuts.
* (Optional) Duplicate the current keyboard setup using the duplicate button.
* Edit the keyboard setup you want to change.
* Select the "application" entry in the list that appears and click the "New" Button
* Enter the keyboard shortcut to the left. For example: i ctrl shift alt
* To the right enter the following: Execute program, "iexplore.exe", "%u"

Now, whenever you click ctrl+shift+alt+i, internet explorer should launch using the current url as an argument.

Re:Extensions

[MyLongNickName]

Errrm. I am not employed by Opera. I will testify tat it renders faster, faster startup, and much more stable than Firefox or IE. Firefox is fun because of extensibility, but memory bloat is annoying. Only downside to Opera? ESPN has fits with it.

Re:Extensions

[Yusaku Godai]

Personally, I don't find many of those examples particularly useful. I already have both Gmail notifiers and weather indicators elsewhere, and don't see why they need to run inside my web browser. If you were desperate, I bet both of those functionalities could be accomplished with UserJS.

I can see where an IE Tab-like feature could be handy. But Opera keeps managing to improve compatability with shitty IE-only sites. Where it still doesn't work, UserJS can usually fix whatever problems exist--I hardly ever have to use a different browser to view a site. And in cases where I have a choice, I'll usually just refuse a site any business if they're going to design their sites so poorly as to only work in one browser. Fortunately, such sites have been on the decline lately.

Re:Extensions

[Volkov137]

1. Gmail can be accessed via pop3 now. You don't have to use the several applications developed during Gmail's early years when they didn't support it. 2. Opera 9 has a few widgets developed to check the weather, one of which (Touchthesky) is really good.

Re:Extensions

[Bing Tsher E]

If you ignore the multi-language installer, Opera's install size has increased about 500kb over the past five years.

That may be true, but I can remember when one of the boasting points about Opera was that the install binary could be carried around on one floppy diskette. And I got had a paid, registered copy of Opera back then.

Bloatware is what bloatware duz.

Re:Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually possible to modify the contents of every menu in Opera via ini files. You can download third party setups in the Opera community customization area, or if you are more particular, create your own. Take a look at the "standard_menu.ini" in Opera/defaults for reference, then simply create your own and place it in your profile/menu directory. You only need to include the sections you modify- copying the entire default is not necessary. (So, in your case, you'd just need the [Version] [Info] and modified [Document Popup Menu] sections.) Choose your menu setup in Prefs->Advanced->Toolbars, and voila! It's quite remarkable how much of Opera can be changed just by poking around it's configuration files. I hope this helped.

Re:Extensions

[jlarocco]

No.

Re:Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point. I don't care if I have to write the extensions in C/Objective-C/C++/brainfuck/i-have-no-idea-what-la nguage-opera-is-written-in. I don't need javascript+xul, but I want a fucking way to extend the browser!

The Opera devs are fantastic, but even they can't scratch my balls every time they start itching.

Re:Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen that tool. I still dont like it quite as much as FF's web developers toolbar. Its good but one of the major things it's lacking i find is control over cache and better box model options. It lacks on convienience as well. The guy who made it gave it lots of functionality, but not quite so much polish. Little things like enabling or disabling javascript or cache from the context menu, will keep me on firefox still.

Stumbleupon is also lacked on Opera. This is a BIG issue for me. I love that button.

Re:Extensions

[Marsell]

And the size of the installable package I am currently downloading from the opera site is 5.1mb not 4.6mb

Compare apples to apples. I'm not certain what your point is.

not as interesting as the memory footprint or actual disk space used after installation

I agree with this, but such metrics are not as simple to acquire, and nobody seems to have made a histogram of it. Interestingly enough, the size of the installation package is useful to determine the amount of novel code or data, because variations on a theme are compressed better. So they've done a remarkable job working with what's already there.

Re:Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got no idea what OS you're using or what your browsing patterns are, but that's unusally good for FF. I'm using 1.5.0.4 on Mac OS 10.4, and Firefox is currently eating 127 megs of physical ram and over 2 gigs of virtual memory. Needless to say, Opera performs much better under similar conditions. (to be fair, FF has been running a few days and has seen a number of windows opened and closed and lots and lots of tabs).

Re:Extensions

[Petrushka]

The most used extension for Firefox is Adblock.

you know how fast Opera/Mozilla/anyone would get sued for having that feature as default?

Opera 9.0 does have an ad-blocker. (Actually, earlier versions did too, but it's become much more accessible now. It's much more powerful than the Firefox "Block images from ..." menu option, less powerful than the Adblock extension.)

Re:Extensions

[EvilIdler]

I haven't noticed huge memory usage with Firefox, either, and startup time
is the same with Opera and Firefox. When I was using Opera 7.x, it could
eat over 100MB of my memory, and even more earlier, plus it crashed randomly.
Opera 9 merely shuts down on certain Flash sites now :)

I pretty much only use Opera for actual browsing (testing webpages in others),
and I see memory between 55MB and 80MB. Part of this is the memory cache I set,
which is 20MB, I guess.

(Both Win32 and Linux x86 versions compared)

Re:Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been meaning to get something like that working for a while, but it was always "easy enough" to copy the url, go to the Run menu, and type iexplore and paste. Thanks!

Re:Extensions

[vuzman]

From the author himself:

Before anyone suggests it, I got this job after writing my browser speed tests article, and it was not biased. Opera performed well in the tests because Opera performs well. As for whether writing the article contributed towards me getting a job ... well ... maybe just a little bit, but if so, I hope it was because of the effort that went into the honest researching. Considering how many Opera articles I have already written, it is fairly obvious that those were the influential ones, and not the browser speed tests article. I have already had enough of Mozilla/Firefox users dismissing the article simply because I am an Opera user. Please just accept that your browser is slower. My personal choice of browser has nothing to do with it. It really is not that big of a deal. Opera is already good, I do not feel any need to make it appear better than it is.

Re:Extensions

[SillyNickName4me]

Compare apples to apples. I'm not certain what your point is.

You did not specify which installation package you were talking about. Also, the size of the installation package differs between platforms and hence it doesn't just depend on the size of opera itself. I was wondering what the point was of comparing the size of installation packages at all.

I agree with this, but such metrics are not as simple to acquire, and nobody seems to have made a histogram of it. Interestingly enough, the size of the installation package is useful to determine the amount of novel code or data, because variations on a theme are compressed better. So they've done a remarkable job working with what's already there.

This is true, but by the same token the installation package size says little about tight integration of code. Having the same bit of code or slight variations on it repeated throughout the package will compress quite well and not be significantly larger then having that code on one place.

Really, looking at the size of the compressed installation package is interesting for various reasons, but isn't going to tell you much about what is in there at all.

Re:Extensions

[m50d]

The language isn't the point. Out of god knows how many extension systems, I've only seen one (winamp) which doesn't result in a very bloated program. And not one extension system I've seen is without security problems. It doesn't matter what language you use, having extensions messes up a program.

64bit support

[Jack Malmostoso]

Probably it's not the answer to the question, but I'd love to see a native 64 bit version of Opera. As for the argument "there's no 64bit flash", screw adobe/macromedia/$proprietary_technology_owner. The web is a nice place also without Flash. Maybe even better!

Re:64bit support

[LubosD]

I agree. How many people use Sparc version for Linux? Very little, yet Opera for Linux Sparc exists.
How many people would use an AMD64 version? A lot...

BTW check out NSpluginwrapper - 32bit plugins in 64bit browser.

Re:64bit support

[horza]

Seconded. Lack of a native 64 bit version means that the main feature missing is the ability to run it on any of my machines in the first place.

Phillip.

Re:64bit support

[thelost]

I'm not sure how you can say the web is better without flash, to me that is an obviously false statement. Some of the most enterprising art projects I've seen on the web have been flash based. People have got over their first love affair with flash so it isn't being used in the vulgar way it used to be embedded into sites, and now has become an integral canvas for projects like youtube and google video.

Re:64bit support

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Why? Can't your 64-bit kernel run applications in 32bit mode? Why not? (Can't all decent operating systems?)

And why would you even *notice* if an application uses 32bit- or 64bit-instructions? Exactly.

My Mac has a 32bit CPU, but my friend has a 64bit one. I don't see any difference. Does Safari use 64-bit instructions if the CPU has 64 bit? Does the kernel? Maybe, but none of us care, and there's no reason at all why we should.

It's a web browser, nothing more.

Re:64bit support

[nighty5]

Porting the flash engine isn't as simple as a re-compile.

Flash uses a x86 bit JIT runtime compiler, some of the underpinnings such as their garbage collections accomodate only 32 bit pointers.

Its no small task, but with the release of Windows 64 bit into main stream will help move things along.

My guess is you'll see a native 64 version realistically within 6 months, I know the Adobe engineers are working on it.

Re:64bit support

[tomstdenis]

You have to call the the pluggin at some level. If you are in 64 bit mode you are passing pointers and other stuff as 64-bit registers [or stack entries]. If the plugin is 32-bits it won't be able to make use of them.

Yes, you can run 32-bit code in 64-bit mode (in x86_64 64-bit instructions need a REX prefix byte so they're actually not default!) but your 64-bit code has to be aware of what it is calling.

Tom

Re:64bit support

[TheRaven64]

On a real computer, a 64-bit app will be a bit slower, but can access more memory (and other things that take up address space). On x86, a 64-bit app benefits from being slightly less register-starved, and so is often faster. Because of this, it makes sense for all apps on an x86-64 machine to be 64-bit.

Re:64bit support

[baadger]

BTW check out NSpluginwrapper - 32bit plugins in 64bit browser. ...the latest version of which is very stable, the only glitches left are things like YouTube videos not working (Google video seems to work for me but crashes when I resize the window)

Re:64bit support

[Danga]

Because of this, it makes sense for all apps on an x86-64 machine to be 64-bit.

Bzzzt, wrong. If there is no need within the software for 64 bitness then by making everything 64 bit you will effectively double its size and even though it may be faster if it was all 64 bit the speed gain may not be worth the cost of doubling its memory footprint.

As a simple example lets say a simple home recipe organizer is developed, it consists of a way to type in/load in recipes and save them as well as search through its database of recipes. Doubling all integers and pointers would be quite useless. Even if you did something somewhat stupid like give each recipe a unique number (unsigned int) as its primary key and stored everything in a single "recipe" table you would still be able to store 4,294,967,295 recipes before you ran out of slots to insert more recipes. It just would not make sense and would be wasteful to use all 64 bit numbers in this situation since the speed gain (if any) most likely would not be significant.

Now for a memory intensive app such as a high definition video editor it most definately makes sense to have a 64 bit version since it will be working with very large files and being able to natively address those huge memory address spaces would be very beneficial.

It all depends on the application.

Re:64bit support

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Well, but if the app (and its plugins) don't really need more than 4GB address space, there's no reason to not simply let it stay 32 bit. The OS simply loads it in 32-bit mode.

Your comment about the REX prefix: is that like the 16-bit-prefix when in normal 32-bit more, i.e. does that mean I can run in "64bit mode" and use all registers, but still use 32-bit instructions/addressing, i.e. simply have a 32-bit mode with more registers?

That'd be great (a bit like PPC which has been 64bit from the beginning, but allows you to simply only use the lower half of a register if you like (or if your CPU, like mine, doesn't have 64 bits per register :D)).

Re:64bit support

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends. For Win64, most 32-bit values stay 32-bit unless the programmer says otherwise.

Re:64bit support

[jZnat]

I know that the SIMD-like instructions won't help a web browser in performance (video encoding, definitely), but I'm pretty sure that both x86_64 and IA64 added more than just 64-bit registers and stacks; they added even more available instructions including ones that take advantage of the 64-bit registers and stacks (e.g. native quad-words). Since x86's history includes elegant hacks to deal with backwards compatibility all the way back to 8-bit processing, I'm sure that 64-bit mode includes more hacks to continue working the way it does (an update to ModR/M, SIB, etc.).

Re:64bit support

[TheRaven64]

The only thing that has to be doubled in size in an application is pointers. With GCC, on x86-64 ints remain 32-bit and long longs remain 64-bit. Longs become 64-bit, but about the only code that explicitly uses longs is code that was written for 16-bit machines, since longs and ints have been the same size on pretty much all 32-bit machines.

In your example, the recipe index, declared as an unsigned int, would be 32-bits. Of course, this is very bad style. You should make your recipe index a recipe_index_t, and typedef this somewhere so that if you port it to an architecture with different sized ints, you just need to change a header. Oh, and if you're writing something like this, you probably shouldn't be using C at all; there are lots of languages about with sensible support for numbers, so there's no point in writing something so low-level if you don't need to.

The only thing that would be bigger would be pointers, and if more than about 10% of your data is pointers then you are probably doing something wrong.

Re:64bit support

[tomstdenis]

The browser itself benefits from 64-bit mode though. The extra registers makes functions faster as they spill less to the stack.

The prefix works the other way. All instructions default to 32-bit mode in long mode [64-bit mode]. You have to ADD the prefix byte to use the extra 8 GPRs or use the upper 32 bits of the registers. This lets you mix 32 and 64-bit operations in the same "64-bit application". It comes in handy when you're doing things like crypto and have to work with 32-bit words in memory. You don't waste the space, e.g.

A += table[B];

If the algo uses 32-bit words you can store table[] as an array of 32 bit words and use it natively [e.g. no masking or shifting].

And yes, in long mode you can effectively run applications using 32, 16 or even 8 bit registers and use the extra GPRs. They are qword, dword, word and byte addressable [well the lower part]. So for instance...

addb %r8b,%r9b

Adds the lower 8 bits of r8 to r9.

addw %r8w,%r9w

Adds the lower 16 bits of r8 to r9

and so on...

That said, you cannot call 32-bit code [e.g. protected mode code] from a 64-bit long mode program. It wouldn't preserve the proper registers and you also couldn't pass it pointers and what not. This is where you use a "thunking layer". Originally made popular by 16-bit drivers in Win3.11/Win95 [e.g. for obscure hardware] you'd have a layer inbetween the 32 and 64-bit code which would pass data so that it's addressable to the 32-bit code and vice versa.

Apparently there is a plugin for firefox that does this already.

Tom

Re:64bit support

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Probably it's not the answer to the question, but I'd love to see a native 64 bit version of Opera. As for the argument "there's no 64bit flash", screw adobe/macromedia/$proprietary_technology_owner. The web is a nice place also without Flash. Maybe even better!"

Though I don't agree with the idea of tossing Flash altogether, there is an annoyance with Opera 9* that I wish they'd do away with. I temporarily used a new machine at work and installed Opera on it. I go to several sites that use Flash in one way or another. A dialog comes up saying "wanna install Flash?" every SINGLE F'N TIME one of those pages load. **It'd be nice to have a "Don't ask me again." option.

* This may not be an Opera 9 specific problem, rather 9 is the first time I've encountered it. In other words, I cannot say that 7 or 8 didn't suffer from it.

** It may be possible, and if somebody knows, please enlighten me.

Re:64bit support

[mnmn]

64-bit would be nice. I dont like the default theme though, it should be a windows classic default theme. I'd do without themes if I were them.

ACID2 and a browser that doesnt crash are high on my list. I went back to firefox after by opera9 full release crashed a few too many times. I leave 10+ tabs open, maybe that did it.

Re:64bit support

[Nurgled]

Many 64-bit Linux distros struggle to run 32-bit apps because they are only supplied with 64-bit versions of the libraries, which a 32-bit binary can't link with.

The recommended solution seems to be to create an alternative root directory which has the 32-bit version of the distribution inside it and then run the 32-bit apps in a chroot. Obviously this is a bit of a pain in the ass. Opera does, I believe, have a statically-linked 32-bit Linux binary which should be a little easier to run on a 64-bit system, though.

Re:64bit support

[Nurgled]

I think if you turn off plugins in the preferences it'll stop bugging you. At least, I have plugins disabled in my Opera and I don't see this dialog. The caveat is that I've had plugins disabled in Opera since Opera supported it, so it might well be something else in my dog-eared, decrepit user profile that I've been dragging around with me since version 6 or so.

Re:64bit support

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Well, since most libs likely don't need more than 4GB, I'd simply only install libs compiled in 32-bit mode, i.e. they might use all 16 registers on the AMD64, but only use instructions with 32bit width.

If the user needs the whole address space for huge mmap()ed files, databases or other stuff, he's free to use it (just like on PPC), but all pointers / program parts that interact with the libs directly should reside in the lower 4GB (which is enough space, really). Also, there's no reason why there can't be 64-bit libs and 32-bit libs in the same program. There only has to be an understanding (this concept is also known as a 'type system') what functions accept 32-bit values and which accept 64-bit ones. Since a value that *has* to be 64bit is rather rare, there shouldn't be a problem making it explicit for the programmer.

Niggling

[rinkjustice]

Give users more monitor real estate (less toolbar, more web page) and reinvent favorites/bookmarks. Say automatic online backups to Simpy.com and an easier way of keeping bookmark catagories organized. I've recently gotten into genealogy and the links pile-up in a hurry. I almost want to use a browser exclusively for that research alone.

The Linux support is awesome however. It's the best browser for that platform.

Re:Niggling

[Rameriez]

MORE real estate? One of the reasons why I love Opera is its interface is one of the most easily configurable. Not only do you have a lot of control over what toolbars are displayed and where, but exactly which buttons appear on them. The side-panel is much nicer than Firefox's in my opinion, and is another great space saver. What more could you want?

Re:Niggling

[tibike77]

I'm glad you asked... I always wanted to have a full-screen (F11) version of opera WITH the top/bottom customised toolbars showing... but without the Windows taskbar and without the Opera menu/titlebar. It might be already possible, but I never tried hard enough to find out how... so if it's possible already, tell me how, if not, Opera10 suggestion, here she comes :P

P.S. Right now I'm running Opera 9 in 1600x1200 and SMALL fonts (21" monitor and I sit close enough for roughly FOV90) and the top/bottom "wasted" two lines (title, menu on top, quicklaunch and taskbar bottom) still bother me :P

Re:Niggling

[SillyNickName4me]

MORE real estate? One of the reasons why I love Opera is its interface is one of the most easily configurable. Not only do you have a lot of control over what toolbars are displayed and where,

I once spent an hour or 2 fiddling with this and you can indeed claim back part of the screen real estate, but even then it still usues way too much screen space for things other then the actual webpage.

but exactly which buttons appear on them. The side-panel is much nicer than Firefox's in my opinion, and is another great space saver.

No, you really don't understand. A sidebar by definition takes away screen real estate from the webpage, this is completely regardless of how usefull you think the info in the sidebar is, the gp and people like me DO NOT WANT IT, we want the space available for the webpage and the webpage only, not toolbars, sidebars popup bars pop-over/under bars, and not even when they are auto-hiding.

Re:Niggling

[tibike77]

Here's a sample of how it looks (1600x1200 res image, reduced to 16 grays, saved as GIF, filesize ~100k):
http://img210.imageshack.us/my.php?image=myfreakin gscreen3ko.gif

Re:Niggling

[Anonymous Coward]

Hit Ctrl-F11 and Opera's menu bar will vanish.

Re:Niggling

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious; if screen real estate means that much to you, why do you use a multiline Start Bar? That's one of the everpresent real estate eaters.

Re:Niggling

[asc99c]

Absolutely agree with this one - I've used previous Operas but am now on Firefox - I generally have it set up to have just one bar at the top which contains everything I generally use. Particularly like the iFox theme for a compact interface, e.g. http://andycunningham.homeip.net/firefox.png

Re:Niggling

[RobbieGee]

I have a few tips for you.

1. Put the status bar next to the address bar.
2. Use search shortcuts instead of the search bar. Typing 'g something' in the address bar will search for 'something' on google, while 'z something' will do the same for Amazon.
3. The progress bar can be toggled to show only when something is loaded, and you can even make it appear inside the address bar.
4. Instead of showing the tabs, you could use the window panel. You need to enable it by customizing the panels.
5. Ctrl-F8 will toggle the address bar, also while in Full-screen.
6. Alt+F11 will toggle the main menu.
7. Ctrl+F7 will toggle the scrollbars.
8. For quicker switching between tabs in fullscreen mode, I recommend holding right mouse button while scrolling. Personally, I prefer to set that list to use the tab-bar order instead of which were last used, you can find that setting in Tools->Preferences->Advanced->Tabs then "Cycle in tab bar order".

These are just things off the top of my head though, so if you *really* wanted to go nuts you could probably get away with a lot more.

Re:Niggling

[tibike77]

I'm fresh after a windows reinstall (done this week[end], last one was about 2 years ago)... my quicklaunch is still un-re-populated ;)
But usually 1280x960 means I get a full quicklaunch bar, and that's only putting the "bare minimum" on it.

Re:Niggling

[tibike77]

Strange but that doesn't work for me (not in normal view nor in fullscreen). Tried other keycombos too. Some other combos do some usefull stuff, but not all I need ;)

Re:Niggling

[tibike77]

CTRL-F8 worked great, thanks. ALT-F11 didn'tm for some reason. And CTRL-F5 did the scrollbars while in fullscreen, but it's ok.

However, the big issue here for me is that the settings don't "stick"... I have to re-press all those combos each and every time I go from normal to full-screen... that would be a nice extra for O10 (sticky fulscreen options, or fullscreen options customisation just like with normal-screen ones) :P

Re:Niggling

[RobbieGee]

Ah, Alt+F11 was Linux specific for some reason. Anyway, you can find lots of other interesting shortcuts at http://help.opera.com/Windows/9.00/en/keyboard.htm l. But that's only a small selection, really. Most everything in Opera can be bound to a mouse gesture or keyboard shortcut. Just go to Tools->Preferences->Advanced->Shortcuts.

Re:Niggling

[Anonymous Coward]

However, the big issue here for me is that the settings don't "stick"... I have to re-press all those combos each and every time I go from normal to full-screen... that would be a nice extra for O10 (sticky fulscreen options, or fullscreen options customisation just like with normal-screen ones) :P

So what's stopping you from creating a new keyboard shortcut? :) Here's what I use:

F1 ctrl
Leave fullscreen | Enter fullscreen & View page bar,7 & View address bar,7

You're free to link other actions as you see fit or change the toolbar positions, of course.

Re:Niggling

[fernando in MN]

I agree with this. Also, a better way to change Font. Hate to say ot but this is much easier in Internet Explorer and in FF

Re:Niggling

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you even USED simpy.com recently? It's a mess and I suggest that you avoid it. The main resons beeing...

1. It's slow. Some days, it's impossible to access the site. (Though not an issue anymore, see 2!)

2. It's broken. Quite funny that you mention automatic online backups to simpy.com when it's not even possible to login with Opera (yes, simpy.com claims that it works with Opera, but it doesn't. If you don't believe me, try it yourself or read the post that the author of simpy posted to the Opera forums - the issue described there is old, but still unresolved.

3. It's annoying to use when you do not have Firefox's LiveBookmarks. This can be fixed, for example, thanks to the glorious Web 2.0, by using the available API. Now here's the fun part: If you have, for some reason, recently written your own sidebar, you will be excited to find that, as of a month ago, it no longer works well - now only the most recent items are exported. It may be very "Web 1.0" of me, but I'd rather access all of my bookmarks - ah, well, I guess it doesn't matter as long as I can find out who visited the same sites that I did and how many people have "Google" filed under "web search" in their bookmark list...

Re:Niggling

[rinkjustice]

I like Simpy. It merges bookmarks and deletes redundancy, something most other social bookmarking sites are incapable of. But Simpy was merely an example. What I'm suggesting is this: there needs to be a new way of bookmarking and backing up favorites, which is "integrated seemlessly"(TM) with the browser. There are too many websites out there, and people have too many bookmerks. People complain of information overload and are looking for ways to aggregate (popurls needs to be shoehorned into the conversation somehow) and opera has the desire to bring bookmarking to the next level. So let's do it.

Re:Niggling

[TheoMurpse]

Tools>Appearance>Toolbars will hide almost everything. To hide the scrollbar, press Ctrl+F7. There exists a key combination to hide the "File Edit View Bookmarks ..." menu, but I cannot remember what it is. It used to be Ctrl+F11 I believe, but in Opera 9, many of the shortcut keys are different than they used to be (made similar to Firefox, perhaps? Ctrl+N now opens a window instead of a tab in MDI mode, for example).

Or you can hit F11 to have nothing but a fullscreen window with nothing but the webpage you are currently on. This is literally the largest you can have any browser window for any browser, by definition.

This should solve your "real estate" problems.

Re:Niggling

[miro f]

really? configurable? I seem to recall installing Opera a while ago and deciding I wanted to change the order of two of the toolbars. I believe the solution was "manually clone one of the toolbars as a custom toolbar and then hide the original"

Not fantastic configurability there...

Re:Niggling

[otisg]

I support the idea of using Simpy for the backup (or even real) store of Opera's bookmarks. Firefox is already heading in a similar direction with their bookmarks revamp, and Flock is already there.

Re:Niggling

[hkmwbz]

Give users more monitor real estate

Uh, Opera has MORE viewing space for web pages than Firefox by default. It is also easy to remove buttons and enable/disable various toolbars.

Re:Niggling

[corrie]

What more could you want?>

I could want that the tab bar doesn't keep gaining rows until the actual web page viewing area is 1px high...

From a developper point of vue

[yogikoudou]

- More CSS 3 - A Javascript Debugger (including XMLHttpRequest debugging, as with the Firebug extension) - XForms - XUL ? And from a user point of vue: - Extensions

Re:From a developper point of vue

[Jicksta]

I'd have to second the request for XUL support. With Microsoft producing its XUL clone XAML for use with Vista software, it's only a question of when, not if these technologies take off. Is this an area out of which Opera truly wishes to stay?

The parent's request for better AJAX debugging is another possibility certain to turn a number of web-dev heads. Few doubt AJAX's destiny. I for one would love to see this.

Additionally, I'd also like to request an option to specify how the middle-button responds to clicks for scrolling. Presently, and for prior versions, pressing the middle button to begin the hands-free scrolling feature snaps the cursor to the middle of the page. This becomes an issue when trying to open a page in a background tab with a middle click and, if the click is off by a little, the cursor shoots away, causing the user to move their cursor back to the link. A minor nuisance but one I've heard complained about for years.

Re:From a developper point of vue

[Anonymous Coward]

A Javascript Debugger including XMLHttpRequest debugging

Try Fiddler

Re:From a developper point of vue

[ChristTrekker]

Fiddler doesn't run on all the platforms that Opera does.

Re:From a developper point of vue

[masklinn]

Fiddler is not a javascript debugger, try Firefox + Firebug sometime.

Re:From a developper point of vue

[arendjr]

I'd also love to see more wide-spread support for XUL, the only trouble is that it's a Mozilla proprietary technology and a bit of a moving target, making it very tough to support fully in other browsers. IMHO Mozilla should do with XUL what OpenOffice.org did with their file format: open it up for standardization so that everyone can give input on it and let it become the standard user-interface language among (open-source) browsers.

Re:From a developper point of vue

[_xeno_]

I'd have to second a JavaScript debugger. I do almost all of my webdesign targeting Firefox first because it has the best debugging tools. Once I get it working in Firefox, I move to making sure it works in IE and later Opera.

However, I'd also like to see something like the DOM Inspector. Among other things the DOM Inspector allows is the ability to see the CSS rules and the order they're being applied for every node in the DOM tree. It really helps when CSS's crappy specificity causes rules to apply in an order you didn't intend.

Re:From a developper point of vue

[Danga]

And from a user point of vue: - Extensions

If you want extensions go use firefox. The Opera developers do listen to input and if a feature is requested by enough people then they will add it. They also will take out features that people dislike/don't use. That is what I like the most about Opera, they make it the best browser available right out of the box. You don't have to go messing around downloading and installing extensions because it already includes the best features available that most people need.

I used Moz for quite a while until about 3-4 years ago when I came across Opera and decided to give it a shot. I LOVED it, initially what got me was its speed and of course the tabbed browsing. I also currently still have FF installed but I almost never use it, Opera just has everything I need and it does everything I need better. I much prefer just being able to download an installer once and have everything I want already available compared to downloading FF and having to find/load a bunch of extensions.

Re:From a developper point of vue

[Amazing Quantum Man]

And from a user point of vue: - Extensions

That's in Opera9. They're called "Widgets".

Re:From a developper point of vue

[leighklotz]

Definitely XForms. It's a W3C standard and XForms 1.1 is about to be published, with feedback from existing implementations on interoperability and necessary features derived from real use cases. It wraps up a markup-based interface to many of the things people do with XMLHTTPRequest, and handles all the callbacks and stuff for you, and leverages other technologies for much of the work (XML for data, XPath for addressing the data, CSS for styling, XML/DOM Events for eventing, etc.)

With IBM's contribution of an XForms XPI to Mozilla, and an Opera implementation, we'd have a chance at a cross-platform mechanism for deploying web applications in a way that's good for device independence and accessibility.

And since this is slashdot, I should point out that I was one of the editors of the XForms 1.0 recommendation.
I would also like to point out that Opera Software wrote Opera, but the article doesn't mention that...

Re:From a developper point of vue

[Nurgled]

I'm not too fussed about XUL, but I'd love to see some support for XBL. Of course, XBL2 isn't really finished yet and XBL1 as currently implemented in Mozilla has a few warts that make it hard to implement in other browsers.

Under Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Under Windows: Get rid of the stupid default whereby the main scrollbar on the righthandside turns nearly-white (thus "disappearing") whenever a person goes to use it. That's a really dumb default. Also, make it easier to change because I never found a way (without choosing a different theme entirely). Note: no problem on OS X.

2. Under any OS: When opening a link into a new tab, it automagically pops the new tab up. I like the new tab under because I'm often going to A Page whereupon I click several links, like when I'm scanning the Slashdot homepage and want to open 3 or 4 stories to see what the lunatics are raving about. Allow me to control that behavior. And, if you already do, make it easier to find.

3. Please revisit a number of your configration/preferences/options menus. I don't find them to be well organized or comprehensive. Take a note from FireFox was does do a fairly decent job in this area whether its Win, Mac, or even Ubuntu. I'd even go so far as to say IE is easier to configure.

Other than basic usability which prevents me from using it as my primary, I'd like to love it.

Re:Under Windows

[Hektor_Troy]

Since ... well, I'm not sure how long, but as long as I can rembmer, and I've used it since 3.x - if you right click on a link, you'll see "Open in background tab" along with the keyboard combination used to do that. Not sure how much easier it can be to find.

Re:Under Windows

[moonbender]

Yes, I'm not sure how one could miss that. Middle clicking works, too, I think.

Re:Under Windows

[whathappenedtomonday]

some suggestions (though 1. was never a real problem, at least for me...)

2. Use the RMB and select "Open in background page" or hold CTRL and SHIFT when clicking a link.
3. Use opera:config (Opera 9)

Re:Under Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Is definitely a problem.

2. Took me a moment to realize what RMB meant, but I understand now. That's a good temporary workaround until Opera gives me, the user, the ability to configure client application behaviors for tabs in a way that borrows some of the good ideas of FireFox. Thanks!

3. Now, that was fairly handy. It doesn't look anywhere near as comprehensive as FireFox, but it is a straightfoward interface. Thanks again.

Re:Under Windows

[tibike77]

For the Windows version: a "manually edit theme" (colors, fonts, etc).
I used to stick to Opera 7.xx exactly for that reason even when 8.xx came out.

Second thing, an "export/save environment" (key settings, WAND database, toolbar settings, bookmarks, color scheme, etc) and the companion "import/load environment".
If you can make it also automatically import all that from PREVIOUS versions of Opera, I have a nearly 4-year old Opera 7.52 that's itching for "upgrade" to Opera 9.
Yes, I still use both... 7.52 for all the stuff I forgot the pass (hey, it happens) and Opera 9 for all the rest.

Oh well, and IE for the DotProject site of partner companies, but that's more of an issue for DotProject than Opera.
Hmm... how about an "EMULATE BROKEN IE CSS" option ? ;)
Would go nicely with "identify as IE" :P

Re:Under Windows

[IndigoParadox]

I'm not sure what you mean about not being able to use the Wand info. If you've been doing upgrade installations until now your copy of Opera 9.0 should have all of your information since you started using Opera. Are these installations on seperate machines?

Anyway, you can find your Opera settings in C:\Documents and Settings\[Your user name]\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile if you have Opera set to use multiple user profiles or C:\Program Files\[Opera directory]\profile (I think, or something like that,) if you have it set to keep all settings in the program directory. The file that contains your Wand info is called wand.dat. Just copy that file over from the old Opera installation to replace the wand.dat from whatever current version you're using. Similarly, your search engines are in search.ini, your bookmarks are in opera6.adr, your notes are in notes.adr, and your contacts are in contacts.adr. I think your toolbar and keyboard and voice settings are in the toolbar, keyboard, and voice directories. I use a file sync program with these files to keep my Opera environment in sync on my desktop and my tablet and it works perfectly.

Hope that helps!

Re:Under Windows

[pafrusurewa]

2. Are you trolling? Now I don't know what you mean by "opening a link into a new tab", but for me that's middle-clicking. If that's what you mean, you can change the behaviour under Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> Middle click options.

Re:Under Windows

[MukiMuki]

1. I haven't used Opera's default theme in 3 years, so I'm no good for this one.
2. Ahh, this one got me too at first. I'm assuming it's not that you don't use the middle mouse button (or scroll wheel down-click), but it's sites like Amazon that force the newly opened tabs to the front that's bothering you.

I wish they'd make it easier to find, but when I asked them about it I DID get an immediate (within a few hours) response... 'course, I DID pay for my copy:

Ctrl + F12 -> Advanced (Tab) -> Content -> JavaScript Options (Button) -> Allow Raising of Fields, Allow Lowering of Fields
Disable (uncheck) both. Yeah, I agree that it is a little too deeply in there.

On the FLIPSIDE, go to opera:config (about:config works too for longtime Firefox users)
Look up "allow script". Disable as needed ;)

Re:Under Windows

[PostFutura]

>Second thing, an "export/save environment" (key settings, WAND database, toolbar settings, bookmarks, color scheme, etc) and the companion "import/load environment".

This is one feature I really would like to see. I need different settings&environment for my browser when i'm working on different things, or just surfing around on my free time. Currently I have many browsers installed to get the job done. And I mean the whole shebang. Layout, look&feel, network settings, **ADBLOCK** settings etc.
And this is just on one OS and computer. The datafiles could then be synced for example with my laptop using third party software.

Re:Under Windows

[tibike77]

Different machines, different Opera versions on same machine, multi-user environment on each machine, etc.
Also, I had this nasty thing with hardware hickups (too heated, occasional resets on really hot days) one one of the machines, and one time Opera 9 just LOST all settings (literally all except bookmarks) and reverted to the default ones.

Bottom line is, I'd really like to be able to backup and mail myself (or lug around on a memstick) a full current environment config.

Re:Under Windows

[tibike77]

And don't forget, single click, single (compressed?) file ;)
I'm lazy, as most other "usual" users :P

I mean, you can always backup all files manually and re-copy where needed, but it's troublesome enough that I don't do it sometimes... then I end up regretting it (a lot less times, but still, you get the idea).

Probably not a vital nor a must-have feature...
But for sure, it would be a NICE feature for O-10 if you ask me :P

Re:Under Windows

[IndigoParadox]

Then you might as well zip up that "profile" directory I mentioned. As I pointed out individually, all of the environment settings are right there. ;O)

Re:Under Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

"2. Under any OS: When opening a link into a new tab, it automagically pops the new tab up. I like the new tab under because I'm often going to A Page whereupon I click several links, like when I'm scanning the Slashdot homepage and want to open 3 or 4 stories to see what the lunatics are raving about. Allow me to control that behavior. And, if you already do, make it easier to find."

You could always have fun by holding shift and the middle button of your mouse and see what results from that.

Re:Under Windows

[AgNO3]

2. Under any OS: When opening a link into a new tab, it automagically pops the new tab up. I like the new tab under because I'm often going to A Page whereupon I click several links, like when I'm scanning the Slashdot homepage and want to open 3 or 4 stories to see what the lunatics are raving about. Allow me to control that behavior. And, if you already do, make it easier to find.

I am not a lunatic, You're a Towel.

Re:Under Windows

[TheoMurpse]

2. Tools>Preferences>Shortcuts
The default has, since at least Opera 8.0, been to Ctrl+Shift+Click to open under the current window.

Combining HTTP w/ BitTorrent

[Aidan Steele]

While it's certainly kickarse to see a browser implement BitTorrent downloads, it would be even more impressive if they could combine this facet of the program with HTTP downloads. While I can see a number of difficulties with this (technical challenge, lack of standards, etc) these can be minimised in a number of ways. It would certainly mean much faster speeds for end-users, lower bandwidth costs for hosts and resulting increased user numbers of a standards-compliant browser. 2. ??? 3. Profit!

Re:Combining HTTP w/ BitTorrent

[tibike77]

Although I'd positively love to see most "popular" downloads automatically BitTorrented when I download with Opera (by the way, I don't use a download manager, I just use Opera for most of my HTTP downloads), I am having a hard time imagining HOW you could do it in ways that don't breach any laws AND is beneficial to the user WHILE keeping the user anonymous (among others, not having to "phone back home" each time you do a hybrid HTTP/BT dowload).

Well, the "challenge" would be to have a tracker that you can access for those HTTP downloads, and also the tracker would have to (have a companion system that would) download the file first so it can hash it.
This means only "popular" downloads would be worthy of this, as any other download wouldn't benefit from anything... you HAVE to have some seeds online or else it's useless... and probably having Opera's tracker also double as "last seed" would break a few copyright laws.

There are a lot of other issues here, so basically UNLESS most companies get away from the "we host stuff on HTTP" mentality to "we HTTP host the .torrent and we have a BT superseed of it running and our own tracker", there's not much you CAN do. IMHO.

Re:Combining HTTP w/ BitTorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF are you talking about? HTTP is a protocol for transferring files. BitTorrent is also a protocol for transferrnig files. They don't complement each other, they are alternatives. You can't combine them, that makes no sense. They aren't power rangers, man.

Re:Combining HTTP w/ BitTorrent

[Aidan Steele]

Placing the onus largely on the Opera developers is the wrong way to look at it, IMHO.

As hosts would benefit greatly from this (exponentially so, with the hosts serving the most bandwidth benefitting the most), it would be in their best interests to do whatever it costs to reduce costs. (No pun intended.)

A minimally-modified BitTorrent tracker can be in a standardised location (eg. /downloadmanager/tracker), that the browser can check whenever downloading a file from a server. If the location doesn't exist; fine, download via HTTP. (Possibly offer the user a chance to manually substitute a .torrent file here?) If the location does exist, however, it indicates that the webhost is capable and willing to act as a tracker for the file. As the server is hosting the file, hashing it won't pose a problem.

I realise that existing patchy solutions already address a few of these points, but no progress have been made on the browser front. To do so would be to stand out from the competition and be an incentive for all concerned.

Re:Combining HTTP w/ BitTorrent

[tibike77]

That's why I said the people hosting "stuff" for downloading should be the ones changing mentality first :p
Only afterwards can Opera (or any other browsers) do anything about it.

Re:Combining HTTP w/ BitTorrent

[Aidan Steele]

I guess that's why GetRight and Azureus already do such a thing.

It pays to think outside the box, even if that box isn't particularly big to begin with.

Re:Combining HTTP w/ BitTorrent

[baadger]

I think what you're basically proposing is support for Dijjer. I can actually see that working well for Opera

Re:Combining HTTP w/ BitTorrent

[Kjella]

Well, the "challenge" would be to have a tracker that you can access for those HTTP downloads, and also the tracker would have to (have a companion system that would) download the file first so it can hash it.
This means only "popular" downloads would be worthy of this, as any other download wouldn't benefit from anything... you HAVE to have some seeds online or else it's useless... and probably having Opera's tracker also double as "last seed" would break a few copyright laws.

Technically, there's no reason why Opera should be seeding it - the HTTP download may act as "seed" for a modified bittorrent client. Even if there are no actual bittorrent seeds, other people downloading at the same time (not unlikely for a bigger file) could swap parts. Opera will need to download it and generate the torrent file - however that should fall within fair use. If the URL dies, so does the tracker and it becomes a trackerless torrent - that should cover Opera well enough with regards to material that is removed.

The tricky parts:
1) Privacy - if your browser phones home to Opera to ask if there's an autotorrent, they will have your entire download history.
2) When to download and create the torrent/tracker - if you accept #1 then you can simply go by hit count

Still no Opera topic in Slashdot

[Hank Powers]

It's time for you to stop dissing Opera. There are applications that get news coverage really seldom and even they have their own topics in Slashdot. Opera gets mentioned every once in a while and always gets placed under the general software topic. Do I smell an anti-Opera Software bias among the editors?

Re:Still no Opera topic in Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu is mentioned once in a while, yet it doesn't have its own topic. Obviously the editors are biased against Ubuntu too.

Re:Still no Opera topic in Slashdot

[Pneuma ROCKS]

Opera gets mentioned every once in a while and always gets placed under the general software topic.

First of all, I would have to say Opera gets placed under the general software topic because it only gets mentioned every once in a while, so that's really just one reason. And not to flame, but I think Mozilla does deserve a category of their own for its current market precence, and because they produce a lot more than Firefox.

I like Opera a lot, and I think it has contributed greatly to browser history, but its market share is too small. Granted, perhaps it's due to the User Agent switcher. Perhaps these reasons are enough to make Opera undeserving of a category of its own. I'm sure the editors have some "objective" criteria for creating categories. I wouldn't say they're biased.

Re:Still no Opera topic in Slashdot

[TheRaven64]

Opera, FireFox, Safari and IE between them get a lot of mentions though. Perhaps it's time to add a 'browsers' category?

Re:Still no Opera topic in Slashdot

[Yvan256]

Especially since Nintendo is using Opera for the Nintendo DS and is also going to use Opera for the Wii.

Re:Still no Opera topic in Slashdot

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Do I smell an anti-Opera Software bias among the editors?"

Maybe... but I'm not sure it's about fanboyism so much. Opera isn't Open Source. Until recently (version 8.5, I believe), it was ad supported.

From the responses I've read here, I'm not convinced Opera's well understood on this site. Everybody thinks FireFox is the bee's knees, so what could Opera possibly bring to the table?

Anyhoo, I wish Slashdot would pay more attention to Opera, though. Not because I'm a rabid Opera fanboy, but because we already know the problems with one browser dominating them all.

Re:Still no Opera topic in Slashdot

[mdwh2]

Maybe... but I'm not sure it's about fanboyism so much. Opera isn't Open Source. Until recently (version 8.5, I believe), it was ad supported.

I don't know if Open Source is the issue - look how popular Mac OS X is, and in very much the same way as Firefox: comments not in favour get modded down, whilst flamebait against other niche alternatives get modded up - as you say, they think it's great and can't see what anything else could possibly offer. Yet I'd like to see the reaction if I posted to Mac OS articles saying I won't use it unless the open source it.

Better UI

[Poromenos1]

I have always wanted the in-page UI to be prettier. The round corners on the controls look very old-school, and I have always thought that Gmail in IE looks better (though it's much faster in Opera).

Re:Better UI

[kamakiri]

Isn't button shading just a property of the currently installed skin? There are lots of different skins to try:
http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/?sho w=rate

Re:Better UI

[Poromenos1]

That, I didn't know. You are very right, sir, thank you. I love this browser.

Re:Better UI

[baadger]

Perhaps they need to add a prompt for the first-time user that says "Hey! Not digging our curves? Checkout the communities wide selection of Opera skins!"

Re:Better UI

[rapidweather]

I've always thought they needed to fill in the old advertisement area on the right side of the "main bar".
From what I am looking at now in Opera 9.01, the buttons only fill in about 40% or less of the main bar area. and they are all over on the left side.

I do have Opera 9.01 in my Knoppix Remaster, and am using the "shared-qt" version. I did have a problem with the "static-qt" version in tests, it was not compatable with the 7 kde-look.org mouse cursor themes I have built-in to the remaster.
Everything mouse-cursor-wise is fine now, Opera will display the theme chosen, in the browser. Before you got a very small cursor inside the browser, when downloading a web page, and Opera would only use your default cursor theme, not any other you switched to, even if you closed Opera and started again.

They have a lot of nice features in Opera 9.01, in KDE, you get an Opera icon next to the clock that you can click to instantly minimize/maximize the Opera window.

I put 13 RSS news feeds in Opera, and there is a short delay in the response of the browser on older computers while the feeds download the stories, immediately on bootup of Opera. That happens also when they get more stories. Very nice, however, you can have something to look at while a web page downloads. You get a small picture with some of the stories, and that takes extra bandwidth, but is a nice touch. You did not get the pictures with Opera 8.54. I did drop my default "df" /ramdisk useage to compensate for the extra space that the Opera 9.01 ~/.opera will take to handle all those feeds.

For those of you using another flavor of livecd linux, I have a short howto for trying out Opera, with a link to the Opera "weekly", at my blog here. That how-to should work with Kanotix Linux, although I have not tried it there. I often save the Opera directory and the ~/.opera to a usb memory stick, for use next time or on another box. It is a temporary way to test Opera without actually "installing" it.

-Rapidweather

Adblock

[Umbral Blot]

Adblock, adblock, adblock. I know you can do something like adblock with Opera, but it doesn't even compare with firefox's version. That's the reason that I still use firefox even though it isn't as small or as fast as Opera; I want my adblock.

Re:Adblock

[LubosD]

Opera 9 has integrated content blocking - it is quite good. You don't have to edit filter.ini any more...

Re:Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

Adblock, adblock, adblock. I know you can do something like adblock with Opera, but it doesn't even compare with firefox's version. That's the reason that I still use firefox even though it isn't as small or as fast as Opera; I want my adblock.

Right-click on the page, choose the relevant option, click around to block stuff. Where's the problem?

Re:Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you can do something like adblock with Opera, but it doesn't even compare with firefox's version.

What's missing? Right-click on the page, select "Block content", and the page gets greyed out, with the blockable items highlighted. Click on everything you want to block, and it automatically sets up wildcard rules to block those ads. That's easier than Firefox's Adblock.

Re:Adblock

[Justin205]

I haven't used Opera 9 (used 8.5 a bit, but back to Firefox for a couple things, like mplayerplug-in working properly there), but I have a question... Is there a way to import a filterlist? This is one of the very nice things about Firefox adblock, to me. I just grab a good filterset, and it'll block almost everything without me touching it, ever.

Re:Adblock

[xtracto]

No, with firefox adblock I just need to download the adblock filter lst and never worry about ads.

Re:Adblock

[Bogtha]

Is there a way to import a filterlist?

Yes. You can get a pre-made filterlist here.

Re:Adblock

[infestedsenses]

Right-click on the page, choose the relevant option, click around to block stuff. Where's the problem?

Do you have to do this for every new ad you see? Or does Opera automagically create regexes for permanent blocking of similar ads by using your method?

Re:Adblock

[SillyNickName4me]

Opera 9 has integrated content blocking - it is quite good. You don't have to edit filter.ini any more...

So it has now what adblock started out with roughly.

There are very nice blocklists for adblock and ways to automatically import them, which means you won't get to see the ads without having to block them yourself.

Adblock also has some other nice features and all in all a content filter only covers part of what adblock does.

Re:Adblock

[Jugalator]

Bah, how about not forcing Opera to keep up to date with specific extensions found in Firefox...

Firefox actually has a worse adblock implementation then Opera, did you know that?

The root of the problem as I see it is not a poor integrated adblock functionality -- I'm sure Opera 9's new interactive and visual adblocking mechanisms are sufficient for most people -- the problem is more likely deep extension support for power users to extend functionality as they want and need.

While Opera ASA is doing an admirable job of keeping up to date with the competition as a company, my number one wish for Opera 10 is good extension support.

And no, Opera's aging Netscape plugin support is lacking in so many areas, like chrome and renderer extensibility, that I won't even discuss it.

Re:Adblock

[Rits]

Do you have to do this for every new ad you see? Or does Opera automagically create regexes for permanent blocking of similar ads by using your method?

No regexes, but a simple matching expression using * is automatically created. You can also block specific images only by holding Shift while clicking. It is quite intuitive, with a simple UI with only a few buttons and a short explanation text.

Re:Adblock

[Blod]

How about Proxomitron? It requires some time to get used to, but in the end result is the best possible. It doesn't matter what browser you're going to use, Proxomitron will block any adverts.

Re:Adblock

[Henry V .009]

Doesn't come close to adblock plus with automatic updates from filterset.g. I haven't seen a web adverstisement in forever, and it requires no work on my part.

Re:Adblock

[Rits]

Yep, automatic filterset updates would be useful, if you really want to block all adds (instead of only removing some especially annoying ones). There are of course ethical issues...

Re:Adblock

[QuietLagoon]

I'd rather use privoxy to block ads and other web-based nasties, and not have to worry about whether the browser I happen to be using supports ad block.

Additionally, I can have one instance of privoxy running on a server, and cover my entire home network. One single point of configuration, with the config files easily transferred to my notebook when I travel.

Re:Adblock

[trifish]

As I expected, the list blocks Google ads. If everyone downloaded this list and used AdBlock, Google would die. In case you did not know it, 99.99% of Google's income is from Google ads, based on their public reports for share holders, etc.

Blocking obtrusive ads is justified. Blocking any other ads is not. Did you ever stop to think who's going to pay the bandwidth costs of sites that depend on income from ads? The more popular a site is, the more incredible bandwidth fees they pay (popular sites can't use free hosting, mainly due to their bandwidth needs, etc). Without ads, sites like SourceForge.net or Slashdot.com would have to charge everyone for reading or die too. Think twice before blocking unobtrusive ads. Mass selfishness could bring many popular free sites to an end.

Re:Adblock

[crazed gremlin]

I have the firefox extensions: Adblock, Filterset.G updater. These work together so I never see an ad! It updates automatically.

Re:Adblock

[VikingThunder]

Opera can't really have a specialized "built-in" adblocking mechanism in my opinion. Not because they can't implement it, but because they would probably end up getting their browser banned on sites that depend (however wise) on ad revenue. Heck, isn't that the reason the current implementation is called a Content Blocker, not an Ad Blocker? Firefox can have an Adblock extension because it is a third-party extension.
So essentially, Opera needs a better third party plugin system if people want a better adblocking system (so ad companies can't blame Opera).

Re:Adblock

[arevos]

Firefox actually has a worse adblock implementation then Opera, did you know that?

Is there an equivalent system to Filterset.G in Opera? It doesn't matter how technically sophisticated Opera's adblocking system is, if you have to manually configure it, and manually update it, it's not as convenient as Adblock + Filterset.G under Firefox.

Re:Adblock

[eMbry00s]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the tech-savvy (those who both know of adblocking and are capable of setting it up) aren't Google's main audience. If all of slashdot started adblocking google, we wouldn't make a dent.

Also, what one should want is an extension API for Opera, not just content blocking. This would enable developers to produce insane amounts of functionality without consulting with Opera or using their resources. Automatic updating of the block-list (similar to filterset.g updater for FF) would obviously be included in this.
If they could make both their own extension API aswell as hack up a way to use Firefox extensions (hard but certainly possible), they would grab me by my intestinal cords. I would probably even pay money for their browser.

Re:Adblock

[Kjella]

The root of the problem as I see it is [lack of] deep extension support for power users to extend functionality as they want and need. While Opera ASA is doing an admirable job of keeping up to date with the competition as a company, my number one wish for Opera 10 is good extension support.

Extension support is Firefox's greatest blessing and greatest curse. I know that in order to make Firefox work the way I want I have to install maybe a dozen or more plug-ins - I've tried the out-of-the-box functionality and it doesn't hold a candle to Opera - which has tons of features in less memory footprint. Pull out whatever excuses you want but base Firefox is featureless and bloated at the same time. Micromanaging Firefox and building my own "custom" browser is somewhere below clipping my toenails on my priority list, and even if I did I don't want to manage all my extensions every time I upgrade. What I end up with every time is Opera on the 90-10 rule - it gives me 90% of what I want in 10% of the time. Sure, they could add it as a gimmick, but the day I have to cobble together a dozen plug-ins to use Opera is the day I move to Firefox - which probably have more and better plug-ins anyway.

Re:Adblock

[trifish]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the tech-savvy (those who both know of adblocking and are capable of setting it up) aren't Google's main audience. If all of slashdot started adblocking google, we wouldn't make a dent.

Maybe you should read my post once again, but this time more carefully. I wrote: "if everyone started blocking Google/nonobtrusive ads". In other words, if all people did what some people do now, it might have negative impact on popular free sites, Google, etc.

PS - I also wonder where did the part "tech-savvy aren't Google's main audience" come from.

Re:Adblock

[wyldeone]

I agree completely. While Opera 9's (my main browser) adblock is nice, it lacks one critical feature of the firefox extension: iframe blocking. It can only block images and applets, which is limiting.

Re:Adblock

[eMbry00s]

Ah, yes. If everyone does start blocking google's ads, they will indeed either perish or adapt.

As you might know, Google operate in a market economy environment. This means that they will either have to adapt themselves or their customers. Either one will have to suffice.

Adblocking is for two kind of people:
Those who don't want to be disturbed by ads and those who fanatically avoid seeing ads.
The second group will keep blocking google's ads, but are such a staggering minority that they won't matter; not that they brought any income to begin with.
The first group won't mind google's ads, but will use adblocking software to combat animated gifs and flashbanners literally screaming for their attention.

Hopefully, adblocking of irritating content will become standard, and companies will have to conform to non-obtrusive (preferably text) ads.

I can say that the tech-crowd aren't their main audience because their main audience is what their highest paying advertisers' target audience is. Common sense would have that to be normal internet users, rather than the minority of tech geeks that fiddle with such crazy things as "extensions" or "settings". Another thing that speaks for this is the fact that google haven't done anything about it. They didn't recieve (m)any profitable clicks from this group to begin with, so them not viewing their ads only makes it easier on their, or their customers, bandwidth.

Re:Adblock

[trifish]

Sorry, but you still didn't get the point.

Re:Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

If everyone downloaded this list and used AdBlock, Google would die. In case you did not know it, 99.99% of Google's income is from Google ads, based on their public reports for share holders, etc.

And I care why? Google can either adapt or they can die; welcome to a free market. I have never clicked on an ad and they're almost always intrusive and annoying. Even if I saw something in an ad that I would like to purchase, I still wouldn't click it as I don't make "spur of the moment" purchases over the Internet. In fact, I've never purchased anything over the Internet. I also don't owe it to Google, or any other site for that matter, to click on their ads so they can make revenue.

I block all ads with AdBlock, Filterset.G updater and Flashblock and I wouldn't even consider switching to another browser unless it included these features. If a few sites can't adapt that's too bad for them.

Re:Adblock

[nacturation]

There are very nice blocklists for adblock and ways to automatically import them, which means you won't get to see the ads without having to block them yourself.

I suppose that's good if you like others controlling what content you see. I still add things to Adblock manually so that I have control. Is a site's banner showing a link to The Hunger Site an ad for you? Maybe it is, maybe it's not... but then again you might never see things that are to your interest if you've empowered someone else to make your choices for you.

Re:Adblock

[eMbry00s]

As I expected, the list blocks Google ads. If everyone downloaded this list and used AdBlock, Google would die. In case you did not know it, 99.99% of Google's income is from Google ads, based on their public reports for share holders, etc. Blocking obtrusive ads is justified. Blocking any other ads is not. Did you ever stop to think who's going to pay the bandwidth costs of sites that depend on income from ads? The more popular a site is, the more incredible bandwidth fees they pay (popular sites can't use free hosting, mainly due to their bandwidth needs, etc). Without ads, sites like SourceForge.net or Slashdot.com would have to charge everyone for reading or die too. Think twice before blocking unobtrusive ads. Mass selfishness could bring many popular free sites to an end.

Your argument seems to be that if everybody would block all ads, then sites like Slashdot would not be free (as in beer). I agree with that, but don't think that is even remotely near happening. Consult my other replies as to why I think the chances of that happening are slim. I don't think the far off potential situation should stop us from blocking obtrusive ads using extensions such as AdBlock or Filterset.G

Neither do I think people should be stopped from using lists that block all ads. Of course, if their numbers grow they might pose a threat to "free" service. We, aswell as the content producers, will have to take that then. Magic invisible hand of the market and all that.

Maybe you'll be able to choose between viewing ads or paying money (as http://last.fm/ do)? Maybe we'll know in time.

Re:Adblock

[pafrusurewa]

As I expected, the list blocks Google ads. If everyone downloaded this list and used AdBlock, Google would die.

I have JavaScript disabled most of the time, for very good reasons. JavaScript is enabled for a couple of (very few) sites, such as my bank's online banking application -- Opera lets me do this. Google AdSense does not work without JavaScript. Please tell me, am I a bad person?

Re:Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use the GOOGLE service then yes.

Re:Adblock

[rizole]

If everyone walked over the road blindfold, would you?

What do you mean not everyone would do that?

Okay, what if everyone turned off their TV when the adverts came on?

What do you mean not everyone would do that?

You don't have shares in Google do you?

Re:Adblock

[bit01]

Mass selfishness could bring many popular free sites to an end.

That's some chutzpah you've got there, claiming that somebody not looking at an ad is somehow selfish.

It's actually almost the reverse; doing pretty much anything that makes life hard for the marketing industry at the moment is performing a social service.

Oh, and your sky-is-falling scenario of free sites disappearing is so silly it's hardly worth talking about. They're not free, you're paying for them twice over; once in time/attention to watch/avoid the ad and secondly in the increased price of the product to pay for it. Not to mention all the associated transaction overheads.

All that would happen is that people would pay for what's worthwhile to them directly, including classified advertising directories. True market value would emerge and with luck the value shell game that is modern unsolicited advertising would go the way of the dodos.

---

The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".

Re:Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. Hardworking people have always earned their compensation. To everyone according to their needs and... you know.

Now, bit more seriously. I'd actually happily trade the existence of ads to twice as much of my upstream as my web use consumes if there was a system that could take advantage of that. What is more morally right, to support websites that don't "float" naturally and a broken system requiring publishers to pay depending on their popularity or to provide a natural incentive to find an alternative? If you place a high value on honoring unofficial contracts I'd guess you'd pick the first one but I'm edging on the another.

My morals are a bit wicked though. For instance, I'd rather see people stealing (even in the original sense of the word) stuff occasionally than seeing the society being built over what I consider an unsustainable inbalance.
(BTW, running ads that are unobtrusive enough that people don't even bother trying to block them isn't such an inbalance IMO, rather the perfect opposite of that. However, that still doesn't make blocking them immoral as such an act is working as the very tool of determining the right outcome)

Re:Adblock

[Petrushka]

1. Too many mouse-clicks required: you right-click to get to the adblocker, click again to choose which image(s) to block, and then to fine-tune your filter you need to mouseclick on the "edit" button, make your changes, then click "OK" or "Done" twice (IIRC). With the FF Adblock extension, it's possible to get by with a single mouseclick.
2. No options for adblocking iframes, flash, or other elements. To block these, you have to open up the page source and go through it by hand.
3. The Opera adblock feature only appears in the popup menu when you right-click somewhere other than an image (or text).
4. I didn't notice any options for exporting or importing filter sets, but I may be mistaken about that.

Re:Adblock

[NereusRen]

That depends whether the person would have even clicked the unobtrusive ads to begin with.

As I understand it, most (good) ad blockers don't even download or request the ads from the server. For people who wouldn't have clicked them anyway, running an ad blocker just increases the perceived "click percent" for the site. Since almost everyone pays for ads per-click (rather than per-view), blocking them without downloading them also doesn't cost the site anything, and in fact saves the advertiser bandwidth. It's not as clear-cut as you make it sound.

Re:Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

Look for "Inline Frames" in the Advanced preferences; it is there. Inline frames can also be a site wide option.

Re:Adblock

[Geminii]

I have an idea. Every time I block an ad, it can pop up on trifish's PC. That way it's not deleted, and the people who think ads are a great idea can be the ones seeing them. Everyone wins!

Re:Adblock

[hashar2]

What Opera really needs is something like Adblock Filterset.G Updater (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1136/). I used to configure Adblock manually until I found this. Using this my adblock DB is auto updated. Try it for yourself.

Multiple Personal Bars

[venkateshkumar99]

Multiple personal bars so that one can put more bookmarks/searches in them.

Re:Multiple Personal Bars

[kamakiri]

Try setting personal bar placement to the right hand side of the screen with wrapping on, perfect if you have a wide screen display. This way you could have dozens of bookmarks instantly available.

Re:Multiple Personal Bars

[Rits]

Or just set the Personal bar to 'wrap', if you've got a normal screen.

Re:Multiple Personal Bars

[venkateshkumar99]

hey,thanks for the suggestions,I will try them!

Use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel)

[kamakiri]

Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Shortcuts > Middle click options

Select "Open in background tab".

Yes, they could make this a bit easier to find.

Re:Use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel)

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Instant messaging.

Browsing email downloading and Instant messenging are the tasks your average user (including me) does on the internet. With an Instant messenging plugin for Opera, using all the existing IM networks (or even just jabber), Opera could be a complete web solution for a user.

Re:Use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel)

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera supports IRC already and with Bitlbee you can use IM-networks too. It's not for average person though, it's mainly for people who like IRC, but need those IM-networks too.

Re:Use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel)

[Anonymous Coward]

That will solve my Windows trouble for getting links to open in background tabs. Thank you.

Re:Use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel)

[JCholewa]

> Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Shortcuts > Middle click options
> Select "Open in background tab".
> Yes, they could make this a bit easier to find.

Hold shift and middle click on a link. It should immediately go to the "Middle click options" dialog. It does here, anyway. :)

Integration.

[Anonymous Coward]

Human Interface Guidelines, native widgets, integration with the host OS. Opera is completely unusable because it refuses to behave like all other applications, be it in Gnome or Windows. It doesn't matter if that way might be better, because the problem is switching between paradigms.

Re:Integration.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod down as 'smoked some crack'. Using the above argumentation, mouse-gestures should go because the OS doesn't support them. Idiocy.

Re:Integration.

[Goaway]

Yeah, fuck thirty years of HCI research. Who the fuck wants consistency? I want programs that look like pools of slime and oranges and have eyes everywhere!

Re:Integration.

[QuietLagoon]

Opera is completely unusable

Then tell me how I have been using Opera for the past five or six years.

Re:Integration.

[laffer1]

Your one person. He meant everyone. Without following HCI guidelines, it makes it difficult for someone new to start using the program. Let me give you an example. I used to work on a coworkers computer in my spare time for a little extra money. She only liked Mozilla (and later firefox). Her husband only liked Opera 6. (literally one version) He would not switch off opera or let me upgrade it. He complained that anything other than the browser he knew was too hard. His wife just thought it was a piece of crap like IE. She was able to use IE, Netscape 4, Mozilla 1.x and Firefox without me telling her much. She just needed to know how to organize bookmarks and change her homepage. She could not use opera, but every other browser was ok. Why is that? Could it be the odd layout in opera? Yes. Now I realize that is the charm of opera for some, but the masses hate it. Its similar to Mac OS X that way. Its different enough that some fear or hate it. This could be applied to anything thats different like gnome, kde, etc. People are used to certain widgets in certain places with a certain look and feel. Unlike the web, conventional user interfaces must follow strict guidelines. (games are the exception to some degree) Even on the web there are certain conventions like RSS icons for instance.

Re:Integration.

[Yvan256]

You mean like how FireFox's form widgets look like crap (i.e. Windows-like) under OS X?

Re:Integration.

[QuietLagoon]

Your one person. He meant everyone.

Well, in my dictionary, everyone means every single person.

By the way, you only cite two people, I know of many, many more people who use Opera successfully, and move between Opera and other browsers without problem.

the masses hate it.

What surveys have you done to come to that conclusion? Please post the questions you used on the surveys, the resulting answers, and your statisical analysis that proves your conclusions are representative of what "the masses" think.

Re:Integration.

[Muramasa]

I just wish Opera would use the correct file-chooser when running in Gnome or KDE.

Re:Integration.

[FFFish]

Completely unusable?

I guess I've simply been dreaming that I've used Opera continuously since its v2 days.

Strangely, there are a number of behaviours in Opera that I've yearned to have in other applications. But that's such a silly idea: Opera is ususable!

Re:Integration.

[Anonymous Coward]

You fucking people crack me up. Thanks for the laugh, friend.

Re:Integration.

[toddestan]

I wish other applications acted more like Opera. Little things I miss in other programs or the host operating system are things like being able to click and drag to rearrange the tabs, closing tabs with a middle click, being able to re-open things I have closed with the Undo option, and restarting exactly where I left off when I close the application (or it crashes).

Besides, Opera doe act more like other programs in some ways - compare Opera's "tabs" (which are actually seperate, dragable and resizable windows in the host application) and the way Firefox/Safari/Konquerer/etc do tabs with other programs like MS Word.

Re:Integration.

[laffer1]

Ok. Here is a start, W3 Schools hits. You'll notice that opera is not popular among people who learn about making websites. This is just one website, but they are more likely to have alternate browser hits than some. Since people don't use opera, I'm concluding they don't like opera or don't know about opera. Either way, opera has not been successful. Firefox, in constrast, has been successful. Many people have heard of it. Both of my parents have tried it. I called them and asked if they have ever heard of opera. Neither of them had.

I am quite terrible at statistics so I won't even try to meet your requirements. I do feel that I've show a subset of the population does not use opera. If they preferred opera, they would certainly use opera. In a given day, I use several browsers including Firefox, Safari, IE and even lynx on occasion. I don't use opera.

Re:Integration.

[VGPowerlord]

I'm using Opera 9 right now, and it looks and acts like a normal Windows program.

Of course, I changed the appearance to Windows Native, so that might have something to do with it...

Re:Integration.

[QuietLagoon]

Since people don't use opera, I'm concluding they don't like opera or don't know about opera. Either way, opera has not been successful. Firefox, in constrast, has been successful.

Maybe Opera's old ad-based revenue model turned off too many people, allowing FireFox to gain marketshare among those who wanted an IE alternative. By the time Opera dropped the ad-based revenue model, it was too late for it to gain more marketshare because FireFox had already moved in.

I am quite terrible at statistics

I can see that.

Re:Integration.

[mdwh2]

Yeah, fuck thirty years of HCI research. Who the fuck wants consistency? I want programs that look like pools of slime and oranges and have eyes everywhere!

With comments like "pools of slime", I appear to not be using the same Opera as you.

Care to provide some examples? By all means there may be valid criticisms, but you need to specify what the problems are. Vague comments like the OP made, if made about Firefox or other software, would get modded trolling, not +5 insightful.

Re:Integration.

[mdwh2]

Your one person. He meant everyone. ... Let me give you an example. I used to work on a coworkers computer in my spare time for a little extra money. She only liked Mozilla (and later firefox). Her husband only liked Opera 6. (literally one version) He would not switch off opera or let me upgrade it. He complained that anything other than the browser he knew was too hard.

So you're making generalised comments, and criticising a reply based on only being one person - yet your arguments are based on anecdotal evidence of one user? It sounds like you're annoyed by this experience, and taking it out on the program/users in general. (Btw, I've got Firefox installed too, but I prefer Opera. I was using Opera long before Firefox was around and it became "trendy" to switch from IE.)

Yes. Now I realize that is the charm of opera for some, but the masses hate it. Its similar to Mac OS X that way.

The masses use Internet Explorer, so I'm not sure how that means anything.

And it's interesting you compare to Mac OS X - I would say the exact opposite. Mac OS X is more like Firefox, in that despite being in a niche, it's still worshipped here on Slashdot, and if anyone says anything critical, it's guaranteed to get modded down. Yet bizarrely this doesn't apply to other niche OSs/software - whenever these are mentioned, it's "Why should I use this?" or "This is crap", and you're guaranteed +5 insightful. Opera is not comparable to Mac OS X at all.

Re:Integration.

[mdwh2]

Ok. Here is a start, W3 Schools hits. You'll notice that opera is not popular among people who learn about making websites. This is just one website, but they are more likely to have alternate browser hits than some.

And which browser comes out top?

Since people don't use opera, I'm concluding they don't like opera or don't know about opera. Either way, opera has not been successful. Firefox, in constrast, has been successful. Many people have heard of it. Both of my parents have tried it. I called them and asked if they have ever heard of opera. Neither of them had.

And did you suggest they try installing it?

The reason is that the fan-boy Firefox pushing does wonders for getting people to try that. And I fully agree - it is a good thing that due to Firefox, people have been motivated to get people to switch from IE.

However, it is absurd to suggest that this act suddenly makes Opera installations worse or break in anyway. Consider - at one point Opera was the only decent alternative to IE, so the argument that it's because Firefox is better doesn't apply. People were happily using Opera, and they weren't obsessed with getting everyone else to switch.

Re:Integration.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the fact that this debate so lacks examples is telling of how entrenched the browser war has become. What is so alienating in Opera? Could it be the numerous ways of navigating, or are we just talking about a somewhat less than optimal initial skin? If you want to contribute in any useful way, you should remember to point out clearly what you want changed, and saying "Integration." might be a little vague. There is an interesting potential here, though, for discussing a possible tradeoff between OS-program interoperability and cross-platform integrity. After all, you would expect Opera - or Firefox for that matter - to be the same browser on a Mac as it is in Windows. That follows the same logic as saying that programs that use the same platform should act (somewhat) the same. But what matters most?

The look of a program is certainly important. Personally, I prefer the 'windows native' skin for Opera, which is included by default. I like it because it blends in with the rest of my environment, allowing me to work more intuitively. That plus the extended ability to customize and minimize the bars and buttons was really the main feature for me when Opera8 was released. I just don't like a lot of different skins cluttering up my screen. Firefox, too, is nice in that way. (As a short note, I too wish that FF would handle tabs more like windows inside windows and provide native close buttons in the upper right corner just as Opera does. It's about that integrated look.) I liked how Opera8 introduced an RSS icon (standardized and nice, just like requested in another post) in the address bar whenever it was available, and I liked how Opera9 had learned to recognize .torrent files as something that included more than simply a 20kb download. When programs work visually together, they all come out stronger.

When it comes to the way a program 'feels' and is controlled, however, I'd like to make a different case. I'm not arguing for browsers to go the same way as 3D modelling programs, some of which require large books and hours upon hours of training to use, but if we were to wait for everyone to agree upon how browsing is to be conducted, allowing no creativity and no innovation, we'd get nowhere. If we were to say that Firefox' type-as-you-go feature is bad because we normally stick with ctrl-f, and if we were to say that Opera's mouse gestures are bad because you normally have to keep your left hand at the keyboard to do that, then there would be no progress. Differentiation is the same as innovation in this aspect. Why else would there be more than one browser?

Hence, the request for a better API is not only reasonable in its own way, but has a functionality that is multiplied by the number of all plugins that are made for it. I think Opera has underestimated Firefox in this respect, and that widgets were really only a half-baked solution. They should include it, and we should thank the Mozilla crew for helping the world of browsing one step further, just as we thank Opera for all the great features they've invented. I love tabs, I love mouse gestures, I love zooming and all the little things they have to facilitate the varying habits of different people. They are great because they are intuitive and because intuition comes from what cannot be planned.

Well...

[gall0ws]

Open source.

I would use Opera instead of Firefox if it was free (as in speech)

Re:Well...

[thanasakis]

You are out of line here dude :)

Obviously Slashdot can swallow a camel but chokes on a mosquito. Meaning, we think Java is evil despite its source being available, but Opera is cool despite its source NOT being available.

Re:Well...

[Danga]

Open source.

I would use Opera instead of Firefox if it was free (as in speech)

I think Opera being closed source makes it better. You have dedicated teams who solely focus on adding features and they do listen to user input so I see no problem. They are focusing on (and succeeding at) making the best web browser possible. They are a business and have reasons to keep the product closed source yet they still allow people to use it FOR FREE, they even took out the annoying ad bar that used to be part of Opera. I fail to see why if you really like how Opera performs and functions as a web browser you would decide not to use it solely because it is not open source.

I like open source, it is a great, but I don't let it run my life on my computer. Some open source zealots just go too far at times and I am sure they have their reasons I just fail to understand them.

Allow context search results to open in a new tab.

[Zelgadiss]

Allow context search results to open in a new tab. This is the default behavior in Firefox. It allows me to search something I don't know then go back to the original page without waiting for it to reload.

I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari is even leaner and faster than Opera, and it's extensible.

Re:I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

In my personal experience on an iBook G4 (2nd newest gen...768? megs of ram...it's like a pinto with a full leather interior) Opera is notably faster than Safari. However, Safari works much better with plugins (e.g. quicktime and flash).

M2

[dr. greenthumb]

I for one would LOVE to see support for mail encyption/signing in M2.

What I want: Less!!!

[robbak]

What is the biggest problem with software? Second-System Effect! 2SE makes life so much harder.

So, opera, continue to work on bug fixes, keep an eye out on useful, underlying technologies (bittorent, css updates (which is getting 2se'd as well!), and leave the bells, whistles and gongs to others!!

Tools for standards compliance (for developers).

[expro]

Browsers bend over backwards to be compatible with lots of pages, and by so doing promote worse behaviors.

The mess that passes for HTML is a direct result of the permissive approaches of browsers. It is understandable that browser vendors want to make the browser work on as many pages as possible, but it is a horrible tool to use in the hands of web developers because the bottom line is if it works, it is OK.

Browsers need modes that can be enabled for developers that raise exceptions when exercising behaviors that were inserted for compatability but which violate standards and/or are likely to break other browsers/versions. They need to do this to make it easy for developers to use the browser to test their web pages while not promoting worse-formed content. Whichever browser does this first, will be my choice of main browser to use when testing my web pages.

Misleading title and my two cents

[ThiagoHP]

When I first read "Opera Seeks Developer Input", I thought that Opera was seeking input from software developers, not from web ones. Well, I'm not a web developer, but I would suggest to Opera offer more Javascript debugging (specially XMLHTTPRequest) and some "Fit to width" tweakings. It works very well in most pages, but in a few of them it screws the page rendering completely.

Some people here asks for Firefox-style extensions. Unless the Opera people change their minds, this would never happen, as they think extensions are a security threat (you have to trust no just Opera ASA, but also the extension writer) and that tech-unsavvy users can confuse low-quality extensions with a low-quality browser.

adblock

[tHeSiD]

adblock, adblock, adblock, adblock, adblock, adblock, adblock, adblock, adblock, adblock, adblock, !!! and extensions... cleaner ones.. and widgets suck :(.

Add PGP/GPG/S-Mime in M2!

[Anonymous Coward]

Add PGP/GPG/S-Mime in M2! We need it!

CSS behavior of form elements

[infestedsenses]

The same CSS behavior of form elements that Firefox and IE support. Whenever I style an input textfield, defining fixed widths and then add padding to that, it works great in Firefox and IE, but Opera ignores the padding so the fields are shorter. This makes it difficult to create a clean, aligned form so we usually just ignore it and leave Opera unsupported in this aspect.

Re:CSS behavior of form elements

[Anonymous Coward]

I second this. Actually like the feel and speed of Opera better than Firefox, but Oper still breaks some things that dont break in IE and Firefox. Layer positioning, css etc.

XUL and WhatWG support

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the subset of XUL that is just more widgets than what HTML provides, it would be great for a second browser to join with Firefox so that we've got an alternative to WinFX for complex GUI apps.

This is already being done with WhatWG, and their widgets would be a great idea too.

(admitedly Safari has minor XUL support but that hardly counts). And I say all this as someone who wants to develop more complex and useful apps without having to make them Firefox-only, rather than as an Opera user.

Re:XUL and WhatWG support

[aztracker1]

I think SVG support would be nice too, if not already in there... I use Firefox for my main browser, but test with Opera8, and now 9.

Re:XUL and WhatWG support

[hkmwbz]

I think SVG support would be nice too, if not already in there...

Already in. Opera supported SVG before Firefox did.

Opera

[Konster]

A real bookmark manager. Why do browsers do so poorly in this area, and why is Opera the worst at it?

Re:Opera

[KDR_11k]

CTRL-ALT-B

If that's not what you mean please be more specific, the devs will just look at your post and wonder what you want.

how about work in marketing?

[alonsoac]

What they need to improve is marketing. No browser will be relevant for me as a developer if nobody uses it. Most developers still do not care if their pages work in Firefox even with its considerable user base.

Re:how about work in marketing?

[Yvan256]

Considering that Nintendo is using Opera for the Nintendo DS and will also use it for the Wii, I'd say Opera's marketshare could go up quite a lot within a year.

Re:Allow context search results to open in a new..

[Anonymous Coward]

Just click that search with shift. That way you get new tab. Ctrl+shift opens in background tab.

Re:Tools for standards compliance (for developers)

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't they have a smiley face for compliant pages, and a frown otherwise?

What I'd like to see

[Anonymous Coward]

-Adblock. I just can't stand flash, animated gifs

-Enable cookie tracking on a per site basis ON THE ALLOW COOKIE DIALOG

-Fix the mail client so it separates by REAL folders. The "view filter" idea is great but doesn't work with 5000+ messages.

-Integrate the error window as a sidebar

-XUL support would be a bonus (and one less reason to use mozilla)

-Proper theme integration with KDE

Re:What I'd like to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Press F11. Gives the option to block both flash and animated gifs, or halt the gifs at the first frame.

Re:What I'd like to see

[wheany]

Correction: F12. That menu lets you control pop-up blocking, disable/enable embedded media, and disable/enable some network options.

Re:What I'd like to see

[hkmwbz]

-Adblock.

Already in 9.

-Enable cookie tracking on a per site basis

Already in 9.

-Fix the mail client so it separates by REAL folders.

No!

The "view filter" idea is great but doesn't work with 5000+ messages.

Sure it does. Views are far more flexible than folders, and this comes in handy with thousands of messages. 5000?! That's all? Try 500K, which is what I deal with.

-XUL support would be a bonus

Why on earth would Opera implement XUL? It sucks!

XForms

[Anc]

I'd like to see XForms support. It's a great technology for Ajax-ish websites which has tremendous capabilities and allows to drastically reduce the amount JS required for many types of web applications.

Mozilla is already at an advanced stage in working on an implementation. The current progress is available via an extension.

Interesting fanatism towards software . . .

[ThiagoHP]

. . . cause something like this: some people complaining about the lack of some features that actually exist in Opera 9!!!

Re:Interesting fanatism towards software . . .

[tHeSiD]

oh .. crap.. my bad.,. it does have adblock.. "blocked content".. not as good as powerful as adblock.. but works pretty well .. enough for me to shift to opera :) thanks man..

Opera gives you all the space you need! (scrensht)

[eddy]

> but even then it still usues way too much screen space for things other then the actual webpage.

WTF?! You do know that the sidebar "Panel" toggles on and off with F4, right? Requests ought to focus on stuff that isn't already in the browser and trivially available to users to configure, don't you think?

I'm sorry, but requesting more space for the web page is sort of insane, considering there's always full screen mode (F11). The difference between full screen and my current configuration is neglible. Here's a current full screen screenshot (~44KiB) of my setup. Explain what you want to disable and how that makes a real difference to your browsing experience.

Personally I'd like a special tab which would include all client-server exchanges, toggable to exclude content body/show as hexa, etc.

How to make Opera better

[Cal Paterson]

Release the source under the GPL.

I, and a load of other people, won't use it until then.

Re:How to make Opera better

[Anonymous Coward]

Release the source under the GPL.

Yes, I'm sure Opera would be thrilled to see Mozilla taking their very profitable and very proficient code, and then implementing it in their products. A perfect way to bankrupt a successful company.

Re:How to make Opera better

[masklinn]

Don't use it then, no one gives a fuck.

Re:How to make Opera better

[John Courtland]

I understand the Java for drinking and the Smalltalk for thinking, but the C for sinking I just don't get.

Re:How to make Opera better

[Cal Paterson]

The article asked for input, and that's what I gave.

Re:How to make Opera better

[Cal Paterson]

Yeah, it's funny, Red Hat, Novell, MySQL and Mozilla are all totally unprofitable as a result of releasing their source code to the public.

Oh wait. They are profitable, and you're talking shit.

Re:How to make Opera better

[WilliamSChips]

C as in Sea, I believe.

Re:How to make Opera better

[John Courtland]

This is why I didn't graduate college :(

Re:How to make Opera better

[Anonymous Coward]

lol ye dats jus so tru lk i wndt neva use no fukn non-free bs on my cpu cos lk im sum windoze luser lol!!! i have sum rl stndards ffs!!!

Close/Delete

[hubidat]

I often browse web pages that I have saved on my computer. After I read them I usually just want to delete them. Currently I have to close the page and then delete. I would use any browser that let me close and delete directly from the browser and then open the next page from that folder automatically. Perhaps there is an existing way to do this, I'm so retarded about keyboard shortcuts 'an all.

Re:Allow context search results to open in a new..

[Rits]

Yes, hold Shift or Ctrl+Shift while clicking the menu item 0 this works just as well for menu entires and buttons that load a new page, as for links. You can also disable the 'reuse current tab' setting in the Preferences, which will cause all such actions to use a new tab instead of reusing the current tab.

Re:Tools for standards compliance (for developers)

[ChristTrekker]

Smiley? You're thinking of iCab.

This goes way beyond just well-formed/valid HTML

[expro]

Every Javascript that executes, style that is interpreeted, etc. has to carefully segregate favored behaviors from poor behaviors done for compatibility.

There needs to be several levels. In some cases, there are standards-compliant behaviors that have traditionally been so poorly implemented by browsers that these should also be flagged as non-portable.

Just one thing...

[powermacx]

A new icon! Seriously, it's just a big, red zero, er.. "O".

If FreeBSD can get a new spiffy logo, so can Opera. ;)

Re:Just one thing...

[ChristTrekker]

Yeah...like a chubby female viking singing while holding a sword.

Seriously, what is it about browsers and icons? IE is a big "e", Netscape is a big "N", Opera is a big "O". Where's the creativity? At least Firefox, Camino, and Safari put a little effort into it.

Re:Just one thing...

[baadger]

Yeah, because FreeBSD's logo is so damn cool...no wait it's not it's just a shiney round thing. It sucks

The FreeBSD project should have given the daemon a redraw and a hip new 2000's look, instead they have a shiney..thing.

native NetBSD port

[ChristTrekker]

I think there are a sizable chunk of people that would like to see a NetBSD/i386 version. (Personally I'd like to see a NetBSD/mac68k version just for kicks, but I'm probably in the minority there.)

Re:native NetBSD port

[Anonymous Coward]

also there is no native port for openbsd or dragonfly bsd.

Re:native NetBSD port

[ChristTrekker]

OpenBSD might have a larger installed base then NetBSD, but I really doubt there are as many desktop installations. I don't think Dragonfly comes close to either.

Open the bug tracker

[Bitsy Boffin]

The single worst thing about Opera from a developer's point of view - the bug tracker isn't open. You can't search to see if something is a known bug, you get no feedback when you submit a bug. It's just a big black hole where you throw bug reports.

Making good bug reports can take a bit of time, I don't bother for Opera, because I don't know if I'm just wasting energy on a bug that's already known.

And no, a forum is not the answer, too much noise to signal.

Re:Open the bug tracker

[RobbieGee]

In my experience, submitting a report is not a wasted effort if it contains an actual report as opposed to some venting or rant.

If the bug is a duplicate, the report will help Opera know how commonly the bug is encountered. If it's not a duplicate and there is too little information, but a good summary, some employee will likely contact you for more information.

In either case, there were some information gained and a higher probability of the bug getting attention. You could take the time you would have spent searching for a duplicate and just write a better summary of the bug.

That's not to say I don't support your opinion that the bug tracker should be open, but I think that a mediocre or better bug report is rarely a wasted effort. It's just that the task of searching for duplicates is left for the Opera gremlins.

One word...

[Bri3D]

Privoxy. Privoxy will filter HTTP requests using regexps and works as well and often better than Adblock. Plus (the best) it's browser neutral and you can do more than just ad blocking (i.e. filtering certain cookies, your user agent, referrer, etc.)

Re:Opera gives you all the space you need! (screns

[SillyNickName4me]

WTF?! You do know that the sidebar "Panel" toggles on and off with F4, right?

Yes, so I leave it permanently off (in all browsers btw).

That was however not what I commented on with regards to the side panel. The statement was that it contains usefull information, well, maybe so, but as long as it does it takes away screel real estate. Of course when you turn it off, it doesn't take screenb estate. You did read the start of my post where I said I fiddled a few hours with this and other panels and that I am quite aware that you can turn them off?

Requests ought to focus on stuff that isn't already in the browser and trivially available to users to configure, don't you think?

Fair enough. The better request would be, come with a profile that doesn't confuse the user with 20 toolbars, sidebars and what not..

I'm sorry, but requesting more space for the web page is sort of insane, considering there's always full screen mode (F11). The difference between full screen and my current configuration is neglible. Here's a current full screen screenshot (~44KiB) of my setup. Explain what you want to disable and how that makes a real difference to your browsing experience.

The bars you have at the bottom of the screen, they just take away space.. But then, you probably have a use for them..

I guess the point of my post was to say that toolbars and the like may provide some nice functionality, but the sheer number of them makes for a significant reduction in actually usable screen real estate. My only critisism of Opera in this is that by default, it is worse in this then about any other browser. You can indeed disable most of it, but making it less cluthered by default and possibly moving part of all the functionality into its own module/extension would imho be a serious improvement.

Personally I'd like a special tab which would include all client-server exchanges, toggable to exclude content body/show as hexa, etc.

Which to me sounds like another candidate for an extension. I see the use, but the use of this to the typical end-user is pretty much zero. Why bother them with this?

real google bar

[TTL0]

'nuff said.

btw thanx opera for a great browser. one of the few apps that keeps me on (desktop)linux

Make the e-mail client callable by other programs

[tetabiate]

I think having an e-mail client integrated into the browser is a good idea. Despite Opera's e-mail interface and usability is not (yet) as intuitive and powerful as, say, thunderbird, it seems promising. Besides, how would you instruct other applications to use it as the default e-mail application?

Only one thing needed

[eebra82]

I think Opera is a great browser (although I personally prefer Firefox because of all the plugins), but it is also the most feature-packed browser. That's a good thing, but too much is crammed into into this thing. Most people use only the most fundamental basics of a browser. What I would like to see is an ultra lite version of Opera with all the nifty features removed, or at least scalability in the full version.

Internet Explorer is great because it allows the user to remove stupid buttons, move around the menus and so forth, making the browser only one length thick on top. That's great if you want more space for viewing web sites and such. I personally prefer compact applications. When I look at Opera, I don't see that. I see a lot of cool stuff but I don't really need most of it and would prefer to add these nifty things once that I need them.

Re:Only one thing needed

[Anonymous Coward]

What I would like to see is an ultra lite version of Opera with all the nifty features removed, or at least scalability in the full version.

Opera already is an ultra-lite version. Don't use the mail client? It doesn't get loaded. Don't use BitTorrent? It doesn't get loaded. Don't use IRC? It doesn't get loaded.

Internet Explorer is great because it allows the user to remove stupid buttons, move around the menus and so forth, making the browser only one length thick on top. That's great if you want more space for viewing web sites and such. I personally prefer compact applications. When I look at Opera, I don't see that.

You're not looking closely enough. Opera is, by far, the most customizable browser when it comes to UI. Neither IE nor Firefox - nor anything else - can come close to Opera in that regard. Why don't you try customizing the toolbars and the mouse gesture/keyboard shortcut actions a bit? The only thing that isn't possible is to have both the main menu and other stuff in the same toolbar.

Re:Only one thing needed

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing that isn't possible is to have both the main menu and other stuff in the same toolbar.

Actually, it is possible. You can put a button or buttons on any toolbar that pops up the main menu (or any menu at all), then hide the menu bar.

Look here.

Re:Only one thing needed

[hkmwbz]

too much is crammed into into this thing

Not at all. Everything is disabled and/or hidden by default, so if you don't want to use those features just don't activate them.

What I would like to see is an ultra lite version of Opera with all the nifty features removed

Opera is already lighter and faster than the competitors, and your request is rather useless. What features should be removed? Bookmarks? Bookmark nicknames? Everything except back, forward, reload and the address field?

or at least scalability in the full version.

Yes, and that's what Opera does today: It starts off as a plain and simple browser, but you can activate stuff if you want to.

Internet Explorer is great because it allows the user to remove stupid buttons, move around the menus and so forth, making the browser only one length thick on top.

It's extremely easy to remove buttons in Opera, and to turn toolbars on and off. But Opera has far fewer buttons visible by default than IE anyway, so...

64bit support /. consistent.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm not sure how you can say the web is better without flash, to me that is an obviously false statement. "

Simple, slashdot isn't consistent in it's principles. Flash-hating is basically "blaming the technology, not the user of the technology". While DRM and TC is basically "Blaming the user, instead of the technology.

BTW there's nothing technologically wrong with Flash. The issue of license or "proprietary" has nothing to do with that.

Re:64bit support /. consistent.

[masklinn]

It's more like flash is often annoying (never stopping animations, sound, ...), sometimes extremely impractical (bizarre navigation) and too misused, therefore a damn fucking pain.

And the web DOES feel better without flash (e.g., with Flashblock installed).

Re:64bit support /. consistent.

[thelost]

that's a personal preference, but like i said most major sites have gotten over their love affair with flash and now use it in a practical way, rather than for as you say extremely impractical navigation systems and annoying animations. In a post web 2.0 world designers have learnt to not piss off the consumer, as they will happily walk away. there's no such thing as brand loyalty anymore.

Re:64bit support /. consistent.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad the sites you visit no longer use flash for menus, even when the pages they link to are simple html. I'm glad the sites you frequent don't use flash to present information in tiny little chunks with no state or bookmarking capability and no ability to save or print a "page". I'm glad the sites you want to visit finally get it. I'm really happy for you. Really.

The sites I find myself at, however, do not get it.

Sure, there are some practical uses out there. I like ESPN's Tournament Challenge bracket entry system (but note that they also offer a non-flash version) and some of the ways they use flash applications. There are also lots of sites that offer entertaining flash animations when I'm in the mood to watch animations.

But most of the time, I still see ridiculous sites like scifi.com, who seem intent on making access to information slower and more difficult. I'm glad your flash world is perfect.

Mine sucks.

Automated nag to bad webmasters

[Jeppe Salvesen]

I'd like webmaster@yoursite.com to receive this mail:

"Hi,

While accessing your site, I came across some questionable markup. I've done my best to present your site - but I'm not positive I did it right. Perhaps you can fix the following errors?

[list of validation errors]

Kind regards,
An Opera browser"

Wouldn't that be something, folks?

Re:Automated nag to bad webmasters

[eargang]

Valid markup does not guarantee anything, just as invalid markup could render perfectly on any browser since Netscape 3.

Validation is a good start, but building sites "properly" with infrastructure and semantics in mind is the only way to "get it right".

Plus, Opera doesn't render as well as some other browsers.

Re:Automated nag to bad webmasters

[Chatterton]

Actually I maintain a web site of an institution using HTML 4.01 strict and CSS 2.1. All my new pages pass the W3C validation for the HTML and the CSS.
I get very good results with IE 6, NS 8.1, FF 1.5 and Lynx (for a pure text version) and that with and without javascript. But I have dropped the gauntlet with Opera. When something work with all the others browsers it doesn't work correctly in Opera and when I correct it in Opera, the display in all the others browser is broken...

I work for an institution who have set IE as his standard for their website. I try to have something working in a maximum of browsers. I try my best to make it work in a maximum of browsers but if it doesn't work correctly in opera, too bad for the Opera users. The next time, they will browse with a free browser :)

I don't consider myself a bad webmaster, but not as a top webmaster too. I think I am not too bad, but making web page display correctly in Opera and other browsers is for me out of my capabilities :/

Re:Automated nag to bad webmasters

[RobbieGee]

Care to provide a link? I could maybe have a look at it. If it's not too obvious, mention what the expected and actual result is in Opera.

research tools

[kingduct]

I'm writing a thesis and I have noticed a few things I'd like:

1) I want to be able to bookmark/save a page locally. Bookmarking is way easier than the "save as" dialogue and is also much easier than finding something in cache. Let me bookmark a page locally, the page could then have a "check for changes" that would download the current version of the page in a new tab.

2) the reason for this? I want a whole highlighting system so that I can markup documents I have locally bookmarked and then look at them later (with those markups). The closest I've been able to get to this is with Firefox, saving the page on my harddisk and then using platypus to highlight paragraphs, but that is a suboptimal system.

3) I am sure I could add more nifty things to this setup. For instance, maybe I could assign keywords to each page I have locally bookmarked, I could have labels like in the mail program, etc (normal bookmarks could have these too, rather than the traditional folder system). The main thing is that almost no consideration is given by any browser to its use by students for research, think of those things!

Re:research tools

[dyftm]

Use Scrapbook for Firefox - saving to disk as quickly as bookmarking, edit the pages, highlight them, etc.

From a (web) developer standpoint

[masklinn]

• Advanced javascript debugger that includes XMLHttpRequest debugging (on par with Venkman + Firebug)
• Network request trace (LiveHTTPRequest) with optional ability to tamper with requests (Tamper Data)
• DOM Inspector (DomI / Firebug / MouseOver DOM Inspector / WebKit's DOM Inspector)
• A Javascript console at least on par with Firefox' Console/Firebug, and that includes Firebug's console interface, invaluable for trace-debugging
• A Web Developer Toolbar (just hire Chris Pederick or something)
• A Javascript CLI/shell (like Squarefree's JS Shell)

(between parens are existing equivalents to the request, mostly firefox extensions with the exception of the Mouseover DOM Inspector and the JS Shell -- bookmarklets -- and Webkit's DOM.I)

These are all tools that'd make the Opera Experience much more interresting from a dev standpoint. Just provide an alternate "dev" version of Opera with all these goodies included so that they don't bloat the "customer" version, but provide these, they make creating complex sites so much easier.

systematic "active stuff" blockin

[jc42]

Something I've always wanted with all browsers is a single place that lists all the "active" (i.e., cpu-using) features, with a button to block/unblock each of them. It would be best if the blocking could be either per-site or per window/tab, or maybe both.

Yes, active stuff like flash is sometimes useful, and some sites use such things to great advantage. But 99% of flash, for example, is used to create distracting ads. When a site does this to me, arrogantly assuming that I have nothing better for my cpu to do than to run their ad, I attempt to block the site's ads, and if I can't do that, I put the site on my list of "greedy" sites to be avoided.

I used to have slashdot's images enabled. Then one day an active ad showed up that used more than half my cpu. I found /.'s setting to disable images, and I've used that ever since. The images here seem to have no content anyway (as far as I can tell). They're just eye candy, so I'm probably not missing anything.

Anyway, I tend to use mozilla for my "random" browsing, because that's the browser for which I've learned the most about turning off cpu-sucking active-ad junk. But even there, it occasionally goes berserk from some ad that knows how to get around all the blocks that I have enabled. Just an hour ago, I found mozilla had a size of 1.4 GB, and was using around 55% of the cpu. I killed it. Now I'll have to open those windows and tabs one at a time, trying to spot the culprit and put it in my hog list.

I've found opera to be not quite as crippled by such things as the other browsers I have installed. An ad that soaks up 40% of the cpu in mozilla or firefox will usually only use 5% or 10% in opera. But it's still a pain, and I can waste a lot of time hunting down the culprit if I have a lot of tabs open.

It sure would be nice if there were somewhere an explicit list of all the cpu-using things in a browser, with a way of turning each of them on/off as needed.

And a way of quickly locating a cpu- or memory-eating hog could also be useful. That can take a lot of time if you're working with a lot of open tabs. It would help a lot if the browser could tell me where it's using resources and why. That way, I wouldn't have to kill the whole browser; I could just kill the one hog.

Re:systematic "active stuff" blockin

[kevlarman]

the https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/433/flashblock extension for firefox seems to get rid of the biggest (only?) offender in wasting cpu time, and makes it easy to enable a flash you actually want. now if only there was an extension to identify and block "seizure gifs", i would never need another extension for dealing with ads

Re:systematic "active stuff" blockin

[wheany]

Maybe not quite what you're after, but you could sutf with java, plugins and gif animation disabled, and activate them (eg. F12 -> Enable java, or edit site preferences -> content -> Enable Java) as you need/want.

I myself browse with plugins, java and referrer logging disabled and activate them only if a page requires them.

Re:systematic "active stuff" blockin

[jc42]

Yeah, I do that, too. But there are limitations. Thus, if you disable plugins with most browsers, it's a single enable/disable checkbox for all plugins in all of that browser's windows. Then, if you want to run something like a video clip in one tab, enabling the plugins means a loooooong pause while it runs through all the tabs in all windows and enables all plugins everywhere. Then if you neglect to turn it back off, perhaps because you wanted to watch several videos in that tab and then got distracted by some other job, you find that all your plugins are now running in all your tabs, wiping out your cpu.

And it seems there are things that aren't turned off in mozilla or firefox by disabling plugins, javascript, and active GIFs, and enabling flashblock. There are still some video thingies that run somehow, and a refresh= attribute in a meta tag is still honored. Sometimes I still find mozilla or firefox suddenly using most of the cpu, although I have every active thing I know of turned off. And closing all the browser's windows usually doesn't reduce the cpu or memory usage much.

It would be nice if a browser could handle this issue in a user-friendly manner (which would be inherently web-site-hostile in many cases).

Re:systematic "active stuff" blockin

[wheany]

If you enable plugins in one tab, plugins in other tabs won't activate unless you reload them. And you can enable plugins in site's preferences, using site preferences as an exception to the normal surfing settings.

The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways:

[Futurepower(R)]

What sunk Opera's chances to make money on its browser, in my opinion, was lack of attention to detail in the design of the user interface.

There's a good test available at present, and the experiment is being performed all over the world. People can have both Firefox and Opera free, and they choose Firefox. They choose Firefox even though Firefox is the still the most unstable program in common use.

(The 1.5.0.4 version of Firefox is quite stable when the FlashBlock extension is installed, but still, after days of many windows being loaded, Firefox is so unstable that the Microsoft Windows operating system must be re-started to return to original performance. My experience has been that Linux remains stable, but that all Firefox windows must be closed to regain performance of Firefox.)

Opera, on the other hand, is rock solid, and better at rendering web pages that are designed around Microsoft Internet Explorer's goofy quirks. Opera is also nicely configurable, and the configuration files are easier to copy that those of Firefox. Opera has a built-in ability to save the current browsing session, with all the tabs and the sequence of tabs. It's much easier to do several independently operating installations of Opera; that feature is supported by the installation program.

But there are subtle mistakes in Opera's user interface design. Both browsers have a URL auto-completion feature, for example. In both browsers, if I enter "vmware", for example, I see a drop down list of all the pages I have viewed recently at www.vmware.com. But in Opera, I must choose one of those pages with the mouse. In Firefox, I don't have to remove my hand from the home row of keys; I just press the Tab key to choose the page I want, and then press the Enter key.

Opera shows how mis-management can reduce the profit of a software company. Opera cost $30 previously. That's an amount I would easily pay, if there were advantages instead of disadvantages in the user interface. I spend a lot of time with a browser, and $30 would be a tiny amount of money per hour.

The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways, in my opinion: First, Opera failed to recognize that the user interface design of a successful product is a huge intellectual challenge, and that, when competing products work fairly well, the user interface determines which will be most popular. For professionals, the cost is a small issue.

Second, Opera, like all software companies of which I am aware, thinks of product support as a very low-level job, and assigns it to people with a teenage sense of responsibility. It's true that most product support requests require little thinking. However there was no policy at Opera about teaching product support specialists how to recognize requests that should be guided to someone more skilled. My attempts, several years ago, to tell the Opera company how the user interface could be improved were met only with frustration. For example, someone who seemed that she was only working until she could find a man to marry and have babies answered my suggestion about tab-key autocompletion with nonsense.

Third, Opera, like most software companies, has poor marketing. Good marketing requires someone who is very skilled at communication and who is also willing to understand how to structure product support so that it is both efficient and useful in guiding the development of the product. At Opera apparently there has always been a lack of understanding of communication, and a lack of connection of the communication with the technical details of the product. There have been many subtle and not-so-subtle mistakes.

There are other unfortunate choices. Opera's excellent ability to save the current browsing session is ruined by the fact that the session files are now buried deeply in the Opera folder structure, and cannot be saved elsewhere. That's a mistake that is recent; with version 6 session files could be saved anywhere.

A Slashdot comment is not the place for a thorough analysis of Opera's user interface, of course, so there are many other issues that aren't mentioned here.

Re:The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways:

[mobby_6kl]

But in Opera, I must choose one of those pages with the mouse. In Firefox, I don't have to remove my hand from the home row of keys; I just press the Tab key to choose the page I want, and then press the Enter key.

And this is an example of bad UI in Opera? The URL field is basically a combobox, and its behavior does not include changing items with tab, the arrow keys do that. The expected behavior of the tab key is to switch focus to the next (or previous) control.

Re:The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways:

[Anonymous Coward]

What sunk Opera's chances to make money on its browser, in my opinion, was lack of attention to detail in the design of the user interface.

Opera makes tons of money on its browser. Mobile phones, Nintendo's consoles, some vending machines, airplane media platforms, they have a contract with Google...

But there are subtle mistakes in Opera's user interface design. Both browsers have a URL auto-completion feature, for example. In both browsers, if I enter "vmware", for example, I see a drop down list of all the pages I have viewed recently at www.vmware.com. But in Opera, I must choose one of those pages with the mouse. In Firefox, I don't have to remove my hand from the home row of keys; I just press the Tab key to choose the page I want, and then press the Enter key.

That's actually a mistake in Firefox' UI design. The Tab key should NOT select those items in the dropdown, but move to a different chrome element - and indeed, that's what happens. Just like various HIGs suggest, just like various operating systems behave, and just like everything else *but* Firefox behaves. To select items, use the directional keys. The Opera person you were talking to was damn right to dismiss your insane proposal.

Most of your points are moot. Don't expect Opera to violate HIGs because Firefox does, and don't blame their marketing when they have a #1 mobile browser and when they'll have a #1 game console browser.

Re:The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways:

[Anonymous Coward]

"What sunk Opera's chances to make money on its browser, in my opinion, was lack of attention to detail in the design of the user interface.

There's a good test available at present, and the experiment is being performed all over the world. People can have both Firefox and Opera free, and they choose Firefox. They choose Firefox even though Firefox is the still the most unstable program in common use."

Ergo, Mircrosoft has put in a MASSIVE attention to detail in the IE UI?

Re:The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways:

[hkmwbz]

There's a good test available at present, and the experiment is being performed all over the world. People can have both Firefox and Opera free, and they choose Firefox. They choose Firefox even though Firefox is the still the most unstable program in common use.

I'm sorry to have to say this, but your post is misinformed and your arguments are illogical or simply wrong.

Firefox's success has to do with marketing, plain and simple. Firefox had a major marketing push, as a completely free browser. Opera could obviously never reach as many users as Firefox since it was adware/payware.

Opera's mistake is not the UI at all. Rather, it is the failure to do a major marketing push when everyone was looking at an alternative to IE, and while Firefox wasn't finished yet. Firefox came almost exactly at the right time: While everyone was focusing on IE's shortcomings, especially regarding security.

In both browsers, if I enter "vmware", for example, I see a drop down list of all the pages I have viewed recently at www.vmware.com. But in Opera, I must choose one of those pages with the mouse.

Not at all. Simply press the down key on the keyboard. So, wrong.

Opera shows how mis-management can reduce the profit of a software company.

Huh? Opera is making more money than ever! Most of Opera's income has come from mobile phones and devices for several years now anyway. So, wrong.

Opera cost $30 previously. That's an amount I would easily pay, if there were advantages instead of disadvantages in the user interface. I spend a lot of time with a browser, and $30 would be a tiny amount of money per hour.

It was $39, and you are just one single person. Most people do not want to pay for a browser.

The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways, in my opinion: First, Opera failed to recognize that the user interface design of a successful product is a huge intellectual challenge, and that, when competing products work fairly well, the user interface determines which will be most popular.

This is vague nonsense. I've already demonstrated that you are wrong about why Firefox is more popular than Opera, and shown that you are not representative of most users.

Second, Opera, like all software companies of which I am aware, thinks of product support as a very low-level job, and assigns it to people with a teenage sense of responsibility.

Wrong, and also irrelevant. Firefox doesn't even have any tech support (unless you pay $50 or so per incident), and yet it's more popular than Opera. So, you are contradicting yourself.

For example, someone who seemed that she was only working until she could find a man to marry and have babies answered my suggestion about tab-key autocompletion with nonsense.

Well, I've shown how you are the one talking nonsense :)

Third, Opera, like most software companies, has poor marketing.

Yes, Opera has poor marketing.

Good marketing requires someone who is very skilled at communication and who is also willing to understand how to structure product support so that it is both efficient and useful in guiding the development of the product. At Opera apparently there has always been a lack of understanding of communication, and a lack of connection of the communication with the technical details of the product. There have been many subtle and not-so-subtle mistakes.

This is yet more vague and irrelevant nonsense.

There are other unfortunate choices. Opera's excellent ability to save the current browsing session is ruined by the fact that the session files are now buried deeply in the Opera folder structure, and cannot be saved elsewhere. That's a mistake that is recent; with version 6 session files could be saved anywhere.

And this is completely irrelevant to just about everyone else. The old way to save sessions sucked. Thew new way is far better UI because it doesn't confuse the heck out of the user. It's Firefox UI design in Opera!

Re:The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways:

[bunratty]

Firefox's success has to do with marketing, plain and simple. Firefox had a major marketing push, as a completely free browser. Opera could obviously never reach as many users as Firefox since it was adware/payware.

Opera's failure to gain usage share dates back to 2002 when Mozilla 1.0 was released. That's when a large percentage of existing Opera users seemed to switch from Opera to Mozilla. Opera was able to gain more users up until that time, but since the release of Mozilla 1.0 Opera hasn't been able to sustain any increase in usage share.

People who thought that Opera's status as adware/payware was holding them back claimed that Opera usage would soar quickly after removing the ad banner/making Opera free in 2005. Many people who made that claim have now realized it didn't happen. It looks like users really do prefer Mozilla browsers.

Re:The Opera company is mismanaged in three ways:

[hkmwbz]

Opera's failure to gain usage share dates back to 2002 when Mozilla 1.0 was released.

Wow, so a free program takes users from a program you have to pay for! What a surprise!

People who thought that Opera's status as adware/payware was holding them back claimed that Opera usage would soar quickly after removing the ad banner/making Opera free in 2005. Many people who made that claim have now realized it didn't happen. It looks like users really do prefer Mozilla browsers.

No, people simply follow the advertising, and Mozilla was clever enough to hire professional marketing people and take advantage of IE's security holes. Users don't "prefer Mozilla browsers", since most people don't even know about anything else. They know about IE and likely Mozilla/Netscape. That they choose Mozilla over IE is not exactly surprising.

Other than that, I don't understand what you are trying to say.

Re:Opera gives you all the space you need! (screns

[pafrusurewa]

I guess the point of my post was to say that toolbars and the like may provide some nice functionality, but the sheer number of them makes for a significant reduction in actually usable screen real estate. My only critisism of Opera in this is that by default, it is worse in this then about any other browser. You can indeed disable most of it, but making it less cluthered by default and possibly moving part of all the functionality into its own module/extension would imho be a serious improvement.

You seem to be implying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that Opera is more "cluttered" by default and takes up more screen real estate than "any other browser". This is of course not true. I present you a screenshot with a default installation (freshly installed, nothing changed) of both Firefox and Opera, both recent versions. Note that Firefox takes up more screen space than Opera.

Letting go of /dev/dsp

[The Creator]

After using Java or Flash they stay alive and hog the audio. I whould like Opera to kill them off when not used anymore.

(This applies to Linux)

Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt.

[Nazo-San]

I don't know, I use Opera 99.9% of the time and only fall back to Firefox in extreme emergencies, but, I must say that I'm not entirely certain they really listen all that well to suggestions and such. For example, people have been calling for extentions (let's not get into an argument here, whether you think it's good or bad, the fact is, a huge number of people want extentions so they should at least make it more clear why they haven't made any efforts they've shown to us in this direction) for years and there isn't even an official response as far as I know. Then they do these "widgets" that are just pointless (hey, I tried. I downloaded several things that should be useful and tried to get the hang of using them, but, in the end they just get in the way and have no real use. I searched every widget on their site and didn't find one that I didn't end up finding to be in the way once the neatness factor wore off. Anything a widget can do, you can do better with an actual program in Java or some other easily portable language.) If you look at their forums you can find some long running feature request threads that a lot of people have "+1"ed that just never happen. (Not to mention that more than a few of those are probably requests for extentions. It gets posted a lot.)

We can hope though I guess. All browsers have a lot of room for improvement (though I personally feel Opera mainly just needs extentions and to remove the extra pointless overhead that widget support has added) and if they actually stop and listen maybe we could get a browser that's truly as close to perfect as any peice of software can be? (Ok, that's going too far I guess, but wouldn't it be nice?)

Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt though. Get the web designers to look at Opera and get it mentioned enough that more users hear about it. To make suggestions on improvements, web designers would have to actually get it and try it (actually, I like the sound of that since a lot of them would have no choice but to admit that it's a good browser and maybe should get the occasional support instead of an "only IE and Firefox supported" page.) The truth is though, it seems to me that most of the suggestions are basically going to be things that should be ignored, such as a designer asking that they support a proprietary extention that works only in IE (I still don't know why they do that sort of thing since it's actually more work in the long run.) The fact is, unlike the big two (IE and Mozilla/Firefox) Opera is among the very few that correctly implements enough of the actual standards to pass the ACID2 test, so it seems to me like there isn't going to be a lot of requests that they support this or that standard.

So what's left from a designer's perspective besides asking them to fully support whatever little bit of the standards they don't already? Most changes need to come from the customer's perspective I think. Extentions, a better download manager, etc. It's easy to think of suggestions a user can make. Actually, what worries me is that generally what it comes down to is a developer wants as much control over your browser as they can. For example, one might want the ability to change the skin and menu layout of your browser specifically for their site. That's great for the developer, but, the end user would go bonkers in a hurry. Besides asking for proprietary extentions and more control over the user's screen, there's really so little that a developer can do that I can only conclude this is really ultimately just meant to get people's attention (hey, they got it on slashdot even, that's a good start, though the problem is that most slashdot users are intelligent enough to know about browser alternatives and most here who don't use Opera are just using it because for whatever reason they don't like it.)

Anyway, I'm not saying boycott Opera or something, just I'm wondering if this is just a publicity stunt or if they really do have a point for

Re:Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt.

[hkmwbz]

I must say that I'm not entirely certain they really listen all that well to suggestions and such.

Then you haven't seen the way frequently requested things are added all the time.

For example, people have been calling for extentions

Maybe extensions aren't considered to be of critical importance, or maybe it takes more than a week to implement an extensions system properly.

Then they do these "widgets" that are just pointless

Then why do Opera widgets have tens of thousands of downloads? Clearly there is something you are not getting, and clearly there is something of strategic importance with widgets, seeing as they are available on mobile phones too (they were before the PC version got widgets).

Also, lots of FF extensions can be "emulated" using widgets.

Anything a widget can do, you can do better with an actual program in Java or some other easily portable language.

Except doing them with web standards is faster and cheaper, and it's easier to deploy.

If you look at their forums you can find some long running feature request threads that a lot of people have "+1"ed that just never happen.

Or take a long time. Or aren't a priority for some reason. Sometimes, long awaited features arrive only after some major rewrite since they relied on some kind of functionality which wasn't present yet. Rich text editing in Opera 9 was apparently one of those things. The old engine simply couldn't do it, and it relied on stuff that needed to be added.

So it's not just a matter of adding features just like that. It requires planning, and they may require other features to support them.

The truth is though, it seems to me that most of the suggestions are basically going to be things that should be ignored, such as a designer asking that they support a proprietary extention that works only in IE

Huh? What about the suggestions about better web dev tolls?

So what's left from a designer's perspective besides asking them to fully support whatever little bit of the standards they don't already?

Proper/better web development tools?

I'm wondering if this is just a publicity stunt or if they really do have a point for all this.

It is obviously not just a publicity stunt. Geez, do you know anything about Opera at all?! :o

Re:Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt.

[Nazo-San]

Then you haven't seen the way frequently requested things are added all the time.

Such as? I'm not saying nothing gets added, I'm saying that it really feels like they aren't so much listening to requests as just adding what they think makes sense when they think of it.

Maybe extensions aren't considered to be of critical importance, or maybe it takes more than a week to implement an extensions system properly.

Maybe. Maybe extentions take more than a year because people have been calling for them for a very long time now, not just a matter of a few weeks.

Then why do Opera widgets have tens of thousands of downloads? Clearly there is something you are not getting, and clearly there is something of strategic importance with widgets, seeing as they are available on mobile phones too (they were before the PC version got widgets).

Tens of thousands? That's actually not very much when it comes to downloads. Let's take an example of something relatively worthless: Birthday Alert on Tens of thousands of downloads, yet, if you think about it, Windows, since 98 or so, has had a built in task scheduler in which you could simply make a task to give yourself a message on the specified date. Linux has had task schedulers built in to any distro in the market for as long as I've used it. But, hey, it has tens of thousands of downloads, so it must be useful huh?

Something I'm not getting you say? I tried numerous widgets, quite a few of which should have been useful (such as a unicode paster thing) and I just found that they got in the way. Perhaps it's not that I'm missing something despite the direct experience, but, instead perhaps it is that all the many people who claim widgets are pretty much a waste of time and resources might actually not be just making thigns up randomly. On a phone, maybe widgets are useful, but, then I'm not discussing the phone browser.

Also, lots of FF extensions can be "emulated" using widgets.
Emulated? Extentions do things within the browser itself. Widgets are actually pretty much external. At least I certainly have yet to see a single widget that can do things within the browser itself instead of in it's own external annoying window that gets in the way.

Except doing them with web standards is faster and cheaper, and it's easier to deploy.

What web standards? It's an Opera API... Anyway, if you want a so called "web standard" Java has been known all over the web for a lot longer. Java apps will work in pretty much any browser, while Opera widgets will only work in, you guessed it, Opera. Plus Java isn't even limited to the browser and can be 100% external. It's also quite easy to program for as even I could do simple applications after only a couple of weeks or so of a low level OO class that focused on Java. Some very useful and popular applications use Java, such as the well known BitTorrent client, Azureus. Name one well known popular widget.

Or take a long time. Or aren't a priority for some reason. Sometimes, long awaited features arrive only after some major rewrite since they relied on some kind of functionality which wasn't present yet.

Yes, this is true and I don't disagree. The flaw in this explanation is the fact that extentions have been a request for several major revisions. By now they could have worked in whatever might have been needed had they wanted.

Huh? What about the suggestions about better web dev tolls?

What's a dev toll, and how does it in any way disprove that only a few suggestions from devs are likely to be any more useful than "support x standard in W3C document y" (which my point is that they'll get around to eventually anyway, so the main thing that would do is prioritize.)

Re:Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt.

[hkmwbz]

Such as? I'm not saying nothing gets added, I'm saying that it really feels like they aren't so much listening to requests as just adding what they think makes sense when they think of it.

Obviously. Software development is not a democratic process. You don't just add something because someone asked you to. But the market's rules applies. SMTP authentication was added for mail (ages ago), NTLM support, rich text editing, etc. You are just ignoring obvious examples because you have made up your mind already.

Maybe. Maybe extentions take more than a year because people have been calling for them for a very long time now, not just a matter of a few weeks.

A very long time? Maybe a year or two. That's not "a very long time" in software development. And it wasn't until Opera went free without ads that you noticed requests for extensions. And that's not even a year ago.

Tens of thousands? That's actually not very much when it comes to downloads.

It is when it's a single feature in a minority browser.

Something I'm not getting you say?

Yes.

Emulated? Extentions do things within the browser itself. Widgets are actually pretty much external.

Yes, but you can still get features that are available as extensions in Firefox. Whether they are external or not is irrelevant.

What web standards? It's an Opera API...

No it isn't. It's using web standards. Widgets are basically web pages without a browser UI.

Java apps will work in pretty much any browser, while Opera widgets will only work in, you guessed it, Opera. Plus Java isn't even limited to the browser and can be 100% external. It's also quite easy to program for as even I could do simple applications after only a couple of weeks or so of a low level OO class that focused on Java.

Java still requires more time and resources than web applications.

Name one well known popular widget.

I don't have to. But I can name plenty of web applications. Java is a programming language used to create programs. HTML, JS, etc. are the languages behind widgets. The same languages are used for normal web sites.

The flaw in this explanation is the fact that extentions have been a request for several major revisions.

No, they have not.

By now they could have worked in whatever might have been needed had they wanted.

You are assuming that things are done in a week.

Opera is a web browser.

Opera has never been just a web browser. Even the first public version had a newsreader and could send mail.

Actually, the facts speak for themselves. If anyone doubts even for a moment, then the word "obvious" does not apply.

No, you are being irrational and illogical again. If something obvious isn't obvious to someone, they may just be an idiot.

Clearly there is something that makes it less than obvious that it is not a publicity stunt or I never even would have said this since it would be obvious to me that it is not true.

But then again, you obviously haven't paid attention to Opera or what it does or how it works. Thus, you may not be an idiot, but you certainly are clueless when it comes to Opera.

Re:Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt.

[Nazo-San]

First, claiming I'm "ignoring things because my mind is made up" is just getting silly, and then later actually outright calling me an idiot is only making your position look worse. You are resorting more and more towards just a simple flame war. Let's keep this intelligent. Refrain from the insults if you wish to continue this conversation, and I'd like to point out that if you didn't want to continue the conversation, the easiest way to have ended it would have been to not have made that post at all.

Things like SMTP authentication aren't feature requests, they are feature requirements. More and more services are finally getting a reality check and realizing that authentication is needed, and thus require it rather than just making it optional or even not available at all. Any mail reader not supporting that needs to be deleted, so if Opera were unable to do it, they might just as well remove all the code for mail reading. No, my point isn't whether or not Opera gets changes at all, but, whether what users (and guess what the market is made up of, that's right, users) actually have any say whatsoever. Again, like I said before, you will even see things get added in that users requested, but, how many of them were added because people wanted them, and how many were added because the Opera team independantly decided that they made sense? It may not even be true, but, from the user (and previously customer) perspective, it looked that way.

Ok, I made a mistake on the API thing, and looked it up. Yes, widgets are using HTML code complete with Java, Javascript, and such. The point remains that everything you can do with them you can do via bookmarks or external programs and it's less intrusive.

And why do you keep saying that extentions have only had weeks? People have not been requesting them for less than a year, people have been requesting them for more than a year. Believe it or not, people used Opera back when it wasn't free with no ads and people wanted things back then too. Opera has had to live in the shadow of browsers like Firefox for quite a long while now, and one of the most notable features Firefox has had for quite some time now is extentions. I don't see why it's so hard to believe that people might have wanted extentions back then too.

And Java does not require more time and resources than a web application. Actually, it tends to get more complicated to create what is like a little program with a web application because the web standards were, ultimately, just designed to be a sort of dynamic form of text. The trouble is, anything you can do with widgets, you can do less intrusively without them. You want a calculator, toss something together something in Java if you need portability, or, heck, even just VB will do. Want a comic strip? Uhm, how about just make a bookmark on the comic page instead of trying to rig up something to link to it -- and even if you must do that, why must it be a little box sitting on the desktop (only while the browser is open, so if you need it any other time, too bad) versus say a box on a page that you designed? Why do I need some annoying box sitting on my desktop in the way when I can get to a bookmark with two clicks (add one keypress if you want it in a new tab/window of course.) For calculators, I can just do start+r (or alt+f2 in X,) calc (maybe kalc in KDE or whatever your preference,) enter. It's actually faster than digging through widgets for a calculator that often enough has a bug or two in it. It's faster, and it doesn't get in the way like the widgets do. And if, despite all this, you honestly think it's easier using web apps (which, I would like to remind you, work in only one browser, and you mentioned ease of deployment, well, the ease falls pretty short since you'll be requiring all your users to install and use a browser that a larger number of them probably have never used,) then I'd like to ask how much you have actually tried developing in Java, VB, or even things like Python and if you have developed as

Re:Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt.

[hkmwbz]

and then later actually outright calling me an idiot

I didn't. I wrote:

Thus, you may not be an idiot, but you certainly are clueless when it comes to Opera.

Things like SMTP authentication aren't feature requests, they are feature requirements.

You are missing the point, and ignoring the other examples.

No, my point isn't whether or not Opera gets changes at all, but, whether what users (and guess what the market is made up of, that's right, users) actually have any say whatsoever.

Of course they do. Opera even has a wishlist forum for feature requests. Users are invited to download early alpha versions and give their feedback. And so on.

The point remains that everything you can do with them you can do via bookmarks or external programs and it's less intrusive.

Bookmarks are cluttered, and external programs are a pain. There's a reason why people love Apple widgets, and why Microsoft is doing their own widgets with Vista.

And why do you keep saying that extentions have only had weeks?

I didn't.

The trouble is, anything you can do with widgets, you can do less intrusively without them.

Yeah, who needs web applications when you can just download programs instead? Gmail, etc. are just silly. Who needs webmail? Use Outlook Express or something instead.

Again, you are proving that you aren't getting it. Just because you don't see a use doesn't mean that there isn't one.

Oh, and Opera IS a web browser.

Yes, and a lot more. It has never been just a browser, as I pointed out. Developer tools are a whole different matter entirely.

Simple Interface

[Midnight Thunder]

IMHO, the front end needs to clean, simple and uncluttered. Yet at the same time, it should be possible to customise the front-end to add power-user or more advanced operations to the users who want them. Also it needs to work well with the services of the operating system on which it will be installed.

Re:Simple Interface

[hkmwbz]

IMHO, the front end needs to clean, simple and uncluttered.

It has been since 8.0 or so.

Yet at the same time, it should be possible to customise the front-end to add power-user or more advanced operations to the users who want them.

This has been possible since v1 or so.

Re:FUCK ANTDUDE (GNAA)

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera 9 is my daily driver.

Mainly a couple of style quirks, functionally, she seems the best right now.

Out of full screen I have Five lines of stuff across the top,
including Ubuntu's two. Looks like freekin Office.
I like an uncluttered, clean kind of look.
The problem is "Full screen" lacks sufficient control access.

So copy the old Explorer/windows "Hide tab, always on top if you whack it with the mouse trick"

or add these elements to that left side toolbar,which doesn't work in Full screen anyway, so better to do the above.

Ability to modify the right click menu would do it, perhaps better because it would not conflict with this in the OS.

Still some residual menu fussiness, getting better though.
Appearance options could be a tab in
preferences.

The Code

[YGingras]

Just give us the code under a fine Free Software licence and we'll port the Firefox extentions framework. Oh, and we'll start using Opera once we have the code. It won't happen before that moment, no matter how much hype your marketing dept can pump.

Re:The Code

[Danga]

Just give us the code under a fine Free Software licence and we'll port the Firefox extentions framework

Oh, and also rip out everything that makes Opera kickass and took the company a long time to create and insert it into FireFox. That would be really good for Opera's business. Most Opera users I know (including myself) don't give a shit about firefox extensions, they like having all the features they need already integrated into the browser. When I get a new computer I go download the Opera installer and run it and import my settings and boom, I am up and running. With FireFox I would have to go download and install not only FF but also all of the extensions I wanted to use. FF is also very unstable compared to Opera: http://internetweek.cmp.com/174907404, could Opera be more stable because it is closed source and has dedicated developers working on it? I think so.

The biggest thing that annoys me about most (not all) open source projects is the quality of the code SUCKS (bad design, horrible commenting, doing things just so they work not so they work correctly, cutting corners, basically bad hacks). Most of it just cannot compete with software created by dedicated, paid, teams of developers. About the only open source projects that actually were properly developed and of good quality are projects that actual companies have open sourced.

You will never get the code and if because you cannot access the code you will not use Opera that is your own prerogative but you will be missing out on using the best browser available today which costs NO MONEY. It's your loss and you (along with the other open source zealots) will be the only people who care that Opera is closed source, rational people realize they are a business and they have their reasons to keep it closed source but they are very generous to allow the application to still be used for free.

Re:Allow context search results to open in a new..

[Zelgadiss]

Thanks to the parent and the grandparent. Using shift appears to work, still I wish there was an option to permanently toogle it to using a new tab and maybe get it to load in the background.
The "reuse tab" option works, but there are side effects, now all my bookmarks load in a new tab too instead of the current one. >_

Crash free versions

[Anne Thwacks]

Varsions that dont intermittently core dump on MacOSX, Windows and FreeBSD would be really cool.

Re:Crash free versions

[mobby_6kl]

Varsions that dont intermittently core dump on MacOSX, Windows and FreeBSD would be really cool.

Looks like you posted it in the wrong thread.

Re:Crash free versions

[Anonymous Coward]

On Windows and FreeBSD is rock solid

Re:I find firefox more configurable (screenshot)

[guidryp]

I have both and was an Opera user for years before switching to firefox. Currently trialing Opera9.

Sure you can turn everything off. That is no biggie. But when I have everything turned on, firefox gives me the edge in space and configurability allowing me to put buttons next to the "File, Edit, etc..." Menu. I recover one line this way and still have all the stuff I want on.

http://i.pbase.com/o4/04/606404/1/63200501.vAlG5XD r.operafox.png

Better without Flash? No FJAX

[dugjohnson]

While I don't care much about the cool looking stuff you can do with Flash, I am mightily intrigued by the web development possibilities of FJAX. http://www.fjax.net/ To be able to write one way and have it run almost anywhere (98% is claimed) is a developer's dream.
Interestingly, in checking the URL to be sure I had it right, I discovered that it didn't work in my new install of Opera 9. I must not have the Flash plug-in installed yet.

Usability

[Tylerious]

The great thing about Opera is you can make it look however you want with skins and the like. But to do things like make your page bar (tabs) appear in different places, you have to jump through hoops. There must be ways Opera can make those sort of changes easier.

It's also the little things like one can't right click on a bookmark and say delete or rearrange them from the menu. You have to go through the bookmark manager.

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[thelost]

i think predominantly what I am seeing here is a programmers response to a problem, where as it would different if I asked a more artistic group like web designer/graphic designers and animators. different groups will appreciate different approaches. Not to say one is more valid than another, but I am predominantly a graphic designer/artist and I enjoy what can be done with flash.

David Pogue is right

[jmichaelg]

At the last TED conference, David Pogue said he really liked the fact that his latest voice recognition software upgrade had zero new features. Zero. Instead, they polished the ones they'd already released. I think Opera should follow a similar course.

I'd like to see a better UI. I just switched from Firefox, not because I was dissatisfied with Firefox, but because I prefer to use tools that aren't under active attack. In any event, here are my comments as to what needs work in Opera.

It took me awhile to understand Opera's peculiar caching rules. It's not clear to me how caching works since I don't know what's possible under HTTP besides GET. I had thought that a browser could quickly check with a server as to when the last time a web page was updated and if the server had a fresher page than the browser's cache, the browser would fetch from the server else it would fetch from cache. Opera's cache interface implies my simple model is wrong. You can tell Opera to check with the server everytime you load a page, or to wait 5 minutes, or to wait 30 minutes or to wait 4 hours, etc. There are 8 different options for the text alone. Why so complex? And that's just for text, you have another set of options for graphics. Why would I want to look at an older image if the image has changed on the website?

There are probable good and valid reasons for all those options. Just don't set them as default so that a new user like me is led to wonder why /. hasn't updated its main page in the past 4 hours.

Tabs are wonderful. But don't make the default behavior to double the number of tabs when I reselect "open all folder items" in a bookmark set. Smart move though to put "open all folder items" at the menu top as opposed to Firefox which has it at the bottom.

Speaking of tabs. Very nice touch to dim the inactive tabs so the active tab might stand out a bit more. Makes picking out the active tab much easier if you have 25 tabs open. However, dim the inactive tabs more so the active tab really stands out.

More on tabs. Your tab loading algorithm needs work. Firefox dusts you on this issue. I've got 25 tabs in one of my bookmark folders. The first tab is my homepage, followed in order by the pages I'm most interested in. It looks like Opera tries to talk to all 25 sites simultaneously when I "open all folder items" whereas Firefox appears to favor the sites at the top of the list. The result is Firefox is faster in loading the first few sites so I've got things to read while the remaining sites continue to load. Opera, otoh, has nothing for me once I move off my homepage - it's still trying to load all 25 sites.

Smooth scrolling. Doesn't work regardless of whether I select it or not. Firefox needs an extension to get it right so maybe we have a different idea as to what smooth scrolling ought to be. My idea is the right one...(joke)

Drop widgets. If I want to write a standalone widget, I'll write a standalone widget without Opera's help. Firefox has it right. Give us an API that lets us manipulate the main document like Firefox does. Better yet, don't invent a new API - implement Firefox's so all those Firefox extensions can move over to Opera. For example, there's a nifty smooth scroller extension over on Firefox...

Standards compliance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, standards compliance anyone?

Better integration with Gnome and the GTK toolkit

[baadger]

...nuff said, the theme engine in Opera is very capable at hiding most of the QT ugliness for GTK users (especially those on AMD64 who have even more problems with GTK/QT matching) but it leaves out all the menu's (menubar and right click popup menus).

Obviously Opera can't recode the whole thing in GTK, but perhaps if possible they could extend Opera's existing themeing engine to incorporate the menu's so Linux distro's can produce Gnome friendly themes.

This may seem nitpicky, but Firefox manages to look good on both Gnome and KDE without being tied to a single toolkit.

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[jc42]

I am predominantly a graphic designer/artist and I enjoy what can be done with flash.

Well, I'm both a computer user and professional programmer, so I consider you part of the problem, not part of the solution. ;-)

While I do know of a few sites that use flash for the visitor's benefit, this isn't generally true. At least 99% of the flash is for distracting ads. When I'm trying to get some work done, an active image in my peripheral vision is a serious distraction that interferes with getting the job done, and I just want it stopped. I have flashblock installed in mozilla and firefox, and this is why I mostly use them. A browser that doesn't block flash (and "active" GIFs) is relegated to only occasional use with sites that can be trusted.

Also, I'm using my computer for things. Flash ads often soak up 30% to 60% of the cpu, interfering seriously with processes that are trying to do something that I want done. So again, I just want the flash stopped, so my productive tasks can run.

Now, I don't object to flash when it's showing me something that I want to see. But since flash is mostly used in an abusive fashion by advertisers, my main question is how do I stop it.

The best gift that opera could give me would be a simple, easily-available tool to turn flash and other active things on and off quickly and easily. I want them to run only when I want them to run. Any other time, they are distracting, cpu-hogging pests.

How about some more for users?

[guidryp]

I was an Opera user for years, then switched to FF 1.0. I keep trying each Opera release and give up after a day. This time I have stuck with 9.0 but I could use some small improvements.

My thoughts on this version:

Ad blocking:

Built in content blocker,Who cares, I haven't used it. I have nothing against ads, just annoyances. I do it differently in Opera. I surf with sound,anims,popups and plugins off by default. Use site preferences to turn them on very few sites. This means I get a nice clean browser experience everywhere and can selectively enable features on the few sites that need them. Great idea.

Compatability:

This was a bugaboo in previous iterations. So far this release is now nearly even. In theory masking should help, but I haven't had to use it, my banking and other sites that were problematic, now work.

Missing:

Absolutely great would be an extension architecture, because there is always some slick 3rd party feature you would like. But so far, I don't feel I am missing much.

Greater configurability. It seems that FF is more configurable. I can put buttons anywhere including on the file menu line to save space. I can edit bookmark folder in place without opening the bookmark manager.

Small things:

I would like the search hightlight to be yellow for greater visibility.

I want middle mouse button launch in a new window from bookmarks. Annoying that I have to hold shift key to do this.

Maybe config, but I keep a stable of pages as my homepage and in Opera they come up with yesterdays page, not a fresh load. This sucks...

Overall I am happy with Opera 9 as the first credible challenge to firefox in years.

here you go.

[medelliadegray]

1.)an easier way to disable INDIVIDUAL plugins or groups of plugins. (macromedia/flash/shockwave). I figured it out with opera 8/9-beta, but 9.0 i'm still having troubles with getting these disabled. Then if i DO need them i just had to use a different browser because it was too much of a pain in the ass to re-enable

2.) ability to open javascript in a new window.

those two are the biggest things i'd like to see.

Some suggestions from an Opera user

[Saosome]

1) Tab behaviour
More customisability should be given. For example, we should be able to make our searches from the search box open in a new tab, in the foreground or in the background. The back button should work with middle-click so that we can open previous pages in new tabs without losing the current one. Middle-clicking should also work with bookmarks in the drop-down list.

2) Adblock
The current content-blocking in Opera is much inferior to Firefox's adblock extension. I like to right-click directly on a unwanted ad and choose to block it, then be able to modify the blocked link immediately using wildcards for comprehensive filtering. In Opera, the entire screen is blanked out, and then you have to scroll through the page and shift click on each ad you don't want. If you want to modify the blocked link, you have to go through a few additional steps.

3) Scrolling
The scrollbar shouldn't become nearly invisible when I try to use it. Also, when scrolling using middle-click, I would like the scroll cursor to stay where I left it, rather than jump right into the middle of the page in a disruptive fashion.

4) Search
Opera should emulate Firefox and allow the search box to open at the bottom. Currently the search box opens right in the centre and blocks a significant portion of the screen, making it even harder to see highlighted words. Also, it would be nice if each search engine had their own icon graphic, so you can see at a glance what search engine you want. Currently search engines like wikipedia don't have its own icon in Opera's search bar, even though it has it in Firefox's.

5) Bookmarks management
Bookmark management in Opera is confusing. A "create new folder" option is not immediately apparent, and instead is buried among the right-click options. It also took me very long to find out how to add bookmarks to my personal bar (the only way I know of currently is drag and drop, which is quite a clumsy way of doing it).

All in all, I really like Opera and find it far smoother and faster than Firefox. Firefox trumps Opera in terms of the features provided by its extensions. However Opera can catch up with Firefox even if it does not want to implement extensions - it could just implement features from popular extensions.

Re:Some suggestions from an Opera user

[Anonymous Coward]

Use '/' for search. This is the standard way to do search, even in Firefox.

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[thelost]

heh I sense an ideological gap about this wide , but you go towards proving my point that depending on your viewpoint (programmer or artist) you will find different things annoying or good. A great many artists who aren't technically minded would love to be able to put their stuff up on the web, but are frustrated by how unintuitive making web pages is. That's of course where people like me come in, who bridge the gap between creativity and technical know how.

Also, this is a Surgeon statement "I'm both a computer user and professional programmer, so I consider you part of the problem, not part of the solution. ;-)". By that I mean a statement of someone who has a massive knowledge of a subject who thinks that if you differ then it must be because you're just not looking at it the right way. If you are a programmer then do you deal with end user usability and interfaces? I hope not, because if you do then there will be a lot of average joe users trying to use your applications and feeling frustrated because you knew *you* were right and they just had to see it your way.

I use FF and have adblock with auto update rules, I miss out on about 99% of annoying flash/gif/advertising content on the web. However I happen to watch a lot of movies on youtube (which is on of the most popular [flash based] sites on the web) and google video. You can hardly ignore them. Nor can you ignore sites like flickr which have an extremely slick flash based interface. A great many sites have built their success on advanced use of flash.

Conversely a great number of /. readers are linux users and so flash haters. Not only because flash isn't very well supported on linux but because it's proprietary and that == bad to the majority of people here. I am more of the mindset of best tool for the job, and there are many occassions where flash as championed exciting, different websites. See it for what it is, a great tool that just doesn't suit your particular demographic unfortunately.

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[Khuffie]

Opera has an "Enable Plugins" checkbox (F12) which disables Flash and other plugins like Media Player and Quicktime.

Provide a Firefox-like keymap option

[drgroove]

One of the primary reasons I don't use Opera is that Ctrl+T doesn't open a new Tab. Ctrl+D doesn't open the Bookmark dialogue. Basically, I'm either too lazy or too old to relearn an entirely new keymap for Opera's impressive functionality.

What I'd like to see is an optional setting that allows you to configure Opera's keymap to be identical to Firefox's. That way, I could toggle between the two browsers without having to memorize how to open a new tab in Opera.

FWIW, I think that Ctrl+T should open a tab in EVERY browser, much like Ctrl+P Prints, and Ctrl+O Opens a file. IIRC, MSIE7 uses Ctrl+T to open a tab; Opera needs to get onboard with the coming 'lingua franca' of tab opening et al. So, though I think Ctrl+T should be by default the way all browsers should open new tabs, I'd be willing to settle for an optional setting that allows this keymap to work properly in Opera.

Re:Provide a Firefox-like keymap option

[Webtommy88]

You obviously come from a firefox background. FYI, Opera HAS changed alot of their key mappings to be more "standard" and inline with Firefox. ex: Ctrl + T does open a new tab, Ctrl+D does open the bookmark dialogue. I personally was a little irked when the keys changed to be similar to firefox (I can't believe they changed paste and go from Ctrl+D to Ctrl+B) because in many instances, firefox copied the functionality from Opera and changed the hot keys to be different from Opera....

Re:Provide a Firefox-like keymap option

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA:

Keyboard shortcut changes:
Ctrl+T opens new tab
Ctrl+N opens new window
Ctrl+D saves bookmark for current page
Ctrl+B does "Paste and go"

Re:Provide a Firefox-like keymap option

[JCholewa]

If it helps, Ctrl+B does make sense. The original X/C/V for Cut/Copy/Paste were chosen because they were right next to each other. So now Paste-and-go is just the next key on that row from the one that does Paste. :)

I, too, was annoyed, bye the way. I remapped Ctrl-N to open a new tab. Every app should have editable hotkeys!

Re:Provide a Firefox-like keymap option

[JCholewa]

> I, too, was annoyed, bye the way.

I mean "by the way". I really do know the difference between the two homonyms. ^_^

Internet Explorer on Windows

[RNelson]

Yes, I know I'm at the wrong place to suggest this, and I'm aware it's not the greatest idea (good old security), but it's handy.

One of the extensions I have on Firefox on my Windows desktop is IE Tab, that allows a link or blank tab to be rendered with IE rather than Gecko. While the Identify As Internet Explorer and Mask As Internet Explorer are good enough for most sites, some of them still use horrible JavaScript that won't work in Opera. I'm looking at you MSDN!

It gets annoying at work (software development for a major scoreboard and electronic sign manufacturer) to be using Opera and find a search result for MSDN, open it, and have about a 50% chance of it working. It's not the fact that opening IE and viewing the article is an annoyance, it's being so used to just clicking on Opera for an open web site and then wondering where the article went -- the reason I first used Opera, aside from it being the only web browser I knew of for Windows 3 way back when, was that it supported tabs. That advantage is a bit lost when I have 5 IE windows open along with Opera.

And, yes, I'm aware that I'm complaining from a user point of view as well. This, however, would be useful to web developers (who are testing under Windows) to have pages in one window for comparison rather than many.

Re:Internet Explorer on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons#webdev
You can also add these lines to Opera6.ini under[Document Popup Menu] & [Link Popup Menu] sections:
Item, "InIE"="Execute program, "iexplore.exe", "%u""
Item, "InFF"="Execute program, "firefox","%u"""

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[netsharc]

Try Proxomitron. It acts as a proxy server, and you can use RegExp commands to catch suspect ads embedded in pages and block them. The great thing about it is, install it once and use it in all browsers.

Better Find Option

[rahuja]

Why doesn't Opera 9 have the kind of "Find in the page" like Firefox does, i.e., a small box at the bottom of the screen not obstructing the page itself (as against a dialog box), and start searching dynamically as I type. This is the single feature stopping me from considering using Opera seriously.

Re:Better Find Option

[Anonymous Coward]

Err... it does.

Also you can just hit "." and type to "find as you type"

Re:Better Find Option

[rahuja]

Oh, I never knew that. Thanks.

Change Middle Mouse Behavior!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The stupid way the middle mouse button acts (always moving to the center of the screen) is the only reason I do not use Opera! Please change it, or give us an option to change it. Thanks.

My list

[Tofflos]

1. Remove popup (immediate switch) when using right mouse-button & mouse wheel to switch tab.
2. Trails when performing mouse-gestures.
3. Beagle support http://beagle-project.org/.
4. Privacy-mode (No records are kept while enabled).
5. Strict-mode (While enabled pages have to be perfect to be displayed).
6. Native Look-And-Feel.

What I'd like to see...

[Anonymous Coward]

The source code.

Better management of tabs

[moonsammy]

I know the goal isn't to emulate any other browsers, but I can't stand how Opera 9 handles tabs. When I open a new tab the default behavior is to focus on that tab immediately. Yes, I know you can middle-click to open in background, but on my mac laptop that really isn't an option. I can use command-shift-click, but that's a bit unwieldy - would a preference setting of "open tabs in background by default" be too much to ask?

The other issue I've found with tabs (and for which there doesn't seem to be a work-around - correct me if I'm wrong here) is that after closing a tab, focus then shifts to the last tab viewed. This is incredibly irritating for me personally, as I frequently will open a bunch of links in background tabs from a main page (say, the slashdot front page), then read each tab in order. Using Opera 9 I can still open a bunch of links in the background (using the afore-mentioned 3-button combo), but reading through them is an irritating series of going back to the start tab over and over. Again, a simple preference setting of "When closing tabs: [open previously viewed tab | open tab to right | open tab to left]" would be all I need.

Minor gripes I suppose - I love Opera's speedy rendering and how well pages scroll (firefox and opera both feel like browsing in slow-motion by comparison), but the tab management is a constant source of frustration.

Re:Opera gives you all the space you need! (screns

[SillyNickName4me]

You seem to be implying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that Opera is more "cluttered" by default and takes up more screen real estate than "any other browser".

More or less, yes.

This is of course not true. I present you a screenshot with a default installation (freshly installed, nothing changed) of both Firefox and Opera, both recent versions. Note that Firefox takes up more screen space than Opera.

It was true for sure for the last version I tried, but your screenshot implies that this has improved quite a bit. Now, if only I'd get something more then 5kb/sec from their download site, I might actually take another look at it... Oh well, guess that will be another day :)

better bit torrent implementation

[not already in use]

When I heard that opera 10 had an integrated bt client, it was enough to make me switch from firefox, until i got my hands on it and realized that it is not nearly as good as some other clients out there, namely azureus. All needed ports were open and opera didn't manage to download nearly as fast as azureus. Then again opera aims to be lightweight and doesnt support distributed hash tables so that might have something to do with it.

Gesture Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Is use "strokeit" to add gestures to all of Windows. Since Opera has it's own gestures, it doesnt work with strokeit. And yes, even if I disable opera'a gestures it still doesnt work. And there is no way I'm going to turn on/off my application a hundred times to accomidate opera as I switch back and forth to my web browser.

And once you've been using gestures, it is a big deal. I basically do every command twice. I perform the gesture, and then go "damnit, opera doesnt do that" Then have to go looking for the buttons I never use.

Faith-based UI, instead of ease of use?

[Futurepower(R)]

So, Opera should follow some rule someone invented, instead of being easier to use?

Notice that Microsoft's Internet Explorer also allows autocompletion with Tab key, Enter key method. People become dependent on the habit of that ease of use, and then find it is not available in Opera.

Re:Faith-based UI, instead of ease of use?

[mdwh2]

So, Opera should follow some rule someone invented, instead of being easier to use?

Wait, isn't that what you're asking? You want it to follow the rule IE invented, instead of being easier to use.

At the least, I don't see how pressing down instead of tab is harder, and this has the advantage that I can still use tab to switch to the next UI control (is there a way to do that in IE/Firefox?)

I think it's a bad idea to have to duplicate IE's behaviour just for the sake of it. And elsewhere people have been criticising Opera for not following UI standards (though they fail to explain what), so either way, it can't win. If Firefox followed a standard and did things better, but Opera did things the IE way, there'd be people saying Firefox was better, and laughing at the suggestion it's better to be like IE.

But now Opera makes NO money on normal browsers.

[Futurepower(R)]

"Opera makes tons of money on its browser. Mobile phones, Nintendo's consoles, some vending machines, airplane media platforms..."

This is an example of a cultural phenomenon that is very strong on Slashdot: Try to see how someone could be wrong, rather than try to understand. You know I was referring to normal browser use.

Opera has lost a huge amount of money because of the company's wooden response to market conditions.

Fix the unix port!

[Anonymous Coward]

Its really stupid that the linux release of opera 9 doesn't pass the acid2 test, but the windows release does. That's not acceptable. And the unix releases of opera are WAY too slow when searching large pages, or using interactive javascript elements on large pages. Finally, the unix releases crash way too much. Some complex javascript crashes it, sometimes flash will, sometimes it just crashes for no apparent reason. Please try doing your unix development on openbsd for a while so all the memory management bugs become reproducable crashes and we can have a stable browser.

Re:Tools for standards compliance (for developers)

[therage96]

I thought this was the purpose of DOCTYPES. As I understand, the DOCTYPE determines the "mode" that the browser interpreter trys to read the page in. If no DOCTYPE has been specified, the browser reverts back to "most-compatible" mode. I think Internet Explorer referred to it as "quirks mode," but I'm not sure on that and I'm too lazy on a Sunday to look it up.

msn and extensions...stumbleupon!

[BRUTICUS]

How bout making it possible to open email with MSN, also compatability with firefox extensions.... i'm using StumbleUpon now and I couldn't go to a browser without it now. Even if the new IE blows Firefox out of the water.

WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

no, flash just sucks, period. They don't let you as the user control it, and the end users have no idea what is coming to them when they mash open a new page, and it forces you to go to a third party app/extension to even attempt to get any control over it. I no longer even install the damn thing, it has crippled my older box so many times it ain't funny. Open a few tabs, WHAM, CPU at100%, RAM maxed out (half a gig! Just used up!), and assorted other nasties. It sucks! There's probably a ton of security vulns with it too just lurking out there. People who code with it need to be horse whipped! Websites that insist on me having it just to use their site get no business from me. If you want to show your visitors a damn movie, just code in an MPEG and be done with it, that let's them choose how to view it. You get some poor guy on dialup he can accidently hit a site that is huge flash heavy and that's it! No more surfing until that ...creation.. is done with whatever it is going to do, that or kill the whole browser at the command line.

FLASH SUCKS!

One feature request

[Sarcastic Assassin]

Find as you type, find as you type, find as you type! I can't believe that with all Opera has done (tabs, integrated Google and Amazon searches), they're still using the antiquated, IE-style "type it in the box, click search, and then we'll find it" method of in-page search. It's the one feature that keeps me from switching from Firefox (I'm not as keen on extensions as some FF users).

Re:One feature request

[wheany]

Press "." and type what ever you want to find.

Re:Tools for standards compliance (for developers)

[KZigurs]

Ever heard about validators? http://validator.w3.org/

Bookmark Manager Overhaul

[SpectreHiro]

I use Opera every day, and have for years. I love it all - except the bookmark manager. IMO, it's in need of a serious overhaul. It's counter-intuitive, cumbersome, and really just makes my day a tiny bit worse. Thankfully, I don't really use my bookmarks much... Or maybe I don't use my bookmarks much because of the manager. Hmmm.

At the very least, I'd like the bookmarks menu to have drag-and-drop functionality like the entire rest of the Opera interface does.

Otherwise, thanks for an excellent browser, Opera Software!

If you open it up

[bunbuntheminilop]

you can let the community decide.

Two words: Fix onunload

[VGPowerlord]

Seriously, A List Apart's Stylesheet Switcher uses onunload to set cookies, so you get the same stylesheet next time. It works in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox, but Opera support is iffy.

Why? Because Opera doesn't fire the unonload event if the user clicks the back or forward buttons. I can see not firing when hitting forward... but when hitting back?

turf!

[Anonymous Coward]

What more can you want? No side panel at all, people want to see the web page. Not everyone has a 21 inch monitor at high resolution. They could make all the panels be popups at the sides, top, bottom wherever, just scroll your mouse over there and they slide out. The rest of the time they should default hide (have a toggle option, maybe do it with gestures, whatever).

Another list

[whitehatlurker]

Well, I'm not sure the Opera programmers will get to see this, but here a few things:

• FTP uploads (yes, I know the arguments against it, I'm just sayin')
• Recovering closed pages. If the page closed is not the last page of a session, it will not be saved and is not recoverable. Can we have a system parallel to the "tab savers" for pages?
• Customisable translator list - similar to the new way to edit the search engine list, but so that other languages can be easily added by the user.
• Less "nag windows" - I know that I connect to an idiot's "secure server" which has a less than desireable level of encryption, but I'm okay with it - can I toggle Opera to never ask about it again? Right now it asks the first time for each session.

Re:Another list

[JCholewa]

> Recovering closed pages. If the page closed is not the last page of a session,
> it will not be saved and is not recoverable. Can we have a system parallel to
> the "tab savers" for pages?

There's a little Trash icon with a down arrow next to it. Right now, it holds the last sixteen tabs I've closed. It's in the "Windows" panel and it also makes an appearance at the bottom or right of the tab bar, depending on whether you made that bar horizontal or vertical. Would this help? From the wording of your question, you might be talking about something different.

Oh, btw, it's also in the "Window" menu, submenu "Closed".

Re:Another list

[whitehatlurker]

Yes, that is for tabs. Create a new window (Ctrl-N in the new mapping), then close it. Those tabs were stored with the closed page, and not in the tab recyle bin.

I am asking for a system which rescues the "lost tabs" on closed pages (windows).

What I am looking for can be done manually by selecting "save session" every now and then, but that is manual, requires forethought and is thus beyond me ...

Re:Tools for standards compliance (for developers)

[nlogax]

Try sending your XHTML as "application/xhtml+xml" (as it should be), and Firefox, Safari etc will give you a nice big error message if it's malformed.
Maybe not totally what you are asking for, but better than tag soup.

The one thing every other browser has.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tab complete URL's, everything else is perfect.

No Flash?

[antdude]

How do you watch YouTube, Google Video, HomeStarRunner, etc. then? I can't live without those. :)

Re:No Flash?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Video does not require Flash; I use the manual download link. For YouTube, I use videodownloader.net. Actually, I have my browser scripted to automatically use Google's manual download links and videodownloader to open videos in MPlayer--couldn't be simpler.

How is the talk feature?

[zogger]

I don't have windows so haven't tried the voice feature, but from those that do, how do you like it? I wonder how the linux port of that is doing. I just d/l and checked, not in it yet...

Re:How is the talk feature?

[tech10171968]

Actually it's surprisingly good. I used it on my WinXP box, and it's amazingly accurate. I don't know what use I could make of it (other than annoying the hell out of the cubicle next to mine) but it does a pretty good job.

xsl:fo support

[oyenstikker]

http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/

Improve your fuzzing

[Effugas]

One of the Big Ideas in HTML is that it was the first major format (other than .txt) that could handle garbage input. HTML was probably the first dumb-fuzz resilient protocol in common use.

But fuzzing has gotten smarter. We need stronger parsers.

Re:I find firefox more configurable (screenshot)

[eddy]

It's an argument over like 16 pixel lines of >1024. It's stupid. Really, it is. I just can't take it seriously that a) it can matter in the real world (improving readability), and b) someone would actually want to turn their GUI into widget-soup by combining button widgets and menus in the same 'line'.

If this is a deal-breaker for you guys, alright, but it't can't be taken seriously as something worthwhile to fix. I especially liked that comment about my request for a server-client response tab being to esoteric. Cause yeah, I can see how all users are freaking out over the in-ability to cram buttons into the menu row to save themselves one row of text out of fifty or so.

(Finally, in that screenshot much of the miniscule difference is due to the theme on the Opera installation. Find one which isn't so "fat" and you'd be down to Firefox height, without the widget-soup!)

Third party cookies.

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice if Opera could handle third party cookies properly. As it is, it rejects "third party cookies" that are not in fact third party.

3d canvas

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be happy if they sync the 3d api for canvas with what'll be in ff 2.0.

Yet another poor behavior.

[expro]

Doctypes do not even begin to address the issues.

As long as browsers promote bad behavior.

[expro]

We will continue to get very bad content. As I said before, this goes way beyond validated HTML, anyway, because most of the bad behaviors are not implemented in the parser and would not be detected by a parser, but only by a full-fledged browser paying attention to such things. If it were, webmasters would only need a validator and no browser to see that their content worked.

Most easily configurable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then how does one get the tabs below the address bar? Or resize the search box?

(You can't.)

Re:Most easily configurable?

[dazlari]

Right click Tab Bar, Customise, Placement = Bottom.

Voila! hehe

Oh, you mean immediately below the address bar. That seems not 2b really sensible in the context of MVC interface. Where would they be placed when tiling multiple windows? Something to consider.

A new link type. Go to page and scroll to 'text'.

[Anonymous Coward]

A new HTML link type. Which would: go to page, search and scroll to the found 'text'. This would finally allow for general citation, with the ablity to see the orginal in context. An idea whose time has come again. Brought to you by the folks at www.AudioAssitedText.com.

One User, Multiple Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

I use multiple computers (3 at my office, 2 at home, 1 at GF's house, 2 at Dad's house, 4 at sistas' houses) and have trouble keeping track of my bookmarks. It would be great if Opera provided a way of synchronizing my bookmarks so that no matter what computer I used, I could have access to all of my own current bookmarks. Lugging around my laptop everywhere is not an option.

Re:Opera gives you all the space you need! (screns

[Rits]

You've probably last tried Opera 7.2, which was the worst as far as toolbar clutter is concerned. That was September 2003. 7.5, the next major release, was already much cleaner, and since 8.5 (when the ad was dropped) Opera has been as uncluttered as Firefox and Safari right out-of-the-box. They all have a comparable number of buttons and menus etc.

Re:Better integration with Gnome and the GTK toolk

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? Firefox looks terrible on both Gnome and KDE.

S/MIME support needed!

[LaissezFaire]

The M2 mail client needs S/MIME support. I love the filters for mail (that's where gmail got their labels). The idea of "mailstore as database" is great. Not having S/MIME support is antiquarian. Opera mail M2 has many advanced features, like TLS client authentication, which outlook doesn't have. Not having S/MIME support is just silly.

Highlight Changes to Webpage Since Last Access

[Anonymous Coward]

I surf lots of blogs (like /. and digg) and often return to the same thread multiple times a day. Since blogs have so much updating going on, I'd like a way to easily determine which comments are new since my last visit so I don't waste time. So here's my glorious idea: A browser mode that grays out everything other than the new additions.

Re:Opera gives you all the space you need! (screns

[Dlugar]

Here's my screenshot as well:

http://trantor.indessed.com/screenshot.png

The only thing extraneous I can see is the status bar at the bottom, which is (I believe) off by default in Opera 9, although I prefer it. What more do you want?!

Dlugar

thanks-and why is it useful

[zogger]

thanks for the reply! This voice activated tech, etc is INCREDIBLY important for the future as our population ages. Reading is one step, next comes more complex commands, total control over the box.

    Younger folks don't see it yet, it's off their radar, but as you get older you lose hand/finger functionality and a large proportion of the population gets arthritis and has a difficult time with keyboards. Businesses who get a jump on this and other accessibility features are going to be big winners and raking in the loot in the long run. My GF for instance (we are both early boomers) can barely use any new cell phone now from the size of the buttons, just too small, let alone being able to see tiny screens, and typing for her is a painful chore so she doesn't user her computer very much at all. I am hoping that voice tech gets a much larger interest level, maybe one of the opera guys will read this and stay enthused about it.

Several years ago I had a mac classic program that opened and closed apps with voice commands, it worked quite well, but the funny thing was sometimes the TV or something would trigger it by keyword.

Re:thanks-and why is it useful

[tech10171968]

Good, you'll be happy know know that you can also operate Opera with voice commands - all you need is an external microphone.

Caching!

[jamesivie]

Proper adherence to HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 standards for caching would be nice!

Firefox instability

[bunratty]

There's a good test available at present, and the experiment is being performed all over the world. People can have both Firefox and Opera free, and they choose Firefox. They choose Firefox even though Firefox is the still the most unstable program in common use.

(The 1.5.0.4 version of Firefox is quite stable when the FlashBlock extension is installed, but still, after days of many windows being loaded, Firefox is so unstable that the Microsoft Windows operating system must be re-started to return to original performance. My experience has been that Linux remains stable, but that all Firefox windows must be closed to regain performance of Firefox.)

Although I don't doubt that Firefox is unstable on your computer for some reason, I don't think many Firefox users are seeing that kind of instability on Windows. In the past several years of hanging out in the MozillaZine forums, I can't remember even one person saying they had a problem so bad that they needed to reboot Windows. Serious problems are generally the result of bad extensions, plugins, hardware problems, driver problems, or other problems not with Firefox. If you want to continue to claim Firefox has a common and very serious bug in it, I'd like to see the Bugzilla bug report on it.

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[jc42]

Yeah; I found that and disabled plugins. But, as in other browsers, that seems an "all or nothing" flag. If you disable plugins, they don't work in any tab. If you enable plugins, all of them start up in all your tabs (after a significant delay, it seems). I'm not actually sure that it's this simple, as I seem to remember cases where active thingies were running after I'd disabled all plugins, and it took a refresh to stop them. Or maybe I'm confused and not doing it right. In any case, one of the useful changes in Opera 9 is that the agent-id faking feature is now per-site. But things like blocking flash or active GIFs or javascript is still a single global flag, either on for all sites or off for all sites. It would be much more useful if these global flags could be set to a default (off!), and then individual sites set to the other state. This would go a long way toward preventing the marketers from taking over my cpu with their oh-so-clever active ads.

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[Khuffie]

I know the plugins are global flags; though there's a seperate flag for GIF/SVG animations. Also, along with agent-id faking, Opera 9 allows per site preferences, so you can turn off/on plugins per site

Compact Opera weather widget

[riker1384]

The widget "touchtheSky" can be collapsed to just a little bar, which you can put over the title bar of your browswer. You can expand it to a one-line report or a little full window. I agree, you can't do everything with widgets, but just the one for weather isn't obtrusive.

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

With Opera 9, you can have site-wide preferences. You can either whitelist OR blacklist (your choice) things like Flash.

Tab behavior !

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this sounds minor, but it is the only difference between FF & Opera that I can't deal with in Opera -- when closing a tab, users should have the option to go to the tab on the right, unless the tab is the last tab and it should then go to the tab on the left.

I'm sure the current Opera behavior of showing the last visited tab makes sense to others, but the FF behavior is another popular paradigm that should be accomodated, esp. given Opera's detail to customization.

CSS 3.0

[HaMMeReD3]

It was nice to see css2.0 work so damn well in opera 9, how about css3 support for opera10.

Also I have noticed that opera does not like the anchor links method of history management, it would be nice if the back and forward buttons were able to jump between anchor links so that ajax history techniques would work a bit better.

Although people say opera is fast, it is by far the slowest browser when it comes to javascript animation, I would like to see optimized drawing routines in the browsers, with proper offscreen buffering and rendering through an accelerated layer when possible.

Agreed! Bookmark interface is weak!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever tried "add all open pages" while the bookmark window is open? I don't mean the sidebar--that seems to operate under slightly different rules--but even if I right-click on the empty space of a certain bookmark folder and select "add all open pages", the new pages typically end up somewhere else entirely.

I'm no "Aunt Tillie", so I think of this as an indicator (alone, it's just a bug) that the bookmarks system needs fixing up.

Widgets

[Mantrid42]

I would prefer if widgets didn't appear in the Start bar (the bar in Windows, I mean, not the toolbar in Opera named "Start").

Ironies abound.

[jbn-o]

screw adobe/macromedia/$proprietary_technology_owner.

While it is right and proper to object to Flash on the basis of it being proprietary software, you're raising this objection to a proprietary web browser developer. Denying you the freedom to make your own modifications to the program and distribute the improved version to the community is part of their gig.

Re:Ironies abound.

[Jack Malmostoso]

With the small difference that Opera relies on W3C standards, while there are no specs to create a free flash-decoder. I am not against proprietary software (Opera is the best browser for me, I bought licenses), I am against closed standards and technologies.

Re:Ironies abound.

[jbn-o]

I don't know if they publish this anymore, but when Macromedia controlled Flash (as opposed to Adobe controlling Flash as it achieved by buying Macromedia), Flash specifications were available. The most recent Flash specs were available under some restrictive license I hadn't completely finished reviewing.

I believe that work on multiple free software Flash decoders proceeds apace, albeit slowly.

Finally, I don't understand what being opposed to "closed standards and technologies" means if you're a proponent of proprietary software—software would seem to me to be a "technology".

It already has that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, it already has that, asshat.

LuYu's Feature Request

[LuYu]

NOTE: This was also posted to Operawatch. I will probably also email it to Opera.

I am the author of a script that makes websites out of Project Gutenberg etexts (or virtually any text file that is similarly formatted), and I have been using Opera for years. Recently, my use of Opera has been confined to mobile devices. Opera is certainly the best browser for mobile devices I have ever used, and I have used a fair amount, including PocketIE, Netfront, and various other proprietary browsers.

My Feature Request

In testing these books in mobile devices and on the desktop, both I and my friends have been repeatedly frustrated by the granularity of bookmarking. While it is easy to create identifiable links to any paragraph in a given chapter or book, it is impossible to bookmark those paragraphs. I would like an item added to the right click menu that allows bookmarking for paragraphs or other text marked with the <a name=""> tag.

Such a tag would allow people to instantly return to the last paragraph they were reading when they turned the browser off. This sort of addition would not be difficult to code but would allow people to read longer webpages and books on their desktops or mobile devices. HTML ebooks would create a much greater demand for your webbrowser, and as everything is going mobile, increase the demand for your browser on multiple platforms.

A Fantastical Feature Request

Further, while I am asking for features, I might as well add a more difficult one. There is a program called Dr. Eye (Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2, Screenshot 3) for Windows the functionality of which would be extremely useful in a browser or desktop environment. Really, I would like to see such a thing added to Gnome and/or KDE, but having such functionality in a webbrowser would cover 90% of the uses for such a program. The way the program works is that it uses popup help messages to display dictionary definitions of words one is reading (the pointer is not visible because Windows makes taking good screenshots difficult -- among other things it makes difficult). This program was written for Chinese speakers, and it is really incredible. It displays Chinese definitions for any English word or phrase moused over or English definitions for any Chinese word or phrase moused over while it is running.

However, the possibility of doing something like this in a browser or OS environment where most commonly spoken languages are accessible makes the learning value nearly unlimited. Almost all desktop environments have dictionary systems included. As is obvious, this would make multiple languages readable to many more people than was before possible. Considering the fact that Opera is in the business of making reading easier and more enjoyable for people, this sort of system is desirable for both Opera and its users.

Re:I find firefox more configurable (screenshot)

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera can do this as well: http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons#menu

Add menu buttons to your topmost toolbar and switch off the menu. Search the forums if you need more help.

SVG support

[kliese]

It's a pitty it's not M$ asking the same question.

Ubiquitous SVG support would do a lot for the web.

1. Many flash animations could be replaced by scripted SVG. Macromedia/Adobe could modify their tools to generate the appropriate svg/javascript output.
2. Logos would finally print nicely from website
3. Images on my 2000 pixel wide laptop monitor would become visible to the naked eye
4. Websites that use massive images for colour gradients would load much more quickly

I'm sure I've only scraped the surface here, but it's good to see that Opera supports SVG.

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[jc42]

Opera 9 allows per site preferences, so you can turn off/on plugins per site

Hmmm ... I looked around explicitly for that, and didn't spot it. I founnd the Preferences .. Advanced .. Content, which has an "Enable plug-ins" checkbox, but it doesn't have any way to specify a site.

So where did they hide it?

One real problem with browser config settings is that they are in this maze of twisty links, all alike (to paraphrase something well-known). Even if you remember seeing something, sometimes you just can't find it again.

tabbing and other suggestions

[whatever3003]

I've used Opera since version 3 and it followed me in my transition to Linux too, so it's a much loved and trusted tool that I never want to see disappear. I do have some suggestions that could be helpful. I'm probably not an exception when it comes to having loads and loads of tabs open all the time. I use Opera every day for almost everything and at time of writing I have 142 tabs open - needless to say it can get a bit sluggish ...links, bookmarks, notes, history and email all have their own 'quick find' fields (on the sidebar), the 'windows' pane should also get a 'quick find' for us heavy users - just searching the page title or even it's meta data would be enough imho.

Chaining these quick searches together would be cool too - being able to search email, windows, newsfeeds, history for keywords and have a clearly delineated resultset returned would be magical.

For some reason I can't get a 'feeds' pane on the sidebar unless I set up a mail account (may have changed in O9), but I can get it from the mail toolbar under 'Feeds' ...

Saving a page with attachements saves everything into one directory which gets messy quickly - firefox does this action rather handily by saving attachments and such into a seperate directory...

Opacity (is this supported in 9?), curved edges and generally more CSS3 support - gecko has these already but I assume they're waiting until they have better CSS3 support to rename them to something other than their current proprietry names (mozilla-something). If support for curved edges is there it will force IE to catch up because users don't want to know they're missing out on all that fancy cool hip stuff. Also I bloody well hate all those silly image hacks.

Better download support - bittorrent is cool, but your standard download will not auto-resume if it loses the connection.

A bit of web2.0-ness: ability to tagging emails/feeds/bookmarks combined with the chained search to sort/rank/filter results.

A single-click backup that saves a 'snapshot' of browser state (interface setup/bookmarks/open windows/shortcuts) that can be retrieved and restored from a remote location - this would enable roaming profiles and I can get Opera setup with a single login or soemthing from an alien computer and have it work perfectly. Of course it gets scrubbed on some sort of logout. It would also allow fairly transition tool to those who run multiple versions of Opera over multiple OS's

Not for the casual user, but a 'summary' feature that sums up available internal/external links, resources (images/plugins/downloads) and a list of previously visited pages of this domain - currently these can be accessed via the 'links' and 'history' panes, but a summary feature (a usermode css hack?) that could be displayed on the page or exported to a file would be handy for those who want to understand a saved page or an older page in context. I'm sure this could probably be done with the user-javascript plugin engine too.

Also on Linux I have this weird spacing problem in textfields and such - it might be a problem with my actual box (it has lots of problems atm), but nothing else is acting this way .. is this being addressed or should I send a bugreport? w3003

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[Khuffie]

If you're on a website, you can right click anywhere there's no image/flash, and you can see two options: Block Content (which lets you block ads and the like) and Edit site preferences. Under there you can change several settings, the plugins are under the content tab.

Re:Tools for standards compliance (for developers)

[Blakey Rat]

One of the old Mac browsers (iCab I think?) did this with a little smiley face icon on the toolbar. It basically ran a validation and the smiley would frown if the page had more than a certain number of errors. Stupid feature, IMO... anyone who actually cares can use a validator themselves, and people who don't care will ignore the icon anyway.

Re:Better without Flash? No FJAX

[JCholewa]

> > Opera 9 allows per site preferences, so you can turn off/on plugins per site
> So where did they hide it?

Right click on any blank area of the page and choose "Site Preferences". The "Enable plug-ins" in the Content tab there will be just for that domain.

Web 2.0 Integration

[gnorbx]

My request: Better Web 2.0 integration, such as a blogging package (or the ability to plug in another package, like w.bloggar), integration with online office tools like TaDa List and Writely, social bookmarking integration, external RSS integration (with services like bloglines, MyYahoo, etc) and portable profles, so all my bookmarks, tools preferences, rss feeds, etc, follow me wherever I go (with the option of also housing your RSS feeds localy, so you don't have to be online to view them). I know, this sounds an awful-lot like Flock, but although I like Flock, the cross between Flock and Opera (Flopera?) would be incredible from a usability standpoint. All the coolness of Flock, all the goodness of Opera. (Really, there's no reasons browsers can't make themselves the new desktop with all the new Web 2.0 stuff out there ready for use.

Also, open API's so that Firefox-style extensions could be made for the browser by run-of-the-mill freelance developers.

Finally, text-to-voice support of Linux, instead of just Windows (if it's already there, I haven't found it).

Native Treo Support

[dublin]

Right now, the only really viable alternative to Windows Mobile is Palm OS. (Symbian is for all practical purposes dead. PalmOS may be dead in the not-too-distant future, but it has a very large installed base that is dying for a usable browser.)

All those Treo users are deperately in need of a *real* web browser, something that's a native Plam app and doesn't have the very serious drawbacks of the Java-based Opera Mini.

If Opera wants to make a difference, here's wher it can get the best bang for its buck. A bit of clever coding between the Palm version and the desktop version could allow it to become a viable sync alternative to Outlook, which we're all about to have to use simply becasud it's the only thing most syncable programs can deal with.

There's a huge opportunity for extremely simple and clean web APIs here - not bloated Web Services XML crap, but lean and simple stuff - think SMTP for sync operations for everything from bookmarks and preferences to contacts and events.

Although this sounds like a stretch, browsers will eventually have to understand entities like these anyway - why not now, and on our own terms?