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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?"
API for extensions !
Sent from my desktop computer
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!
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.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
- More CSS 3 - A Javascript Debugger (including XMLHttpRequest debugging, as with the Firebug extension) - XForms - XUL ? And from a user point of vue: - Extensions
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.
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!
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?
hapo
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.
Philosophy.
Select "Open in background tab".
Yes, they could make this a bit easier to find.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.
Open source.
I would use Opera instead of Firefox if it was free (as in speech)
| (ceci n'est pas une pipe)
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.
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.
parasight.de
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.
> 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.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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.
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.)
Constitutionally Correct
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.
Full Tilt
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
I have both and was an Opera user for years before switching to firefox. Currently trialing Opera9.
D r.operafox.png
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.vAlG5X
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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!)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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.
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.
Not at all. Simply press the down key on the keyboard. So, wrong. 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. It was $39, and you are just one single person. Most people do not want to pay for a browser. 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. 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. Well, I've shown how you are the one talking nonsenseClever signature text goes here.
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.