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Opera 9.5 Beats Firefox and IE7 As Fastest Browser
Abhinav Peddada writes "Ars Technica takes Opera 9.5, the latest from Opera's stable, for a test run and finds some interesting results, including it being a 'solid improvement to an already very strong browser.' On the performance front, Ars Technica reports 'Opera 9.5 scored slightly higher (281ms) than the previous released version, 9.23 (546ms). And Opera 9.x, let it be known, smacks silly the likes of Firefox and Internet Explorer, which tend to have results in the 900-1500ms range on this test machine (a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM). Opera was 50 percent faster on average than Firefox, and 100 percent faster than IE7 on Windows Vista, for instance.'"
From what I've seen the speed rankings in all tests always have Opera and Safari leading with IE and FF being behind.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I wonder if they would have said this if Pavarotti hadnt just died?
Well... okay. That was a short article.
I'm not expecting them to try Lynx or anything, but at least test Safari on Windows? The one that also claims to be fast?
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Those milliseconds really add up...
The article links to a Javascript benchmark only. There are many many more variables involved in determining how fast a given browser is, although certainly Javascript plays it's part. Variables like how soon does the browser start processing incoming, but yet incomplete data, etc. influence the browser's snappiness a lot aswell.
Basically, the speed of the browser depends upon the speed of the html parsing engine, available bandwidth, browser settings, speed of the cache and Javascript, just to mention the main variables.
Still, I'm interested how comes Opera's Javascript is so fast compared to the other browsers.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
So Opera is much faster than FF when running JavaScript tests, according to Ars Technica.
Numbers are meaningless without context
without units. 281ms per what? Apparently a bunch of tests listed on http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php
Now my question is, how significant is ~500 ms for these tests? All I care about is how long it takes to load a typical webpage I surf, and for me, Firefox seems almost instantaneous for most pages. "Smacks silly" my be an overstatement.
405 - Browser Not Supported
these pages are fast to load too, how many of those did the other two hit?
How the fuck cares? Has anyone in the history of the world ever really been bottle necked by the speed of thier browser?
Right now, the biggest issues with both IE and Firefox is a huge memory footprint. If Opera wants to bring something valuable to the table, make sure it can run smoothly on XP with 256 megs of memory. That would be valuable for a lot of people with aging hardware.
.: Max Romantschuk
c'mon...like the average person can even notice a 400ms difference. is this a joke? gimme a break
I'd have sworn that the Youtube videos ran as fast on Firefox as they do on Opera, and I haven't really noticed myself reading slashdot articles faster on Opera than Firefox.
I guess I am just getting too old for these newfangled Web 2.0 stuff.
when i see adblock plus, flashblock and noscript, I'll think about using opera.
It'd be invaluable for people with modern hardware.
I'm already looking for a replacement for FF. FF is fast becoming Netscape: the Next Generation - huge, unweildy, and bloated to hell and back.
What happened to my insta-loading browser that kicked ass and took names?
Is that overall time to get and display an average page has gone up for me atleast in the last 10 years.
This despite the fact that the computer speeds have increased and the connection speeds even more.
The bigest fault lies ofcourse with maers of those silly pages with 100 different elements that have to be loaded and displayed separately, but also both IE and Firefox have become more and more bloated with functionality making them slower and bigger memory hogs.
What I care for most is the speed of the browser when dealing with multiple tabs... Firefox (using on both XP and Archlinux) slows down to a crawl when I middleclick a lot of links, sometimes up to 7 or so seconds. This is on a P4 2.6... Sure, not the fastest thing out there, but it shouldn't lock up while loading all the tabs in the background... I have Deer Park installed and IIRC it behaves the same. No?
...Opera has a canvas-element implementation that sucks in speed compared to Mozilla - try running a simple ball-animation in both browsers. IMHO this makes them never the "fastest" browser (whatever that really means).
Ok, but where do you need the speed of the browser? Rendering regular web pages does not take any considerable amount of time(*), so where does the regular user see the speed improvement? (*) except of a few very rare cases - but then transferring the html data takes more time than rendering; and let's not take into account huge local html docs.
The reason is that it's:
1) The most standards-conformant browser
2) The most secure-by-default browser
Now, both these things cause problems in a world where non-compliance and sloppy security is common. That's why most people give up using Opera. The ones who use it are the true nerds, who WILL refuse to accept a certificate if the revocation server for that certificate is providing out-of-date data.
Other browsers neither seem to know nor care what a revocation server is.
Opera aims at different market -- small gadgets. This is where the speed is really critical. For IE and FF good enough is enough, since performance on modern desktops is not that critical.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
I can't believe they left out Konqueror!
Surely the most important thing about your browser is that is is secure, renders pages well and doesn't crash every 5 minutes.
I can understand why Opera is fast, they have a lot of experience in the embedded market. Doesn't make it the best choice for the desktop though.
Just downloaded opera, tried it out on a couple of pages, waaaaaay slower than ff. Where do they get this shit from.
With apologies to Old Ben, I for one would rather give up a little speed for stability, portability, and adblock, foxmarks, and the very real benefits of using an open source product.
But, if they were to GPL it.....
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Opera is faster than Firefox across the board. Always has been, and probably always will be. Put that into context whatever way you want. So what's the point of your emphasis again?
At the same time, Opera is also smaller, lighter, more stable, more innovative, better integrated, and comes from a company that behaves ethically towards the rest of the software community (eg, it does not engage in patent warfare to pummel the competition).
Yet because it's not open source (it's been "free as in beer" for quite some time now, but even that's news to some people here) it's practically awarded pariah status by many Firefox zealots who typically use nothing more than ignorance and FUD to put it down.
Seriously, the amount of anti-Opera, pro-Firefox propaganda (for want of a better word) here on Slashdot is ridiculous. Opera is, and always has been, a top-notch product.
In the eyes of this humble observer, it's a far better browser than any other, but regardless of our personal preferences, isn't it time that people gave it due respect? Or is good software engineering only to be appreciated if it comes from the open source community?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
wake me up when it supports spnego/kerberos auth. Then I can tell my users they use opera at work.
Opera aims at different market -- small gadgets. This is where the speed is really critical. For IE and FF good enough is enough, since performance on modern desktops is not that critical.
Opera aims at different market -- small gadgets. This is where the speed is really critical. For IE and FF good enough is enough, since performance on modern desktops is not that critical.
As a Quad G5 (4x 2500) Mac owner with lots of RAM, I really don't want a browser choking up an entire CPU and flooding my memory. I didn't pay money to cover amateur programming mistakes by other people. As same guy, I flamed Opera guys about not fixing a bug happens on Slashdot beta, first thing I checked was that after getting that awesome 9.5 alpha and yes it is fixed.I have used a Xeon Video workstation lately and poor AVID was acting like it is on 80386 because a stupid "free" antivirus was taking whole CPU cycles trying to "scan" gigabyte level raw videos while it was asked to ignore them.
It is common getting replies as "get more RAM" or "upgrade your CPU" from various browser fans but when I see a browser using 100% CPU , I get alerted about what kind of security issues it may have and why I should be wasting my CPU to it.
Opera's power comes from managing to code and sell full feature browsers which would even run on Nokia 7650 with 2 MB of RAM. Don't let the Desktop versions memory usage fool you, it is mostly RAM Cache, not memory "flood". Instead of flooding memory, they use it for a good reason and release immediately when another app needs it.
Opera aims at different market -- small gadgets. This is where the speed is really critical. For IE and FF good enough is enough, since performance on modern desktops is not that critical.
I really wouldn't say that. Once you've used a browser that renders pages considerably faster than your old browser, there's no going back. It makes a *big* difference.
With Opera 9.5, I can browse my API docs on the web just as fast as if the data were local. It's incredibly comfortable, and for me definitely worth the switch. (I had been using Firefox for a while before going back to Opera)
Mark Kretschmann - Amarok Developer, KDE Member
Its not like I actually notice the speed of my browser on a daily basis. I have 3 browsers to choose from between my laptop and iMac. Those are Firefox, IE, and Safari. I tend to use FireFox on both machines as it provides a consistent experience regardless of platform. I also find many of the plug ins to be very useful.
Should I care? With today's machines the only performance issue I ever encounter is my connection. Frankly, if someone wants to sell me on a new browser then speed isn't the way to do it. Provide some convienence or functionality I can't live without. You are probably going to have to work hard at it and it will have to be something most of us haven't thought of. Sorry, but browsers are not rocket science and in this day they really aren't viable commercial products - you just have to have one and its expected your OS provider will have one for you.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I've written both simple demos and fairly sophisticated JavaScript apps (which can do Sim City / Civilization 2.5 isometric views like this - and render them extremely quickly so you that you can pan around the environment as if it was a native title)).
When it comes to looping through a large array of arrays (e.g. the terrain tile detail in one of the above examples), applying style or class attributes to DOM elements, creating or moving DOM elements on a page and dealing with event handlers Safari wins hands down, followed by FireFox, Opera and IE (in all respects). The "Opera is the fastest" claim holds very little weight with me having compared them. What Opera has is a very fast UI that's extremely responsive, which is all a bit smoke and mirrors really. It's not particularly fast at script execution or object manipulation as soon as things get interesting (it lags behind Safari and FireFox certainly, but it's still far ahead of IE), and of course it renders perfectly valid pages very differently from Safari and FireFox (for which is sometimes possible to blame ambiguities in the standards, but that it doesn't follow the lead of Gecko/KHTML/Webkit or IE is a bit annoying - though do I appreciate the complexity involved).
Opera was one the last major browser that didn't support client-side XSL transformation.
With the upgrade, Opera added the support, which in my view is more important than some milliseconds.
Now you can push raw XML to browsers along with the stylesheet(s) and let them handle the load of processing.
This introduces a lot of new opportunities, for instance, since XSL is way more powerful than CSS, you may for instance rearrange the whole content of the page ways beyond what CSS positioning tricks allow for, you cna also do some computation etc.
Unfortunately, all the browers support XSLT 1.0 for now, while 2.0 offers substantial improvements.
Indeed, opera rocks - at last on Linux, it's waay faster. It's starts in a about a second , while i'm waiting ~30s for firefox. Firefox spawns some zombie "netstat" processes, opera doesn't. Firefox is FUL of memory leaks. It eats as much as 400mb of ram if i keep using the same firefox instance for three days. Let's just face it - Firefox SUCKS and working software has precedence over free software!
http://nontroppo.org/timer/kestrel_tests/
And remember, this is an *alpha* release.
On a Core 2 Duo MacBook with 1GB ram, 413ms. On a G5 PowerMac, 311ms. With Safari coming in at such a close 2nd, it seems it's worth honorable mention, don't you think?
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Really? And here I switched from Opera to Firefox. Isn't that "going back"?
I personally found Firefox more of a joy to use than Opera (though Opera was leagues ahead of the browsers I had previously used). Possibly this is because of the wealth of plugins that allow me to configure it to work exactly as I want it to work.
It's probably a personal preference thing - but I notice the market share numbers, and suspect I'm not that unusual.
Nevertheless - congratulations, Opera, on 9.5's performance! I appreciate having choice again in the browser market.
Yes, it does makes difference, but on desktop feature set is much more important and there is no way I'm trading NoScript + CookieSafe + Firebug + Foxmarks + Slashdotter for a slight increase in speed.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
I really try to like like Opera, because the speed and rendering abilities are really awesome. The one thing that keeps me from using it is the awful user interface, at least on my Mac. Using it just feels clumsy compared to Safari or Camino (using Gecko).
yeah right, 'cos you personally contribute to FF rather than just lip service. right? right?
Of course all the software on your mobile phone, cooker, microwave, watch. Its all open source as well isn't it?
You sir, are an idiot
Well, now that I've installed Safari 3.0.3 (had vers 2 in the previous test) in the MacBook, times have changed. 188ms. And it passes the Acid test to boot.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
The only reason I use Firefox over Opera and IE 7 is because of Firefox's find feature. Having a separate window pop up for finding a word or phrase is incredibly disruptive, especially when you're looking for multiple instances. As soon as you click outside the find window, it looses your place, and you have to start all the way at the beginning again. I know it sounds silly to most people, but Find is one of the feature I use most often, and if it isn't like Firefox, I'm not switching.
You could or you couldn't care less? Make up your mind, don't get my hopes up in the subject and then dash them in the comment....
So, if for example IE7 on Vista takes 10 seconds to do some test, so Opera is 100% faster - taking 0 seconds to do the same test ?!??!
Closed source does not offer the same many-eyes availability which is Opera's biggest disadvantage as well as it's advantage. This same problem is for Firefox, only reversed. Many eyes and mouths will point out the problems, but very few hands are willing to touch them. It's the mouths that are Firefox's biggest problem as many of them do not have enough technical familiarity to understand that 20 tabs of youtube videos, 3 of animated weather channels, and 1 tab of kittencannon is going to use a little memory. Unfortunately, Firefox has been labeled as a gluttonous memory hog, while people forget this is what they are asking the application to do. Firefox will never live this label down and there is something in peoples nature that makes them enjoy a good witch hunt/burning due to simple ignorance.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I just switched from FF to Opera because of its low market share numbers - which was the same reason I switched from IE to FF when the FF market was about 2%.
Luciano Pavarotti September 6, 2007 R.I.P. yesterday.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciano_Pavarotti
What matters Opera without Pavarotti about?
I'd have sword that the speed limits were the same as for my old 90ies volvo.
I wish there was a browser that was properly multithreaded available. As it is in FF, one tab taking a long time to render can prevent actions such as scrolling in other tabs taking place. Tabs should at least render concurrently, if no having different elements on the page rendered by different threads.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Man, that's not slightly higher. If you routinely open a lot of tabs, like I do (there's a convenient pane called "links" under tools, you just open it, select the ones you want (I just select all), and open them all in a background tab, the difference will be like this:
It'll be like going from a 3 GHz processor to a 6 GHz processor! No, really! I really do wait for this many (and more! sometimes hundreds of) vanilla, locally saved, HTML pages to load in Opera
[so I can page through them like a book, with numpad 1 and 2 for forward and back - but maybe that's just me. Anyone else read a few weeks worth of slashdot like this? (for example)]
What does that mean? Can it render any page in zero time? Isn't that illegal (or at least against the laws of common sense)?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Sorry for being off-topic but I am really interested in knowing which is the free antivirus that ``was taking whole CPU cycles trying to "scan" gigabyte level raw videos while it was asked to ignore them,,
Can't say I'm surprised about these results. As a webdeveloper who does a lot of JavaScript, my experience is that Internet Explorer is horribly slow with rendering, javascript (in general) and DOM manipulation. IE7 seems to be slightly faster than IE6, but it's still fairly useless in those areas. Firefox (my personal browser of choice) is quite a bit faster, "fast enough" even. Testing in Opera usually leaves me surprised by it's speed, though there is something seriously wrong with it's rendering engine (not content, but strange lines when scrolling and such).
What absolutely baffles me though, is that Safari isn't listed. It will never be my browser of choice, as Safari for Windows has a bunch of annoying interface quirks, and I just don't like how it looks. BUT, the speed of Safari, I wouldn't be surprised if it's twice as fast as even Opera. In some areas that is, it doesn't really feel like pages render faster, but at least the speed of anything you do in script is simply insane!
Does opera run on linux?
I havn't used it since I switched a few years ago. One would think people could keep up.
http://nontroppo.org/timer/kestrel_tests/
That is not possible. Opera cannot know when another app needs memory.
The M2 mail client in Opera is often overlooked but makes an excellent product even better. The Notes-like approach of having a single repository for all the e-mail but viewing (or filtering) it from any direction is one of its most powerful features in my opinion - it makes searching for e-mails blisteringly fast, even when you have ten years worth like I do. The 9.50 version improves this even further again.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
(It has what you're asking for... & it is properly implemented)
APK
P.S.=> Some added "FYI" for those of you comparing FireFox/IE/Opera, as far as security. Especially as regards security related vulnerabilities remaining unpatched:
----
Opera security advisories @ SECUNIA (0% unpatched):
http://secunia.com/product/10615/?task=advisories
FireFox security advisories @ SECUNIA (43% unpatched):
http://secunia.com/product/12434/
IE 7 security advisories @ SECUNIA (56% unpatched):
http://secunia.com/product/12366/
(Given that information, as far as regards security problems in the code internally, Opera is ahead of the game by far in this capacity)
----
Also, as far as speed comparisons? This is one that also extolls Opera's benefits over FF &/or IE here, & ON MULTIPLE OS PLATFORMS:
BROWSER SPEED COMPARISONS ON MANY TASKS & MULTIPLE OPERATING SYSTEM PLATFORMS:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
----
(& the best part is, Opera has ALL of the features a body can need, WITHOUT using addons (though it has that via Opera widgets), & is LIGHTER ON MEMORY than FireFox &/or IE typically!)
You can check memory residency yourselves by loading FF, & Opera (& IE for Windows users) & test memory size occupancy via taskmgr.exe (or similar tools like Process Explorer) yourselves & see what I mean...
----
Opera also passed the "ACID2" test, for standards compliance (it is not alone here, but is over IE & FF, & it was iirc, the 5th or 6th browser to do so):
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/03/12/1416222.shtml
----
And, Opera had features other browsers (major 3) copied from it:
FIREFOX MYTHS:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMy
(Yes, Opera had tabbed browsing before IE &/or FF, & other features as well. Opera comes FULLY LOADED features-wise, with a built in email client, IRC client, RSS client, & more + yet eats less RAM than others, & does not require addons to bloat it more, though it has those as well in "opera widgets" (like
That is not possible. Opera cannot know when another app needs memory.
They allocate the memory in a way that OS takes the memory when needed. Non blocking way or something. It was discussed when they came with "memory cache" idea back in 6.x days.For example Mac version uses a lot less memory when hidden and taken back to view.
It is possible on Windows, by setting up an event with CreateMemoryResourceNotification - see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa366541. aspx
that may be a good point, and it's a question I've always wondered. The FF "memory leak" feature is defended as 'making full use of the system resources (which would otherwise be sitting idle) in order to provide a better, faster experience' This sounds perfectly valid IFF: when anything else needs that memory, it can get it with negligible delay or mishap. If you're saying the same for Opera, I'd be interested to know how valid that assumption is for either browser, or memory management and handling in general. From my experience windows tends to barf once memory utilization gets really high, but that's because most programs grab and keep their memory. How would a browser 'instantly give it back' when it's needed, without sending the system into a pagefile caching frenzy?
+ Adblock + a few other things, and that 'slight increase in speed' might start to look like a supersonic jet outrunning a kid with a wheelbarrow. A wheelbarrow with a lot of nifty stuff on it, sure, but still
That is the sound it made when the joke went over the mod's head.
Why? You have all that hardware, why not use it? I mean unless it starts to intefere with your real work, and there is no evidence that it is doing that, then you are fine.
Why? You have all that hardware, why not use it? I mean unless it starts to intefere with your real work, and there is no evidence that it is doing that, then you are fine. I could spare my CPU(s) to compressing SD uncompressed Video to MPEG4/ASP profile which may take 390% (in OS X way of telling 4 cpus) and same time, reply to some webmails using the spare 10% CPU not flooded by browser without effecting any real work.
I have seen some badly coded applications may take 80% CPU and leak like 1 gigabyte real RAM (impossible to release), why they should leak? Would I max my RAM to 16 gigabytes and buy a external mpeg4/h264 compressor just because I can work with a buggy program?
I have seen a Windows cluster with total 16 CPUs or something go down to its knees because a Windows service (some virtual cc processor) got stuck. CPU/memory flood is really evil.
I was testing a commercial products beta, its developer said "Memory usage is not a problem, I didn't optimise it, what matters is does it GROW?", that is what every serious developer out there is afraid of.
I just switched from FF to Opera because of its low market share numbers - which was the same reason I switched from IE to FF when the FF market was about 2%.
Pffft. I'm must more emo than you, I use Lynx which has practucally no market share!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Just tried the alpha and it almost instantly became my primary browser. IE and FF are hideously slow on my system and no amount of tweaking can fix them, they seem to 'hang' when downloading pages, like they disconnect and have to re-establish. Safari is faster but takes a bit longer to load, but Opera loads in under a second (excusing the prompt that just popped up to tell me it wasn't my primary browser at the moment) and draws complete pages noticably faster (easily 3-4 seconds faster for the Slashdot main page). I'm keeping all these browsers on my system for testing my own sites, but Opera has easily become my browser of choice.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
The Rule of Economy is fine when applied sensibly (for example, GNOME do the right thing writing many end user applications in python). However, Firefox is currently at the level where it's computational burden is increasing almost as fast as Moore's Law.
Opera, It would be sweet to be able to put compiler optimizations on it. :D Of course that requires the small matter of having the source...
I think connection speed is far more important than how fast your browser renders what is coming down the line. Is rendering speed that much of an issue? Also looks like the test is biased towards javascript execution speed.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I was a long time Opera user until Firefox 1.0, but FF won me over with plugins and better default behaviors.
Like when you are looking at a page and you see something to search for, highlight and right click search for....
In Firefox you automatically get a new tab with the search, which is what I want. Opera overwrites the page you were reading with the search. Other features work similarly. You can hold down alt or something and get what you want.
Similarly with bookmarks. Firefox I middle click a bookmark in my bookmark bar and I get a new tab. Opera, nothing happens, if I left click it over-writes my current page. Seeing a pattern
Search in page. Firefox much better implementation with obvious highlighting.
Speed isn't enough to win me back.
So why use Opera at work. It is stable. Firefox crashes all the time on my Redhat corporate install. Perhaps something wrong with the Redhat because I have tried out IT supplied Firefox and my own DL copy with the same results.
A lot was stolen from Opera, it is time for Opera to steal back with some of the better interface elements of firefox.
... and I must say, I'm impressed. I used Opera for a few years before IE7 came out (had to be IE7 for work...) and going back is amazing. It renders incredibly quickly, and AJAX'd pages with tabs (iGoogle, etc.) actually work more like desktop apps than web pages. Much impressed.
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
I'm a fan of the dual browser solution. I liked opera back in the day (2002) but I didn't like the ad. It took up to much screen real-estate. So I gave up on opera, though it did have that fun part where you could create a 3d building or world. I switched to firefox and have used it ever since. It can be a slow at times and hog memory but it's what I've gotten used to. I'm currently switching to a two browser solution (the trend of the future!). I find my self using FF for certain activates and using Opera at the same time. So I'll leave Opera open with Gmail in it and use FF to surf the net. This way when I get board of the internet I don't accidentally close my email or close a document I was working on. I think the next advance in browsers will be the ability to lock down a instance of the browser so you don't accidentally close your email or the download. So many folks are used to letting outlook or thunderbird, Word, and Excel run the background I'm sure they will want to keep this as they move to more webbased apps.
- Security: According to Secunia, Opera has 0 unpatched holes, compared to IE which has the most and Safari, second worst; unfortunately, Firefox has quite a few left as well.
- Features: Integrated email, feed reader, widgets, notes, IRC & bittorrent client; back in the day, Netscape tried to do that with email, then gave up when the code became too heavy and impossible to manage, opting instead for "modularization"; IE followed by introducing menu items for OE and FP Express. Opera is the only one left standing and still the fastest with the smalled footprint.
- The only browser that can read pages back to you (Windows->select text, right click, V)
- Portability - opera-usb.com, comes with flashblocker button in case you don't know how to set it yourself
- Mobile devices, where it's at - Opera rules that market
- Someone complained about the find function - the window doesn't actually disappear if you click behind it, it stays on top but loses focus
Wishlist: better integration with Google modules and especially Google Reader, but part of that seems to be addressed with Synchronization I used Opera since version 5. I would not use an OS unless there's an Opera made for it."One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
Maybe on my Pentium 1 computer do I care about browser speed. Browser features is the major deciding factor for me. Firefox simply is capable of doing more than any other browser. It wouldn't matter if IE (which has barely ANY features) or Opera started up just by me blinking. I'd still gladly for Firefox.
I'd never tried Opera before. Based on this article I downloaded it (Ubuntu 7) and gave it a shot. Immediately I notice the interface is completely inconsistent with the rest of my desktop. The menus are like something out of 1996. Then the first two pages I loaded didn't render properly at all. Finally I searched for an ad blocking widget and nothing came up. Why would I want to use this?
I've tried Opera before, used to use it as my main browser before FF took off. But I use a lot of extensions in my day to day browsing. Does Opera have these:
Extensions (enabled: 25, disabled: 2):
* Adblock 0.5.3.043
* Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.3.1.0
* Add Bookmark Here 2 1.0.20070528
* ChatZilla 0.9.78.1
* del.icio.us 1.2 [disabled]
* del.icio.us Bookmarks 1.5.43
* DOM Inspector 1.8.1.6
* Download Statusbar 0.9.5.1
* Firebug 1.05
* Fission 0.8.8
* Google Images Re-Linker 0.4
* Google Notebook 1.0.0.18
* Greasemonkey 0.7.20070607.0
* IE Tab 1.3.3.20070528
* InfoLister 0.9f
* Inline Autocomplete 1.0
* Java Console 6.0.02
* Java Console 6.0.01 [disabled]
* Java Console 6.0
* LastTab 2.0.5
* Long Titles 1.3
* Restart Firefox 0.3
* Slashdotter 1.8.9
* Stop-or-Reload Button 0.2.2
* Stylish 0.5.2
* User Agent Switcher 0.6.10
* Web Developer 1.1.4
Off the top of my head the ones I get the most use out of are AdBlock of course, the Delicious bookmarks, IETab, Greasemonkey, adn the development ones like Firebug and Web Dev Toolbar. Can I replicate most of this in Opera?
Wrong demographic ... you're thinking indie.
As they were really responsive and the issue is fixedt, I better not say their name.
Opera is a fantastic browser. While I'd like to have access to the plethora of useful firefox plugins out there, I simply can't sacrifice everything else Opera has to offer. It's fast, it is very user friendly (with options such as real zoom, ctrl+z to undo closed tabs, seemless password management and an outstanding ability to go back to previous pages unaltered (Opera has saved many forum posts of mine from oblivion that way, that other browsers simply eat, especially you IE!)
I'm aware you can enable similar functionalities in firefox through plug-ins (and that the true zoom has now been brought to the latest firefox) but it sure as heck isn't going to be anywhere close to the snappy, responsive feel opera gives.
The bottom line is, from a geek without loyalties, who's tried IE, Firefox and Safari repeatedly, Opera is the best. Period. All the other browser copy from it (which is a good thing.)
My family usually likes better Opera (since many years ago when we had Pentium One 100Mhz PCs).
;-D
The problem is, since 9.something, we're forced to use the non-shared (iow, static) library version on our Mandrake 10.1 community Linux (hey, it's working and all the rest is updated... ok, KDE is not...). That's because the shared version has some incompatibilities (which I quite don't remember) and doesn't accept international diacritical marks -- like (I hope you cand read this) á, é, ã etc. (typing with Firefox here now).
Usually I'm able to scavenge mirrors for said versions, but, as I'm gonna install a current version, I'd like to ask if people do have the same problem with the more recent distro versions... Is it so?
Other than that, Opera blows everyone out of the water, and not just because of performance, but mainly for its various innovative features. It's like knowing like how other browsers will be in the future.
The Opera guys are some daredevils, too, posing with tights etc.
Arguably Adblock makes browsing FASTER because you don't have to wait for 30 or 40K (or more on some over ad blown sites) of stuff to download.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
it is seriously disagreeing with the author. First off, how could 281, of whatever, be slightly better than 546 of the same thing? It is almost half; I wouldn't call that "slight". And then, a 100% improvement means that the criterion in question is completely eliminated, so "100% faster than [your browser here]" means instantaneous.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
It's also an order of magnitude faster than the bloated browsers like Opera, FF, and IE.
Badass Resumes
i'm forced to use Firefox because of vital Extensions and rendering of some sites which can't work with Opera. I'll try this beta.
I can't think of faster browser then Opera
(text browsers don't count).Firefox slowdowns on flash,it slowdowns entire browser if one tab is loading something. Many image on one pages=Browser CPU usage spikes to 100% and stays until it loads them all.And that takes time.
Try loading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_opening
I don't know of any OS that provides such a facility. The app could monitor free physical RAM, or could (as you mention about the Mac version) choose to dump cache when hidden/minimized, but I don't believe there is any way to allocate memory such that the OS will simply take it back when needed. All non-locked memory allocations on modern OSes are subject to being paged out to free up memory when other apps need it, but that is very different from saying the OS "takes the memory when needed", because it involves the (slow) process of writing the memory contents out to the disk.
It's an interesting idea, though. Perhaps operating systems should provide such a feature, a way to allocate memory "weakly", such that the OS can reallocate it as-needed. There would have to be some mechanism by which the OS could notify the app that the memory was being taken away (I suppose it could just be a SIGSEGV).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Anyone else remember when Firefox started as a bloat-free Mozilla? What happened?
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
I always thought that opera is a very slick browser. Though main reason I dont use is same as with Firefox -compatibility. Neither of them works with MSDN as good as IE does. And being windows IT professional that just too much of annoyance for me ( I know about IE render plugin for ff but it is not very stable and tends to lead to memory leaks).
It's annoying like on Digg with its poor comment system. I actually have to disable the graphics to speed up the rendering. Since I use tabs like crazy, SeaMonkey (also heard Firefox does this too) can hog up to 300 MB of memory!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Until Opera 9.5 comes to OS X and the design principles begin to follow its windows and linux cousins, it will never be a decent browser for the mac os. I was very excited when this release was presented. Sadly, after 5 minutes of use (2 of which i spent slapping myself because I was using 9.23), I got sick of the browser crashing and the horrific render speeds. This is a fabulous browser if you run Windows or Linux, but Mac users should just stick to safari 3 or firefox for now.
I have tried and used Opera on several occasions. I tend to use it when testing websites I build, along with most the top used browsers. Personally I just never have cared for it. Even though it is faster I still prefer FireFox. I can tweak FireFox myself and make it a lot faster than it is out of the box. I have my set of extensions I like that make my life easier. I have not been able to duplicate that in Opera or Safari. Speed is always good, but it is not the only important thing to me. Whatever browser I am most comfortable in and works best for me is what I use. I know it is hard to go with the idea different people have different ideas of what makes something the best. In my opinion...
Firefox gives me what I need to do what I want. Is it perfect? hell no, but it is the most complete browser for my use. Allows me to sync my plugins and favs between my windows and Linux systems.
Opera is a good solid browser and easy to use. Even though it is proven to be faster it "seems" slower. I do not know a better way to put it. Easily my second favorite browser though.
Safari, do not have or want a Mac and the windows version is not all that impressive. Use it for checking my web designs and that is about it.
IE, only when I have to.
I was a big fan/user of Opera back in the 5.x days but eventually stopped using it because of memory leaks in SSL pages, my personal email was hosted on my own webmail server over SSL and Opera would just leak memory like crazy when the browser was doing little other than refreshing every so often in webmail.
Anyways, I decided to try it out again recently (9.23 on Linux) because it's supposed to be fast and light weight. I always have two browsers open. Firefox is my main browser which I run with a very dark color scheme(some sites are unreadable in it due to the scheme). Because some sites are unusuable in my firefox configuration I have another browser - Seamonkey usually. Most of the time that other browser sits and reloads two different web sites running cacti, refreshing about a dozen graphs a piece every 5 minutes(225x600 images). And I have noticed that Seamonkey leaks quite a bit of memory while doing that.
But Opera seemed to leak a lot more, within about 48 hours it was using upwards of 900MB of memory, I restarted it, and again it was way up there, several hundred meg pretty quick. Seamonkey is using ~261MB in the last 3 days. Opera leaked at probably 5x the rate. Even with 2GB of ram in my laptop Opera slows down significantly when it gets to such memory levels(even without swapping). Firefox using 325MB in the past 3 days(only add-ons are Fasterfox, live http headers, prefbar and remove it permanently. Firefox 2.0.0.6).
Don't get me wrong though I do recommend Opera to many folks for "normal" browsing. Especially those on slower computers. I think it's a solid browser, it is very fast for most people. I realize my situation is an edge case.
Seamonkey had an issue that drove me bat shit crazy when my laptop was still running XP, on those same cacti pages probably once every day or two seamonkey would just completely hang, and I'd have to kill it. It happened on all of the versions I tried. Did I mention my cacti pages are SSL encrypted?(mainly to protect the passwords, I don't care if people see the graphs). The seamonkey behavior didn't start until I moved my cacti systems to using SSL for everything. This hanging behavior hasn't happened under Linux(Ubuntu but using Seamonkey 1.1.2 from mozilla.org, the Debian packaged version crashed using our internal wiki that runs on Confluence).
It's unfortunate that such leaks seem to exist, I imagine firefox is similar.
So for that reason I switched back to Seamonkey as my secondary browser.
I'm thinking of trying firefox under another userid via sudo to run as my secondary browser as well, see how it fares.
Posting as AC because I post so rarely(actually twice in about the past month which is a record), probably no more than 8 posts in the past 8 years, so I don't have an account, I just sit here and read the threads.
Opera does have equivalents of many must-have extensions. Some are missing (IETab), some are better integrated (gestures), some are almost-but-not-quite (web dev tools unfortunately).
p opular-firefox-extensions-and-opera
That sums it up: http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/2006/07/04/top-150-
Out of 113 most popular Fx extensions: 38 are built-in, 38 are not possible, rest can be added by tweaking/hacking/configuring something.
I've been using 9.5 alpha since it was launched, and I'm thoroughly impressed. It handles great and the memory footprint is tiny. The interface doesn't feel clunky like all the previous versions of Opera I've used.
I love it. And no, I'm not being paid... lol
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
I dunno, I find Opera to be much faster at rendering the images on many websites...
- Frans.
I used Opera 9.0 as my main browser for 1 month and stopped using because javascript performance was TERRIBLE. Sites like armory.worldofwarcraft.com run very slow and are almost unusable. Until opera can at least keep pace with the javascript performance FF and IE it's NOT faster.
Tools -> Preferences -> Tabs -> Resuse current tab : Unchecked
Please take sometime to explore the options menu before trolling.
- mritunjai
Opera lacks a decent ad blocker and many of the other features that the 30 extensions I'm currently using afford me... and that's without even getting into about:config
lynx renders them in O(0) time.
Badass Resumes
My Lynx browser only use only 0 picosecond to render a picture, this is infinite time faster than your Opera browser.
that's all very interesting, but its market share numbers are practically non existant. we get more iPhone Safari visits on our site vs. Opera.
Hold down "Shift" in Opera to get it to open in a new tab. Similarly with bookmarks. Firefox I middle click a bookmark in my bookmark bar and I get a new tab. Opera, nothing happens, if I left click it over-writes my current page.
Someone else replied to tell you how to turn this off. Alternatively, holding down shift opens it in a new tab. Search in page. Firefox much better implementation with obvious highlighting.
I don't know what you consider a "much better implementation," but if you hit "," Opera will do an inline search on any links on the page, and if you hit "." or "/" (dunno what the difference is) it does an inline search on text. Both do quite obvious highlighting, unless you can't see bright green.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Unfortunately, Opera does not figure out that you meant to click on "Preview" instead of "Submit." Sorry about the formatting. Here it is corrected:
In Firefox you automatically get a new tab with the search, which is what I want. Opera overwrites the page you were reading with the search. Other features work similarly. You can hold down alt or something and get what you want.
Hold down "Shift" in Opera to get it to open in a new tab. Similarly with bookmarks.
Firefox I middle click a bookmark in my bookmark bar and I get a new tab. Opera, nothing happens, if I left click it over-writes my current page.
Someone else replied to tell you how to turn this off. Alternatively, holding down shift opens it in a new tab.
Search in page. Firefox much better implementation with obvious highlighting.
I don't know what you consider a "much better implementation," but if you hit "," Opera will do an inline search on any links on the page, and if you hit "." or "/" (dunno what the difference is) it does an inline search on text. Both do quite obvious highlighting, unless you can't see bright green.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Thanks that is closer.
But still not exactly what I want.
Now bookmarks always open a new tab. FF behavior is better. Left click ->same tab, middle click ->new tab.
Page links now almost at random open in the current tab or open in a new tab, where again with FF I get left click ->current, middle click ->new.
These minor interface differences are a PITA for someone using both browsers.
'Tools' -> 'Preferences' -> 'Advanced' -> Uncheck 'Reuse Current Tab'
/, Ctrl+F and the search box, they all highlight). I didn't change anything to get that behaviour.
For me, that is the first setting that is changed on Opera. After that bookmarks and searches will open in new tabs.
Also, my Opera highlights searches inside the page with every way I try (inline with
Personally, I have noticed that while consuming the same amount of system memory, Firefox on Linux does not slow the rest of the system, while Firefox on Windows does.
http://www.mhall119.com
Many eyes being available doesn't mean many eyes looking. You'd have to be an absolute moron to believe the stupid myth that simply having source code available makes software more secure. Opera has a much better security track record than firefox, with far fewer vulnerabilities, and much faster fixes.
And firefox is labelled as a memory hog because it is. The opera instance I am using right now has been open for at least 3 weeks. There are 25 tabs open including this one and my gmail (which is always open), several of which have been sitting open since I last had to reboot windows and thus start opera. Opera is using 129MB of RAM. You couldn't even do this in firefox, it would long since have used all my RAM and had to be restarted. The fact that firefox is too poorly written to simply be a functional web browser is why people call it a memory hog.
My browser is faster than your browser! So fast it loads 1/10 of an eyelid-blink before yours! Neener-neener.
As a web developer I can honestly say - I could give a rat's ass. Where's the interesting news on the web front?
I am Jack's smirking revenge.
So
libertarian: (n) socially liberal, financially conservative; neither left, nor right.
The quoted numbers are a Javascript run test. I think you'll find NoScript speeds up running JS by ... erm, not running it, except when you want it to. And since such a large %ge of Javascript is completely worthless, and possibly opens security holes, I think that's a triple win.
(Yes you can disable JS in Opera, but its considerably more coarse grained and less user friendly than NoScript).
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yeah, you are right, I didn't think that part all the way through...
I very rarely have a problem with it, except on extremely long instances of Firefox (upwards of a month, with upwards of 40 tabs). Then, it becomes slow and uses a lot of cpu for loading webpages. I also notice that the cache sometimes keeps very, very, very old pages in memory (looking through /dev/mem). Perhaps I will look at changing the variable for the caching, to see what effect it has.
Dear opera fans:
Speed is not enough, speed was never enough. Nobody but you actually cares about speed, make Opera a better "web browser", make it friging open source and then I might try to consider it as an option, seriously, I will not use a defective piece of proprietary software only because it saves me 100 milliseconds , heck I would consider myself the most pathetic person in earth if I really cared about rendering speed, got better things to do than counting milliseconds a page takes to render...
Note to the fanboy mods that modded my previous post down: Now do that again! Let's see how many points can you waste trying to censor the truth
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I don't find holding down shift as clean as "Left click, same tab", "middle click, new" tab behavior of Firefox. This is really the only thing that I find acceptable at this point.
Also de-selecting "reuse tab" now results near random reuse of the current tab, or opening a new one. This is much worse than the default.
Search in Opera highlights multiple instances of a word in pale gray both at work on Redhat and at home in XP, so it is not bright green by a long shot. It is so nearly invisible I didn't even realize for some time that Opera was even doing it.
I am not on a Mac, I want to make use of my mouse buttons instead shift-MB which is a waste and a PITA if you also use Firefox.
To solve this, go to Tools - Preferences - Advanced tab - and under the Tabs option you will have a checkbox that says "Reuse the current tab". Uncheck this and Opera will use a new tab for everything.
I don't have a middle mouse button on my laptop but I believe this will work in Opera.
Tools...Preferences...Advanced tab...Middle Click Options...Open in Background Tab (Or Open in New Tab...whichever you prefer)
w3m in emacs on wmii. I win.
Some flavors of Unix allege to support this, through madvise(), with MADV_FREE; this isn't standardized, though, and I don't know how well it actually works.
What is it with Firefox anyway?
Opera is pretty spiffy, but I rely on my Firefox plugins. I wish it didn't insist on leaking memory though.
They have deals with search engines, like Google and Yahoo, to get placement as the default engines in the toolbar, in Speed Dial, and in Opera Mini. (I think these days it's Yahoo in all 3.) Same kind of deal that Firefox has with Google, really.
Plus there are the versions for devices (Nintendo DS, etc.), which they still charge for, either directly or through licensing deals with device manufacturers and mobile carriers. So they pull in revenue from that.
This article is a year out of date, but still informative: Opera making big profits from free software.
I have yet to see Lynx actually render any images. As such, the time it takes to do so is infinite.
- Frans.
When will someone do a comparison of Javascript (ECMA Script?) and CSS compatibility. That's what matters most to me. Speed on a PC affects me very little
I'm fairly sure rendering [alt text] takes a few cycles.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"And JFTR: Opera fanboys (the few that I've encountered) are worse than Linux, Mac and Amiga fanboys combined." - by cp.tar (871488) on Friday September 07, @06:25AM (#20505367)
Ok, but how can we NOT be, when facts like this are available, that note Opera's superiority?
/. today, is about, ONLY):
.xpi addons for FF)...
... Thanks here goes to rh0 (member 1
To wit (quoting another user here, who had misconceptions about multithreaded design of Opera, OR even other browsers, for example):
"I'd like a multi threaded browser" - by Bert64 (520050) on Friday September 07, @05:19AM (#20505053)
Opera runs 8 threads here (per taskmgr.exe &/or process explorer) in the Windows model!
Hey... check it yourself! Taskmgr.exe &/or Process Explorer (microsoft tools) can show you this all, easily...
---
Some added "FYI" for those of you comparing FireFox/IE/Opera (this one is about security, super-important in today's online world, especially):
Opera security advisories @ SECUNIA (0% unpatched):
http://secunia.com/product/10615/?task=advisories
FireFox security advisories @ SECUNIA (43% unpatched):
http://secunia.com/product/12434/
IE 7 security advisories @ SECUNIA (56% unpatched):
http://secunia.com/product/12366/
---
Also, as far as speed comparisons? This is one that ALSO EXTOLLS OPERA's SPEED/EFFICIENCY BENEFITS over FF &/or IE here, & ON MULTIPLE OS PLATFORMS:
BROWSER SPEED COMPARISONS ON MANY TASKS & MULTIPLE OPERATING SYSTEM PLATFORMS:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
And, especially on Win32 OS', the most used PC platform/OS there is... & that one has MANY MORE evidences on many more types of browser activities, than this one that tests Opera 9.50's superiority in JavaScript parse & process (which this report on Opera here @
http://nontroppo.org/timer/kestrel_tests/
---
The best parts are, OPERA IS FREE (as in BEER), & Opera has ALL of the features a body can need, WITHOUT using addons (though it has that via Opera widgets), & YET, Opera is LIGHTER ON MEMORY than FireFox &/or IE typically!
(You can check memory residency yourselves by loading FF, & Opera (& IE for Windows users) & test memory size occupancy via taskmgr.exe (or similar tools like Process Explorer) yourselves & see what I mean... I did so with FF 2.0.0.6, IE 7.x, & Opera 9.23.)
---
Opera also passed the "ACID2" test, for standards compliance (it is not alone here, but is over IE & FF, & it was the 6th browser to do so):
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/03/12/1416222.shtml
---
And, Opera had features (like tabbed browsing) that other browsers (major 2 others in IE/FF) copied from it... note the article below!
FIREFOX MYTHS:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyt hs.html
Yes, Opera had tabbed browsing before IE &/or FF, & other features as well.
Opera comes FULLY LOADED features-wise, with a built in email client, IRC client, RSS client, & more + yet eats less RAM than others, & addons only bloat IE &/or FF even more memory-occupancy-wise. (AND YES, Opera has addons as well in "opera widgets" (like
APK
P.S.=> The order in which both dev tools &/or browsers passed ACID2 compliance, is as follows: Safari #1, Prince #2, Shiira #3, Konqueror #4, OPERA #5, iCab #6
I've seen websites that work in FF and are broken in Opera but I suspect shoddy Javascript as the cause since it's often caused by websites that for some reason implement standard functionality in JS (like iframes and opening in new windows).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Pffft. lynx. elinks rocks lynx's world. http://elinks.or.cz/
So, what about Opera is defective? I'm interested to hear your opinion.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I just tried the Opera 9.5 alpha. It's quite impressive, very fast (noticably faster than Firefox with lots of tabs open), it does adblock, it has undo close tab...
But I just can't get over how much space is wasted. If you block an ad there's a big gaping white hole on the page. With Firefox (with adblock), that entire element is gone and the content flows in. FF (with greasemonkey) lets you get rid of all the extra crap on offender sites like boingboing and slashdot where only half the page is real content and the other half is useless crud. And the ability to not see comments on youtube... well that's godly.
I know this seems like a little thing, but it's quite jarring to go from a page full of useful content to half a page of content interspersed with random gaping holes. Firefox is slower but not annoyingly so, so I'll probably end up sticking with it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Ugh, it already loses points....Google Reader doesn't render? The right-side pane with the actual items to read is all compressed and you can't see it. Bah!
Plus, I can't figure out how to block individual elements (ads) on a page. Hmmmm....it *is* fast, though.
Safari 3.03 2.2ghz C2D 10.4.10
MD5 Benchmark took 3.38 seconds for 3000 hashes (888 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 3.369 seconds for 2700 hashes (801 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 3.327 seconds for 1900 hashes (571 hashes/second)
Actually looking at the product goes a long way to understanding how it works. Then you don't look stupid saying things like "I can only use Firefox because I am completey unable to adapt to anything where I can not open a page in a new tab by middle-clicking", only to find out later that there's an option in Opera that lets you *choose* if you want middle-click to not open the link at all, open in the current tab, open in a new tab, open in a new background tab, open in a new window, or open in a new background window.
So now what's your excuse for not liking Opera? I know you've got another arbitrary one somewhere.
Also de-selecting "reuse tab" now results near random reuse of the current tab
Yeah, you're exactly right. They use a random number generator to determine behavior, it's not deterministic at all. Never mind that it works fine for everyone else.
Search in Opera highlights multiple instances of a word in pale gray both at work on Redhat and at home in XP
On every computer I have Opera on it uses bright yellow and bright green to highlight the currently selected search term, and the rest of them on the page. I'm not sure what's different about yours that would affect that.
You switched because of low market share numbers? Why?
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
Could we PLEASE stop posting fricken ADVERTS as articles?!!!
Half of the "articles" are adverts and the other half are pointers at other people's articles with entirely misleading titles and summaries.
Go ahead, mark me troll. Slashdot isn't worth a damn thing the way it is. I don't mind losing my karma!
Not only that, but it is usually animated ads that use most of the cpu when trying to scroll a web page.
Adblock + flashblock means far less cpu usage once the page is down.
While I understand that opera gets more money from yahoo by making it the default search engine in the built-in search bar. At least users to change it to something else, come on even IE7 let you do that.
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
That would be amazingly cool.
Javascript is definitely my primary problem in Opera, and I don't think it's "shoddy" coding. Google Docs & Spreadsheets doesn't work at all, GReader/GReader plugin for home page don't work well in Opera, my company's webmail system doesn't work well in Opera (IMail - attachment uploading broken), my personal webmail doesn't work (through everyone.net), etc. They're all Javascript related problems and it prevents me from using Opera with any regularity.
Look at the first instance of the word. Press F3. Notice how the bright green highlight moves? Personally I hate having every match of a word on a page highlighted, I guess there must be a significant percentage for the compromise they used.
Middle Click on a bookmark is oft requested and I'm really not sure why it's so difficult they haven't been able to put it in in 3 major releases - something to do with their menu system (most windows apps don't recieve anything but leftclicks in menu widgets), it's related to the somewhat weak toolbar system. I also don't understand why everything *but* toolbars can be drag + dropped...
If you care enough you can edit menu.ini and change the behavior of the menu items but for some reason Opera likes to keep things in the same tab. That said, for the longest time I couldn't figure out how to *get* tabs in Firefox as it seems to default to using separate windows for most everything (unless I explicitly use a tab).
Then again, I'm not a Firefox user as I find Opera's defaults of mouse guestures, tab abilities and MDI far more sensible than Firefox's extremely limited and basic browser. It all comes down to preference which is why I'm so glad Opera keeps going.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
cryptic title but thats cuz thats all u will ever see of this post after it gets buried in the noise. Opera has nice privacy features in its older version. Betcha those features did not survive. Why. Cuz now they wanna keep ur favorites online so that you can ..'have ur favorites available to you wooorldwiiiide!! That means that your cache and favorites are now hijacked to opera's servers so that you have no privacy at all. Hey little boys and girls, better bee reall nice to the nice man from homeland security after using this browser so that you do not have a free 'vacation' to Afghanistan via the rack and thumbscrew rooms in Guanotanamo! Also, with your favorites and cache in strange computers, what is to stop anyone from planting so called illegal to possess files in it so that you can get to la la land even faster. Have opera and it seems to want to be 'upgraded' now every time it is used. It nags and nags. Now just suppose it did not have to nag, and went ahead and turned itself into the malware that the new one is without your consent...and then said nothing or worse..continued to nag giving you a fools paradise to live in while you were spied on, planted files on, used as a botnet, and literally became the world's toilet. No, I am now removing Opera from my machine. Rather use Konqueror under KDE 3.1...which IS secure.
No ad blocking.
I just browse with Images disabled. It's the only way I can still function on dial-up.
Note to all slashdot users: If you are ever stuck using dial-up, the first thing you should do is download Opera.
Opera has a pop-up blocker, and ads can be blocked on an individual basis using the Block Content feature.
Anything else?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
It seemed like a good idea to try Opera out; I use FX on Fedora 7, the first thing that began to turn me off was when I found it was proprietary, the second when it displayed my Distro as Fedora Core 7 (if they don't see the error what else don't they notice) the third when it put up an End User Lousy Agreement (shiver) and last when I had to search my system to remove the Installation files I could identify one by one. Neither could I find any reference to Flash Media Plug-ins etc in their site info, maybe I didn't spend enough time looking, but maybe not.
J7
If so it could be down to rounding issues due to accumulated error (you do a calculation and due to the fractional part you end up rounding up, something changes ever so slightly and now the fractional part is smaller so you end up rounding down).
I have to admit I thought most of these had been squashed years ago (I used to see this many times a day back in 2000). If you have time on your hands you might want to trawl Mozilla's Bugzilla for the issue. If you have slightly less time or can't find an existing bug but have a reliable test case that always shows the problem, you are probably best off filing a new bug report.
That requires the user to mark each ad site. It doesn't even come close to the Adblock and Noscript extensions for Firefox. Opera's a great browser for online banking and things where ad blocking is necessary, but as a daily driver, the lack of that sort of extensibility is a showstopper.
Um, I meant "ad blocking isn't necessary" in the above.
9.0 was slow. True. But that was looooooong ago.
I have just tested your armory.worldofwarcraft.com and it's fast as hell.
Would you care to test this 9.5 version instead of that old 9.0?
Kestrel has a total rewrite of the Javascript engine and right now is faster than all your FF and IE.
Now bookmarks always open a new tab. FF behavior is better. Left click ->same tab, middle click ->new tab.
It works like that in the panel though.
Yes, but I use a bookmark bar, not the panel and this is just another sign of the inconsistency of behavior.
I couldn't understood your issue with EULA, unless you were planning to use it in Nuclear plant or embedding it in iPhone. Also, proprietary systems is again a very rigid stance, you should use a s/w for the experiance, ease, speed and value for money. I never understood how it would help me to go for a crappy GPL s/w compared to a better proprietary s/w. For rest i can't comment as I don't use the OS.
On Windows, FFx is a memory hog and it does slow down system, and still it is nowhere as fast as Opera. If any of you are playing with Opera 9.5 alpha just minimize it and see the magic, it releases almost all the memory and takes it back conservatively and as you maximize it back you'll see no diff. in spped.
you seem to have midas touch. that's good for Opera. Hope you are not regretting your decision
Opera has got NoScript / CookieSafe / Foxmarks(9.5)/ Adblock inbuilt and all can be accessed from right click or F12. and you say downloading extension is easy.
Reposted with formatting...
I just got modded a troll.
Please try Firebug and Opera Developer Tools and then make up your own mind.
Firebug has a cool feature that lets you click on any element on the page, which shows you its position in the DOM, the associated styles and which style sheet they came from. You can edit any part of the document or the style sheet and see the changes in real time.
In Opera Developer Tools, you have to click on each node in the DOM down to the element you want, using only the tag name and its id. This takes six to ten clicks on most documents and you're doing it blind unless you know the page structure intimately. Once you get there all the properties are read-only.
Firebug also has a full debugger for JavaScript, including the ability to set breakpoints and step thru JavaScript source code, all without making any modifications to the web site (i.e. you can do it on any site, you don't need write access to the web server). There is no equivalent feature for Opera.
Yes, I'm spoiled by Firebug, but that doesn't make me a troll.