Slashdot Mirror
First Beta of Opera 10 Released
Miladinoski writes "Opera Software ASA today released the first beta of their tenth version of the Opera browser. In addition to the browser's known features, like mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, voice navigation, mail and RSS support, speed dial and so forth, it now includes a Turbo mode which unclogs your connection to get faster browsing, a new interface, a tabbed browsing update and customizable speed dial. Opera 10 continues to follow the web standards by getting 100/100 and pixel-perfect scores on the Acid3 test. The beta is currently available for every modern OS platform."
Opera follows standards, and Slashdot (even the homepage) looks like shit in Opera.
Really, Slashdot looks like shit in most browsers with blatantly obvious bugs everywhere, like the infamous white on white comment titles.
I guess that means that for all the talk and the bullshit, Slashdot totally hypocritical when it comes to standards.
Fix your fucking code or get off your high horse.
I love Opera's speed. And I can live with the bloated features no one uses like Email and BitTorrent. But the sad fact is, a lot of sites don't work the same in Opera. I remember in particular that the uTorrent web GUI's Javascript didn't work at all.
And it's a shame that Opera rocks the Acid3, but nobody really cares because most websites aren't coded to standard; they're coded to work in the 96% of people's machines, and 96% of browsers fail at Acid3. Opera's mostly been a victim of a million different cooks in a million different kitchens cooking for a million different people.
Well, it's mostly meant for people on mobile devices, and people on dial-up could find it useful.
It's free already for average consumers (since I played with it a bit this morning already). I doubt it's an "open" standard, since it's Opera's servers doing it, but I'm not 100% sure. No one's reported bottleneck issues, but that might change with more users on-board now.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
And I can live with the bloated features no one uses like Email and BitTorrent.
It ain't really bloat if it doesn't slow it down at all, in my books.
Opera passes an even tougher css test than acid3 -- unlike firefox and safari, it renders the titles of slashdot comments correctly.
Yes, that's a joke. To see what I'm talking about, use firefox or safari to navigate to the slashdot homepage, and then click on the "Read More..." link for a story in the news, science, or technology sections. (This Opera article is in the tech section, but if you have your default threshold for comments set high, like I do, you won't get any titles of comments displayed right now, simply because there aren't any highly up-moderated comments yet, so you won't get any comments displayed.) What you'll see is that the titles of stories are displayed in white on a white background.
This comment explains that it's due to a CSS bug in the stylesheets in certain sections. Here is a bug report that I did today in sourceforge. I couldn't find any earlier reports of this problem by searching on sourceforge's bug tracker, but they might exist -- this problem has been around for quite some time now. As a work-around, you can click on the story's title in the threshold form.
It would be interested to hear whether this is universally reproducible with firefox and safari, but please be very careful to follow the exact instructions above. It depends on which section the article is in, and it depends on whether or not you're getting a cached version of the story.
The fact that the slashdot crew hasn't noticed this bug on their own after such a long period of time makes me wonder how much attention they really pay to the site. (This is assuming that the bug really does occur for all firefox users.) We've had dupes and grammatical mistakes in summaries forever, but now that the firehose is handling submissions, it looks like the whole site is just on autopilot.
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A quick look shows the OS X version passes Acid3, is about 10% slower on javascript benchmarks compared to the last version, and still has no support for system services so it can't use the same spelling checker as all the other OS X programs or the grammar checker or other tools. Basically, I don't see anything that is here to motivate me to switch. Opera may be a really nice browser for Windows, but it is still subpar for OS X.
Once again Opera pushes the misconception that Acid3 is the test of web standards compliance.
I don't think they're doing that, and I think that if this was your Browser of Choice you would not be disparaging the fact that it passes ACID. Why the Opera hate? The ACID test is a good barometer of how "standardy" a browser is, that's all. No one is trying to claim that scoring 100 on ACID 3 means that the browser is 100% compliant with all web standards that anyone has ever made. Again, why the Opera hate? Should browser vendors not strive to reach 100 on ACID 3?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black