Opera 10 Benchmarked and Evaluated

CNETNate writes "Dial-up connections and flaky Wi-Fi are made significantly more tolerable with Opera 10, it seems. After yesterdays news that Opera 10's first beta had landed, some testing was in order. One major new feature is Opera Turbo — server-side compression — which shrinks pages before sending them down your browser. With a 100Mbps connection throttled to a laughable 50Kbps, Opera 10 proved itself to outperform every other desktop browser on the planet, and there are graphs to prove it. Javascript benchmarks put the new browser in fourth place overall, after Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox, but it indeed passes the Acid3 test with a perfect score. If you ever use a laptop on public Wi-Fi, to not have Opera 10 installed could be a big mistake"

Comments

How to get turbo browsing with free software

[Ed Avis]

Back when my net connection was a 56kb/s modem, I used to make an ssh connection (with compression) to a machine at university, and then tunnel through that to the university's http proxy server. That gave a handy speed increase compared to making http requests directly over the modem link. You could also try the RabbIT compressing web proxy. All this relies on having a server somewhere with a fast net connection that you can run programs on - and this is the service that Opera Software are really providing.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[whyloginwhysubscribe]

I didn't realise that was possible! Thanks for a great tip! In putty you can enable it in Connection->SSH - I do a lot of work over modems, so this is very useful...

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[commodore64_love]

>>>That gave a handy speed increase compared to making http requests directly over the modem link

That's not quite the same. The summary read: "Opera Turbo shrinks pages before sending them." If it operates like my Netscape Web Accelerator, it squashes everything. Text is shrunk to about 5% original size, images to around 10% original size, and Java and other executables shrunk to 20%. This approach makes my 50k dialup have an apparent speed equal to my 750k DSL connection!

The only drawback is that the images, when compressed, look like crap but if you're only interesting in browsing the internet for information, not the pron, then that's okay and acceptable.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[commodore64_love]

P.S.

I wonder if Opera's Turbo could be used with hi-speed connections? If my 50k connection is sped-up to 750k, then maybe it could squeeze text/image/executable for my DSL too and make it load as fast as a ,000k connection. Hmmm. I don't mind seeing images get squashed, smeared, or otherwise distorted.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[commodore64_love]

[,000k] --> [11,000k]

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[Ed Avis]

It depends on what it means by 'shrinks'. If it's just gzip compression, then yes you do get that by tunnelling over an ssh proxy. If you want to recompress images as well, use RabbIT. Anything more than that (intelligent summarizing of text? rewriting bloated Javascript?) is an AI-complete problem.

I also found that cutting the overhead of TCP handshakes, DNS lookups etc. by just sending requests to a proxy server over an already-existing ssh tunnel noticeably reduces the delay between clicking on a link and the page starting to appear (the wait period that used to show 'host contacted, waiting for reply...' and all that in early browsers like Netscape). This is before the effect of any content compression.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[Nesman64]

That sounds like Verizon math, to me.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[Logic and Reason]

The only drawback is that the images, when compressed, look like crap but if you're only interesting in browsing the internet for information, not the pron, then that's okay and acceptable.

Why not just turn off images then?

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. How does your browser "squash things" that haven't been downloaded to it? If Opera Turbo isn't a server going about the business of caching pages and compressing content were does the content get compressed? I can see Netscape Web Accelerator decreasing the MTU size of your machine's nic. And, can even see it loading a smaller portion of an image to decrease the amount of memory needed to display images but, compressing content after downloading them? Your confused.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[keeboo]

You could also try the RabbIT compressing web proxy. All this relies on having a server somewhere with a fast net connection that you can run programs on - and this is the service that Opera Software are really providing.

If you want image compression - and are able to run Linux/BSD at the server side - Ziproxy may be a better option.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[borizz]

No it can't.

At those speeds, delivering internet pages is more latency bound than transfer speed bound. You always have to wait [your ping to the page] + [time it takes to transfer data to you]. With broadband, the first is usually larger than the last, so you won't get any speedup. Certainly not if you add an extra step to the mix, opera's server. Then you have [your ping to the opera server] + [opera's ping to the page] + [time it takes to transfer data to you through opera].

In short, Opera Turbo will only work when the time it takes to transfer data is way larger than the ping.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[jspraul]

Did you miss the '(with compression)' part? The SSH solution squashes everything, without special treatment for anything (lossless images).

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[commodore64_love]

So then there's no reason for me to upgrade my DSL from 750k to 6000k.

Verizon keeps begging me to do that, but if my web-browsing won't be any faster (according to you), then I just won't bother.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[commodore64_love]

(1) Webpages look better with images than a bunch of "X" placeholders and (2) a lot of webpages depend on images to work properly, such as when the menu is a clickable image. If you don't download the image you can't access the menu.

So that's why when I use 50k dialup I leave the images turned-on. And since they are squeezed to about 5 kilobytes, it doesn't really take that long to download them. Just a few seconds for the whole page.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[commodore64_love]

Yes but there are different kinds of compression. All modern modems already have compression built-in (V.44) which squeezes text and executables, but doesn't touch images or ZIP archives. You didn't specify how SSH works, and given the time period you used it (1990s), I just figured it was like V.44.

The Opera and Netscape compression is different from V.44 because it opens the image, recompresses it with very low quality, closes it, and then sends it.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[borizz]

Only your (big) downloads would speed up, but normal browsing would only speed up a small bit. Remember, you're still increasing speed, so you will get a speed up, but it won't have any linear relation to the amount of bandwidth you add.

Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software

[Hurricane78]

Lol. You should have noticed, that DSL and web-browsing are not made for each other. Nobody needs high-speed DSL for sites only.

It's for the P2P networks, and large-scale porn streams, etc, that it's made for. ^^

Everybody knows it. Especially the ISPs. They just can't say it.

But I wonder why you did not know this? ^^

Phenomenal browser

[Jarlsberg]

Opera is a phenomenal browser. Seriously, they keep churning out useful features for their browser, and it's a pleasure to use. It definitely feels faster than the other major browsers, though they're all pretty good nowadays.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Anonymous Coward]

[T]he other major browsers [are] all pretty good nowadays.

Largely because they've copied features originally introduced in Opera.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Racemaniac]

i've been using opera for quite a while, and i agree that it is an awesome browser.

the main problem however is that it's got bad compatibility with lots of sites. not really their problem, just that many sites don't bother to make sure everything works with opera.

besides obvious things like online banking, and microsoft junk, i've since a few weeks been having problems on facebook. lots of things suddenly stopped working, and it's seriously annoying....

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Jurily]

It definitely feels faster than the other major browsers, though they're all pretty good nowadays.

It uses native widgets. You hear me, Chrome and Firefox?!

Re:Phenomenal browser

[rishistar]

I totally agree with this - in fact I started using Opera at version 5 and even paid for it. The BIG feature that made it brilliant above the competition in the year 2000 was the fact that with a single key press image downloads could be turned off, which really really helped when using the Caribbean dial up connection I had to use at the time.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[sznupi]

...It definitely feels faster than the other major browsers...

Especially since it remains fully responsive with much bigger number of open tabs than other browsers. So...you just open interesting pages in new tabs by middleclick where they load without locking the UI (Opera is quite multithreaded AFAIK) and wait, ready, for you (yeah, in that light I'm not that interested in Opera Turbo feature...perhaps when I'll be on 3G)

Plus it has several properly implemented ways of navigating said large number of tabs tabs (you don't have scroll tabbar or "window" menu, sidebar has treeview, and..."hold down RMB and, without releasing, move scrollwheel"), and also full keyboard navigation.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Shoe Puppet]

It uses native widgets. You hear me, Chrome and Firefox?!

No, it uses Qt.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[richlv]

at home i'm using crappy gprs connection (no edge, no thing), which isn't even running at full plain gprs speed.
web is only somewhat usable with opera.
i have default set to use cached images only. if i come to an image i'd like to see, i can either right click and load it, or enable images temporarily (there's no need to refresh the page, opera just downloads the images). then i switch back to cached mode, and downloaded images are nicely used from that point on whenever i visit the same page :)

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Abcd1234]

You mean like the native widgets Firefox supports as of version 3?

Re:Phenomenal browser

[diskis]

Opera widgets == Firefox extensions.
Refer to Qt as a toolkit and not as a widget set to lessen the confusion :)

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook constantly introduces new compatibility problems to Opera where there were none before, yet they're listed as a mirror when you download Opera. Weird.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[sznupi]

Opera uses Qt practically only for functionalities like file selector in Linux version. It really uses its own UI toolkit.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[mcvos]

Opera isn't really ahead of the curve anymore, but for a long time it was the only browser that could handle my browsing habits.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Name me a worthwhile site that doesn't render correctly.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Bert64]

So opera forced other browsers to keep up, and those browsers forced opera to improve too...
No competition = stagnation = IE6...

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Racemaniac]

it may not occur to you, but there's plenty more than just correct rendering.
on facebook lots of interactive things suddenly stopped working, online banking scripts don't work, etc....
and i have seen sites that don't render perfectly, like the website of a pharmaceutical company my sister works at. when she asked to the people maintaining the site why it didn't render correctly on opera, they said opera's share was too small to be bothered with to make it work perfectly.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[mobby_6kl]

Give the Opera 10 Turbo mode a try. This is basically exactly what it's been made for. I tested it on my 2mbps connection, but it (at least in the alpha) showed the exact savings in traffic it made. On average, I'd say you could expect 50-60%* less data transferred for a given page, though of course this depends on the content.

*This is very rough and IIRC, of course

Re:Phenomenal browser

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

[T]he other major browsers [are] all pretty good nowadays.

Largely because they've copied features originally introduced in Opera.

One of my complaints about Opera is that the reverse does not seem to be true often enough. Firefox eventually copies most of the useful features of Opera. Opera never gets around to copying the useful features of other browsers. E.g. it still doesn't allow me to resize text fields.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[twidarkling]

There's a userjs for that.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[harryandthehenderson]

Opera is quite multithreaded AFAIK

And so is Chrome, Firefox and IE7 and 8.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[sznupi]

Chrome and IE8 are multiprocess, don't know about IE7.

Firefox OTOH...does practically everything in one thread.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera is still very much ahead of the curve. It has an integrated email/RSS client, content (ad) blocker, user scripting, an IRC client, a Bittorrent client, a real widget engine, browser synchronization (via Opera Link), mouse gestures, voice recognition and face gestures built in. It sounds like it would be bloated having so many features, but it's not at all. Opera is smaller than the other major browsers, fast and stable.

I was a Netscape and then Firefox user for years, only having briefly used Opera back when it was a new browser. A few months ago I grew tired of the long running memory hole(s) and resource hogging of Firefox, so I installed Opera for another try. I am very happy that I did and will never go back to using Firefox.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[harryandthehenderson]

Chrome and IE8 are multiprocess, don't know about IE7.

IE7 is multiprocess.

Firefox OTOH...does practically everything in one thread.

Your knowledge of Firefox is pretty outdated since it's used multiple processes for tabs for ages now.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[sznupi]

Your knowledge of Firefox seems to be based on announcements that they're entertaining the thought of multithread/multiprocess model, tinkering with it a bit and may eventually implement it sometime in the future. (srsly, there was even quite recent /. thread about it...)

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Wild Bill TX]

Facebook's new brokenness in Opera has been driving me insane. You can join the discussion on it and bug report here: http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=34783

It's fairly absurd, really. The push that broke things did not seem to introduce any visible changes to the site, only internal changes that don't work in Opera. The errors also affect Facebook Connect, so every site on the Internet using Facebook connect suddenly no longer works in Opera.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[ceka]

It definitely feels faster than the other major browsers

I have the opposite experience: It feels slow for me.

I tried Opera just yesterday after the launch the beta. And reaction time for scrolling the window feels slow, at least considerably slower than FF.

When I scroll the slashdot page up/down in Firefox it feels instantaneous. In Opera I first see the scrollbar move then there is a half-a-second delay before the rest of the page moves.

Does anyone else notice similar behavior?

Re:Phenomenal browser

[AaxelB]

You missed my favorite Opera feature, which for some reason nobody ever mentions and I try to bring up whenever it's relevant: full-text history search in the address bar. It's like Firefox's awesome bar but actually awesome and incredibly useful (e.g. finding a recipe I looked at two weeks ago by typing a few ingredients).

The searching can slow things down a bit, so it's best on an excessively-built machine. On my desktop I took the extra step of putting the cache in a tmpfs partition (kinda like this) and set it to remember the max of 50000 pages, and it runs as smoothly as a baby's bottom (sorry, that simile turned out grosser than I intended).

Re:Phenomenal browser

[amicusNYCL]

besides obvious things like online banking, and microsoft junk,

Microsoft, probably more than anyone else, has actually gotten their act together with regard to Opera. It used to be that they were actually delivering Opera a separate stylesheet to manually move everything off the page and mess up the margins, but now I can even use the MSDN articles just fine with Opera. I certainly don't miss an opportunity to rub my Opera user agent string all over their logs.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[amicusNYCL]

Chrome and IE8 are multiprocess, don't know about IE7.

Firefox OTOH...does practically everything in one thread.

While I agree that Opera is a lot more responsive than other browsers (even Chrome, which still takes its sweet time re-rendering things when I come back to it after a while), I do only notice a single opera.exe in my Win task manager, although it lists that it has 40 threads running (for 13 tabs). It says Firefox has 14 threads for its 2 tabs, while Chrome has 3 processes and a total of 18 threads for 2 tabs.

Opera now shows 44 threads. OK, 41. Apparently that changes quite a bit. 43!

Re:Phenomenal browser

[brentonboy]

send complaining emails to the webmaster.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Omestes]

t has an integrated email/RSS client, content (ad) blocker, user scripting, an IRC client, a Bittorrent client, a real widget engine, browser synchronization (via Opera Link), mouse gestures, voice recognition and face gestures built in.

Outside of ad blocking, none of this sounds essential, much less useful to me. It does sound a lot like bloat. But then I'm of the anti-jack-of-all-trades school. The Opera torrent client, for example, isn't as fast or useful as stand alone options, so why would I use it, when I can just have my torrent client pop open when needed? It does a better job, and doesn't use any resources whatsoever until I actually NEED it. Same thing with mail clients, IRC clients, and RSS readers (though I can see a use for integrated RSS, though I just use Google Reader).

I prefer the Firefox model. Out of the proverbial box it's only good for one thing, and one thing only; browsing the web. But its extensible to do whatever I want, or I can just keep it how it is. With Firefox I could add any of those features, if I had a need for them. Or not.

That said, I find browser fan-boys to be much sillier (not in the good way) than OS fan boys, or *nix editor fan boys. Its odd how fanatical Opera folk can be every time there is an article on it her. They seem worse than the other fan boys since they are completely incapable, it seems, of finding ANY fault whatsoever with Opera. They also talk about Opera like its the Jesus Christ of the browser kingdom.

I like Opera, I'd use it over Chrome, and obviously over IE. I can't quantify why I prefer it over Chrome though. I use Firefox though, I've been using Firefox since Phoenix point-something-alpha, so I'm used to it. That's the main reason I prefer it, to be honest, I've grown accustomed to its way of doing things. I've also become addicted to extensions, and adblock+ has become my killer app, once Opera or Chrome becomes as good at blocking as that one extension (with easylist), I'll probably hop over. Well maybe not to Chrome, its GUI kind of sucks. Though it will be a hard transition, because Firefox and IE are the only browsers that hold to OS specific GUI conventions on Windows, at least (it sucks on OS X still, though not as bad as it used to). Opera is nasty since its arrogant, and insists on doing things its own way, and having its own look, which annoys me.

I never had a problem with the infamous (and somewhat mythic) Firefox memory hole (except for a few point releases on OS X). Yes, Firefox is heavier, but I don't notice it with my appearently obscene amounts of ram. I say appearently, since judging from the conversations of memory use, everyone on Slashdot only has 512k still. Yes, Chrome/Opera handles Java better and might be a bit more zippy, but were still taking about a few hundred ms of difference (especially with the firefox 3.5 beta), so I honestly don't even notice it. Opera, due to the way it visually loads pages actually seems slower to me, for some reason.

This all is my subjective opinion. You can disagree, and thats fine, but ultimately it doesn't matter. People use what fits them, and because its what their used to, thats fine as well. Its just a bloody browser, they all do the same thing, and roughly just as well.

But then again people who pick the underdog are generally more fully emotionally engaged in their choices.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[BikeHelmet]

It's worth noting that pre-Opera9, most of those site glitches were Opera related.

element.style.backgroundColor = '#ffff80';

Works fine in just about every browser. Works in FF(all), IE(all), Opera(9), Google Chrome, and probably Safari. You can use it on body elements to create crazy funky background colour shifting, and also use it for fading.

Opera 8 needs this:

element.style.bgColor = '#ffff80';

Some properties also can't be set without calling setAttribute. Ex:

element.setAttribute('bgcolor', '#ffff80');

I haven't come across any such stupidity in Opera 9, so those sites are probably broken because they deviate from the standard. People criticize Firefox for taking a long time to implement features, but it's had great compatibility from the start. Opera only just recently acquired that.

Just pointing out that Opera is neither a bad browser nor the best one. Lots of people above are either worshipping it or slamming it. It's just another one, which prioritizes security and new features over compatibility. As a contrast, Google Chrome prioritizes security and simplicity.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Mex]

This is true, I have 30 tabs open in my Opera and they are all immediately responsive, including the ones with video. My only problem is that sometimes I load a couple of videos and I forget which tab is playing them so I spend a few seconds trying to shut down 3 video streams or something.

Best browser ever.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[sznupi]

I believe there are Greasemonkey (so also probably UserJS for Opera) scripts that require you to manualy initiate playback (when opened in background tab, video simply pauses at the beginning and buffers the content)

Or perhaps remembering that hold down RMB and move scrollwheel tab list shows recently visited tabs at the beginning and last/never visited at the end would be enough?...

BTW...30? That's nothing, try 300 sometimes ;p (yeah, it does slow down eventually...but it seems that RAM, which Opera uses wisely anyway, is almost the only limit)

Re:Phenomenal browser

[mdwh2]

Outside of ad blocking, none of this sounds essential, much less useful to me. It does sound a lot like bloat.

Opera 9.61 - 5.4MB
Firefox 3 - 7MB

I prefer the Firefox model.

Who cares how many features there are that you don't use, when the resultant file size is still less bloated?

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Anonymous Coward]

On my Fedora 10 x86_64, Opera 9 crashes more often than Firefox + Adobe labs alpha refresh Flash when running lots of open tabs & windows. Maybe Opera 10 will be better.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[zyrorl]

i've been able to resize textareas without problems?

Re:Phenomenal browser

[louiswins]

Outside of ad blocking, none of this sounds essential, much less useful to me. It does sound a lot like bloat. But then I'm of the anti-jack-of-all-trades school. The Opera torrent client, for example, isn't as fast or useful as stand alone options, so why would I use it, when I can just have my torrent client pop open when needed? It does a better job, and doesn't use any resources whatsoever until I actually NEED it. Same thing with mail clients, IRC clients, and RSS readers (though I can see a use for integrated RSS, though I just use Google Reader).

I prefer the Firefox model. Out of the proverbial box it's only good for one thing, and one thing only; browsing the web. But its extensible to do whatever I want, or I can just keep it how it is. With Firefox I could add any of those features, if I had a need for them. Or not.

Normally, I'd agree with you on the jack-of-all-trades thing, but I think Opera pulls it off. I enjoy having my mail and feed reader integrated into my browser; it keeps my tabs clear of junk and backs up offline, but doesn't mean having an additional program running in the background. I have rtorrent and irssi running in screen on my server, so I don't use the IRC or bittorrent features, but if I just want to download a small torrent straight to my desktop I like having the client. The browser synchronization was excellent when I used multiple machines, although I mostly just use my laptop now so it's not crucial. Same with mouse gestures: when I used an actual mouse, they were essential, but again, laptop. I'd agree that the widgets are basically useless, and I wonder... does the GP realize that face recognition was an April Fools' joke? My main point is that if Opera felt bloated with all these little-used features, I would agree that they should be removed, but it still feels quicker and lighter than Firefox.

Maybe I've just been unlucky, but Firefox, even in its basic installation has always felt sloooow on my machine - not the javascript or rendering, but the UI itself (3 gigs of RAM, so that's not the problem). Once I add extensions for some the functionality I've become used to with Opera, it's just crawling. Also, even with extensions, there are still some interface adjustments that I use constantly that just aren't possible in Firefox (e.g. single-key shortcuts for back/forward and switching tabs). While I'll admit that there are some Firefox extensions I'd love in opera, such as GPG integration with mail, in my opinion, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.

I use Firefox though, I've been using Firefox since Phoenix point-something-alpha, so I'm used to it. That's the main reason I prefer it, to be honest, I've grown accustomed to its way of doing things. I've also become addicted to extensions, and adblock+ has become my killer app

That's legit. My last two paragraphs notwithstanding, habit is probably half the reason I stay with Opera. Adblock+ and easylist are also undeniably better than opera's built-in adblocking, although I've found that on about 95% of the new sites I visit the ads are already gone and if not I can spend 10 seconds blocking them, and there gone for any subsequent visits (and on pages with the same ad provider). There are probably easylist equivalents for the content-blocking file Opera uses, but it's not worth the trouble to me.

Firefox and IE are the only browsers that hold to OS specific GUI conventions on Windows, at least (it sucks on OS X still, though not as bad as it used to). Opera is nasty since its arrogant, and insists on doing things its own way, and having its own look, which annoys me.

I'd agree with you here. I can't stand Opera's default theme, or couldn't when I first started using it at about 9.0. Luckily I've found a theme that I like (DTA, based on Tango icons) which has remained compatible with all the updates so far. Ironically, my theme's not perfect with this new beta as opposed to the 10 alphas, but since it's only a light blue instead of cream background on the sidebar it doesn't bother me.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[adolf]

Great. More text like "See Amy throatfucked by this HUGE BLACK COCK!!!!!" when I try to enter a URL in front of a client.

Please, whether it's your favorite feature or not, tell me that there's a way to turn it off in Opera. (And, no, "stop looking at angry porn" isn't an option -- I'm not blind yet.)

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Omestes]

Thanks for not flaming me.

Maybe I've just been unlucky, but Firefox, even in its basic installation has always felt sloooow on my machine - not the javascript or rendering, but the UI itself (3 gigs of RAM, so that's not the problem). Once I add extensions for some the functionality I've become used to with Opera, it's just crawling. Also, even with extensions, there are still some interface adjustments that I use constantly that just aren't possible in Firefox (e.g. single-key shortcuts for back/forward and switching tabs). While I'll admit that there are some Firefox extensions I'd love in opera, such as GPG integration with mail, in my opinion, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.

Truth be told, sometimes I think I'm just lucky. A lot of people have problems with Firefox, especially pre-3.0. As stated, it REALLY sucked on a Mac for some reason, and still did as of the 3.0 beta (stopped using the Mac before 3.0 final, so who knows). The Mac, oddly is the only place I've found the dreaded memory hole, as well, with it soaring to 1.2GB at times. Oddly, this only happened on an Intel Mac, and not my old iBook, even for the same release.

Though it ran great on my girlfriends Macs (both PPC and Intel) of roughly the same specs, just fine.

My copy on of 3.5b on Ubuntu also sucks pretty bad right now, but not nearly as bad as on the Mac. Which is odd since I'm using far less extentions than I am on my Windows box.

This, if you ask me is a weakness of Firefox. Admittedly, I never had a problem with Opera (I've tried every major release since it became free) on any OS I installed it on. If I had the same problems you say you've had, I'd probably hop over to something else, and learn to cope without adblock and the native look (in the end I prefer functionality over aesthetics, though aesthetics is a plus).

Firefox is very heavy for some strange reason. I'm not quite sure why, since it is pretty slim in features. I'm pretty sure it isn't Gecko either, since I seem to remember it being MUCH lighter in footprint a while ago.

At this rate it will be the bottom of the heap again, I fear. Which is kind of sad, since I feel invested in it. It being like my ugly open source child who I got to watch grow up into a slightly less ugly popular adolescent.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[jp10558]

You know, I'm generally very anti-jack of all trades, but I've noticed I've also been being won over by some apps, one of which is Opera, and the other is Comodo's Internet Security.

Why? Well, I used to keep mIRC on my PC for IRC needs, but three things happened:
1) I don't think I've used any power features in mIRC in years, ever since I stopped using it for filesharing.
2) I feel bad pirating something when I can do what I want with something legitamately free.
3) Why run an entire other program for my IRC when I just need to hop on some support chats? Why keep another app updated etc...

Oh, and I've come to like the way Opera's IRC chat looks vs mIRC. So I never had a need to go looking elsewhere for IRC goodness.

For RSS - I still don't really understand it, but for the 4 feeds I've found useful (one being Opera's own desktop blog), I don't see the need for another app either. It'd be like one of those third party bookmark apps, fine, more powerful, but . . . why?

Really, for the above, it's the same as why I don't run a separate FTP client for downloads, but use Opera's built in downloader.

Now, e-mail, and widgets, I never really got into with Opera. I tried a while ago, but they never clicked, and no LDAP lookup broke it for me at work anyway.

User Scripting and Ad Blocking look like they might be my forced migration path away from Proxomitron, unless I can ever get myself happy with privoxy.

The only thing I disagree with is:
they all do the same thing, and roughly just as well.

I really disagree with this, and here's why. Depending on what you're looking for, Opera often doesn't run that webapp as well as Firefox or IE. On the other hand, for researching / working with LOTS of webpages for days on end, I just cannot get IE or Firefox to work as well as Opera.

Now, if you mean "display google.com" as doing the same thing, then, yes they do. But I constantly get tripped up by lack of mouse guestures in Firefox, or the tab behavior in Firefox. I can't speak to IE after 6, but IE6 is practically unusable for me for lack of browser functionality. And it's slow.

So if I'm doing research on the web, the different browsers don't do the same thing. I have also heard that Firefox has Firebug, Opera has DragonFly and IE has f**k all for page debugging. I AM SURE those are NOT the same. So you really have to limit what you have your browser doing to say they do the same thing. But it is going to be personal methods of working as to which fits the user better.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[jp10558]

Oh, IDK. Opera finally is copying the spellcheck as you type. They've copied the close button on the tab, they've copied the keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-t) They're adding in HTML compose in the e-mail client. They finally added in a GUI Ad-blocker which back years ago was similar to AdBlock.(before the plus I think). They copied tabs from netcaptor... Tumbnail tabs from Omniweb... They just don't copy everything, or all at once.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[jp10558]

It is quite interesting that people who use other browsers are constantly amazed by the number of tabs I have open all the time. That is probably one of the big reasons I keep using Opera, I'm just used to having one continual session of tabs open... And I usually have at least 40 open at any given time. I don't doubt that the other browsers could have that many tabs open, but in Firefox anyway, there just doesn't seem to be any way to handle that many tabs (no window menu or windows panel for instance)...

Re:Phenomenal browser

[mcvos]

Opera is still very much ahead of the curve. It has an integrated email/RSS client,

I don't want email in my browser, and which browser doesn't have an integrated RSS reader nowadays?

content (ad) blocker, user scripting, an IRC client, a Bittorrent client,

That was once ahead of the curve, but now it's standard.

a real widget engine,

I'm not familiar with it (despite the fact that I'm an Opera user), but it sounds similar to Fluid. But that wouldn't be integrated in the browser, but a seperate app that uses the same rendering engine.

browser synchronization (via Opera Link), mouse gestures, voice recognition and face gestures built in.

Who the hell uses that stuff? They've had mouse gestures for ages, but it's not really what I'm looking for in a browser.

I'm not at all saying that Opera is bad. I consider it at the same level as Firefox and Chrome. But it used to be ahead of the game, and now other players have caught up.

Or maybe Opera really is doing cool new interesting stuff that I'll someday realise I've needed all along, and I just need to take a better look at it. But at the moment, Opera just doesn't strike me as superior to the competition anymore, where it once did. Although it's still my browser of choice for home use.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[AaxelB]

'Course you can turn it off. You can even have it do the full-text index but not show any suggestions while typing addresses (it's searchable through an option in the menu).

It's probably a good idea, though, to keep the naughty browsing to a separate browser altogether (yay firefox!).

Re:Phenomenal browser

[Anonymous Coward]

> This all is my subjective opinion. You can disagree, and thats fine, but ultimately it doesn't matter.

Thank you for writing this very long post that doesn't matter. I love it when people rant on about stuff that doesn't matter. Please write more excessively lenghty articles in which you state how stupid browser fanboys are while putting forth your browser comparison thesis.

Oh you people on the internet, you make me so angry!

Re:Phenomenal browser

[adolf]

But Opera does a better job of scaling than Firefox does, which makes it my preferential porn browser.

*sigh*

Re:Phenomenal browser

[hkmwbz]

It's just another one, which prioritizes security and new features over compatibility.

That's just plain nonsense. If you had actually read their compatibility info and blogs, you would have know that they spend massive amounts of resources on compatibility. Opera was designed from the ground up to be as compatible as possible, and they actively patch sites that break or sniff out Opera using useragent string spoofing, browser.js patching, etc., in addition to fixing compatibility bugs in Opera.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[hkmwbz]

They've copied the close button on the tab

Didn't Opera do that first?

They copied tabs from netcaptor...

Doubt it. I doubt they even knew about Netcaptor, and Opera had MDI agest before anyone else.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[hkmwbz]

I don't want email in my browser

Many do, though, and only Opera has that.

That was once ahead of the curve, but now it's standard.

What other browsers have a chat and BT client built in?

But that wouldn't be integrated in the browser, but a seperate app that uses the same rendering engine.

Why wouldn't something that uses browser technologies/web standards be supported by a browser?

Who the hell uses that stuff?

Lots of people apparently.

They've had mouse gestures for ages, but it's not really what I'm looking for in a browser.

And yet it is one of the most useful features in Opera.

But it used to be ahead of the game, and now other players have caught up.

Not really. No one else has Opera's tight integration of multiple useful features without the bloat. And it's still faster on real sites, and the UI more responsive than other browsers, at least with 20-30+ tabs open.

Re:Phenomenal browser

[mcvos]

I don't want email in my browser

Many do, though, and only Opera has that.

Didn't the (pre-firefox) Mozilla browser have that too? And Netscape? I don't really miss it now that most browsers have dropped it. Email is important enough to have a specialised application for it. I don't see the benefit of mixing it in a single monolithic app.

That was once ahead of the curve, but now it's standard.

What other browsers have a chat and BT client built in?

Chat is usually done by websites rather than browsers. There's too many different chat programs to support them all in a single browser, if you ask me. BT support is a really good idea, though (and I've used a lot in the past with Opera).

No one else has Opera's tight integration of multiple useful features without the bloat. And it's still faster on real sites, and the UI more responsive than other browsers, at least with 20-30+ tabs open.

Now that you mention it, lately I've been rather annoyed by Opera's responsiveness. Sometimes it simply refuses to load a page when I click a link, and I have to select "Open" from the right-click menu to get it to work.

But I suspect it's because I've got closer to 50 windows open and I'm on a Mac (which is crap with memory). Even so, Opera 5/6 worked fine when I had a 128MB Pentium II.

Squid + Gzip

[Albanach]

Given this is server side technology, I presume it's not part of the opera web browser. Sounds like they're using a proxy server with gzip added. There's a beta stage patch for squid to allow you to do that yourself http://devel.squid-cache.org/projects.html#gzip

Re:Squid + Gzip

[sznupi]

They're definitely doing more, for example image recompression (perhaps using better at low quality setting format than jpeg, like jpeg2000, for example?)

Re:Squid + Gzip

[TheP4st]

More specifically what it does is resizing images and disables a lot of plugin content that otherwise would slow the page loading to a crawl on a slow connections. This of course is done on a proxy server as you correctly assumed. Granted you end up with somewhat pixelated images and plugin content that you have to "activate" by clicking. While this is not of much interest to most of us here there is also a very big share of people that certainly can benefit from it.

Re:Squid + Gzip

[Anonymous Coward]

So, porn is faster but more blurry and blocky?

Re:Squid + Gzip

[sznupi]

Well, if they're using different, better, image compression format like jpeg2000 than perhaps more blurry, but not more blocky ;p

But essentially - yeah.

Remember that you can always turn off Turbo feature with one click if you don't see enough details...

Re:Squid + Gzip

[Burdell]

This is nothing new; it sounds like the same thing the "download accelerators" have been doing for years. My ISP has been offering Propel for almost 5 years. The only difference is that now a browser vendor gets to collect stats about your web use.

Re:Squid + Gzip

[IBBoard]

Yeah, from one of their pages it is basically a proxy server with added compression (not just GZip since a lot of servers can deflate content anyway).

Since it isn't part of the Opera browser but is actually an Opera-run server, I wonder how long it'll take for someone to write a Firefox extension that piggy-backs on to those servers and gets the speed increase itself? :D

Re:Squid + Gzip

[commodore64_love]

No need to turn-off Turbo. If there's a pixelated bikini babe you want to see more clearly, you can simply right-click on the image, select "reload", and it will download without compression so you see curves instead of square boobies. ;-)

Re:Squid + Gzip

[sznupi]

"Bikini"? Now I'm confused.

Re:Squid + Gzip

[commodore64_love]

If you're using Opera Turbo while visiting candidbeach.com, and the images are severely compressed, you can click on each individual picture, select "reload", and the image will be downloaded in full quality.

Verstehen Sie?

Re:Squid + Gzip

[sznupi]

Ich verstehe nicht, warum brauchen wir einen Bikini?

Re:Squid + Gzip

[moon3]

They're definitely doing more

Surely, like inject their own ads and replace the original from the sites. Slashdot ads strangely changed immediately I used the 'turbo' mode. I hope I am mistaken.

Re:Squid + Gzip

[sznupi]

That might as well be because Slashdot sees you as beeing from another country/region?

I doubt Opera would do that - they don't tend to do things which would provoke sites into introducing incompatibilities with them; for example, while Opera does have Adblock, the visible part of its funcionality is quite manual.

Re:Squid + Gzip

[treeves]

Wir brauchen kein Bikinis, aber die Mädchen brauchen Bikinis. Einige Mädchen brauchen einteilig Badeanzuge. Das war nicht komisch.

Re:Squid + Gzip

[moon3]

You are probably right, I do not use Adblock, just speculating whether they would do such a thing as replacing ads, considering they pay for the 'turbo' proxies.

Re:Squid + Gzip

[sznupi]

I think they have a plan of financing them from OEM/telecom deals (for including Opera Turbo feature in their portable products)

Re:Squid + Gzip

[jp10558]

Well, that and you don't have to pay extra for it (yet).

Re:Squid + Gzip

[commodore64_love]

In my world "die Mädchen" need no bikinis. For that matter, the men don't need them either. Go naturalism!

Re:Squid + Gzip

[treeves]

der Spass  --------->   (whooosh)

         O
       --|--
         |
        / \
        Sie

(nur Witze machen)

Well that's BS

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

This outperforms every browser on the planet, especially over dialup or flaky wifi. As for the Acid3 test, it passes provided you squint hard enough.

I don't browse the web

[jsnipy]

"I don't browse the web often, but when I do I ... prefer to use Opera" -the most interesting man

Re:I don't browse the web

[Gothmolly]

Stay browsy, my friends.

Now test HTTPS performance

[El_Muerte_TDS]

How well does Opera Turbo work with sites that use secure connections?

Re:Now test HTTPS performance

[alta]

They say in their specs they do NOT compress https at all.
Those are encrypted pages you're requesting, which jumbles up the data. Jumbled data does NOT compress well at all. Plus, they're 'secure.' You don't want someone else handling your secure files.

Re:Now test HTTPS performance

[TheP4st]

It don't, so https traffic will not be loaded through the proxy instead it will be loaded in the normal way. The same goes for intranet pages.

Re:Now test HTTPS performance

[maztuhblastah]

Well that didn't stop them from intercepting HTTPS with Opera Mini. Yes, they actually do something akin to a MITM attack -- your phone will connect to their server via HTTPS, and their server connects to the remote site via HTTPS. Seems kinda... well... sketchy to me.

Re:Now test HTTPS performance

[bk2204]

It's actually possible to use compression as part of TLS; the data will be compressed before they are encrypted (since, as you point out, it would be pointless to do it afterward). I don't know how many servers support it, but it's possible to do.

Re:Now test HTTPS performance

[BtEO]

Yes, this was continually explained to people asking for https support in Opera Mini, but still it kept being requested. In the end implementing it seemed like the better choice, though they still explicitly recommend against using Opera Mini for secure transactions on their Opera Mini FAQ.

Re:Now test HTTPS performance

[hkmwbz]

your phone will connect to their server via HTTPS, and their server connects to the remote site via HTTPS. Seems kinda... well... sketchy to me.

Are you drunk or something? Opera Mini is a "thin client". Opera Mini doesn't do any page processing on its own. How on earth are they going to support HTTPS without going through the servers exactly? There is nothing "sketchy" about it. Unless you are completely retarded. It's just the fact that Opera Mini is just a thin client and the page rendering takes place on the server.

In Opera Turbo, they don't allow compression (going through their servers) for HTTPS sites at all. So shove it with your paranoid nonsense.

Does not work with Fortigate web interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera does not work with the Fortigate Firewall's web interface which made me switch to FF. I had logged a bug when 9.x came out. Tried the 10 and it still does not.

Re:Does not work with Fortigate web interface

[TheCRAIGGERS]

I don't use Opera myself, but as far as I'm concerned, if Opera passes ACID, the problem is with your firewall's web interface. It's not Opera's fault your software is non compliant.

Re:Does not work with Fortigate web interface

[sed quid in infernos]

Fault is essentially irrelevant to anyone who has already purchased this firewall.

Re:Does not work with Fortigate web interface

[TheP4st]

Tried the 10 and it still does not.

Well, duh.. it's not like a bug preventing the Web interface on x brand of corporate firewall to display is going to get high priority. Besides if the web interface fails I rather blame the coding of the interface then the browser, to write html that works in all modern browsers is significantly easier than to write a rendering engine that interprets fugly IE6 hacks "correctly"

Re:Does not work with Fortigate web interface

[parlancex]

It may be irrelevant to the discussion of which browser best suits that organization's needs, but it isn't irrelevant to the discussion of which browser is best period.

Re:Does not work with Fortigate web interface

[parlancex]

Oh, and furthermore we use Fortigate where I work and I'm using Opera there right now just fine.

Re:Does not work with Fortigate web interface

[TheCRAIGGERS]

Not really. My point was that posting a bug about it on Opera's site was the wrong move. The problem is (likely) with the web interface, not the browser. Call up customer support for the firewall and complain that the interface doesn't work with your browser.

Of course, they will have a canned "our product is only compatible with IE" response, but that is an entirely different problem.

Re:Does not work with Fortigate web interface

[PitaBred]

Gotta hate wasting good money on a shitty product, eh? Caveat emptor.

Re:Does not work with Fortigate web interface

[pbhj]

Fault is essentially irrelevant to anyone who has already purchased this firewall.

Unless they want to get the fault fixed and so need to know who to contact?

Contact Fortigate and tell them their firewall is broken as it prevents Opera from working. If you contact Opera they'll probably say their browser works fine and tell you the way to fix it is to use a different firewall - mind you Fortigate may say something similar!

Turbo looks buggy

[paziek]

I'm using it since yesterday, and I had to disable Turbo mode, since all images were looking like crap, flash sometimes didn't work, some sites never finished loading (stopped at for example 18 element of out 25).
But I guess that for dial-up (people still use that? @_@) or crappy Wi-Fi it might be good.

Re:Turbo looks buggy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using it since yesterday, and I had to disable Turbo mode, since all images were looking like crap, flash sometimes didn't work, some sites never finished loading (stopped at for example 18 element of out 25).
But I guess that for dial-up (people still use that? @_@) or crappy Wi-Fi it might be good.

Umm, perhaps you should take a look at what Turbo's intended usage is for.

Re:Turbo looks buggy

[morgan_greywolf]

I'm using it since yesterday, and I had to disable Turbo mode,

I, too, had to disable Turbo mode. I found that I couldn't play some games with it enabled.

But, damn, 12 Mhz is FAST!

Re:Turbo looks buggy

[eulernet]

If you want to browse anonymously, Opera+Tor gives OperaTor http://archetwist.com/opera/operator

You'll be able to experience dial-up nowadays.

OperaTor is super slow, mostly because Tor is slow, and also because ads are frequently bigger than the pages themselves.

Re:Turbo looks buggy

[lhoguin]

All images look like crap because of the recompression. I can only assume that they will fine-tune the compression during the beta stage based on people's input. I didn't try it on flash but it's understandable that there might be a few problems there. While the technology has been widely tested for mobile browsers (Opera Mini), it hasn't for desktop usage yet. For everything that doesn't work on Opera Mini (like Flash) problems are to be expected.

Now here's the interesting part, and I really wish they will allow this. Take your favorite heavy website (Slashdot for example). Enable Turbo and it'll load pages 2 to 3 times faster. That's pretty nice considering how long it can take to load some of the pages sometimes. You don't really lose anything from the compression, Slashdot is 99% text. So having Turbo enabled on that kind of site would be a big improvement, even on a desktop with DSL. Unfortunately they don't allow per-site settings yet, so you can't enable Turbo only on Slashdot. But if they add per-site configuration, then all those and only those annoyingly slow and heavy websites would take 2 to 3 times less time to load for Opera users. I certainly hope they will.

Re:Turbo looks buggy

[parlancex]

I'm willing to bet they're probably still working kinks out with their proxy server's capacity due to high initial demand on the feature.

Re:Turbo looks buggy

[commodore64_love]

The purpose is for people like me who spend a lot of evenings stuck in Motels with nothing but a dialup connection (the phone). I don't mind if the images look distorted, since it's DSL-like speed that I want, not beauty.

Re:Turbo looks buggy

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there is a way to define how much compression you want..

Re:Turbo looks buggy

[Anonymous Coward]

People who want faster browsing? Seriously, it's not like there's anything magic about dial-up or crappy wifi that would go beyond "less bandwidth" or "higher latency", so if you already have either with your broadband connection, for whatever reason...

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's more of an example of an application nobody uses and that Chrome has already surpassed. They should just work on something else.

That's wonderful...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and as soon as Opera has anything that compares to NoScript, I'll be all over it!

Unfortunately, their solution of "F12 then allow certain types of content" isn't NEARLY as good, because you can't allow scripts granularly -by origin- for each page. The F12 solution is "all or nothing" in comparison, which I am not willing to live with having used NoScript for years.

Re:That's wonderful...

[__aatgod8309]

That's curious; I use Opera over FF because NoScript is too hard to configure for a site compared to Opera's equivalent, for my taste at least.

Re:That's wonderful...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

you can't allow scripts granularly -by origin- for each page.

I find blocking scripts by origin globally to be sufficent. If I don't want your crappy ad scripts on one page, why would I want it on another? That, combined with Opera's block scripts on the site I'm looknig at, combine nicely.

Re:That's wonderful...

[monkeybutter]

If F12 isn't doing it for you, try right-clicking on a page and editing site preferences.

Or, you could try blocking content - if you cannot select the elements you want to block on the page itself, you can always edit the list manually.

Re:That's wonderful...

[twidarkling]

Uh, you can just go Preferences --> Advanced --> Content, and uncheck javascript, flash, plugins, etc. That should stop just about everything, no? And then you can re-enable it on a site-by-site preference. Takes about 15 seconds to re-enable a site.

Re:That's wonderful...

[commodore64_love]

Right-click, noscript, allow slashdot.com -or- allow all. What's so hard about that? :-| Perhaps you didn't have the proper setting which is "allow top level domains by default". I made the same mistake at first but now it's made Noscript much more friendly and unobtrusive.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Anonymous Coward]

>and that Chrome has already passed.

Fixed that for you.

Thing opera geeks read /.?

[alta]

http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/

Eh, maybe.

Re:Thing opera geeks read /.?

[kitzkar]

Sure they do! They even have their own little shortcut. Just type /. in the address bar and it leads to slashdot

Re:Thing opera geeks read /.?

[commodore64_love]

Oh snap! That is so cool. However that demo would have been much more effective if they visited an image-heavy webpage like playboy.com ;-) or if they want something more family-friendly, cnn.com. Those types of websites often take 2-3 minutes to load over a normal browser, but with image compression they only take 10 seconds.

Re:Thing opera geeks read /.?

[alta]

I tried using turbo mode last night during 'prime time'

All I got was "server overloaded"

Which makes me wonder, wihtout a subscription business model, how is a smallish company going to keep up farms of web proxys for the long term?

Turbo browsing?

[holiggan]

I love Opera and have been using it since version 3 or something :)

But about the "new" Turbo thingy... isn't this basically the kind of thing that those dial-up "accelerators" did? Like compressing pictures and stuff? Because when I activate Turbo on Opera, the quality on image files degrades quite a bit, so I don't know if this actually much diferent from those "accelerators" of old age :)

Re:Turbo browsing?

[raynet]

It basicly is the same thing, just that the accelerating and recompressing proxy is hosted by Opera and works even if your ISP doesn't offer similar service.

Re:Turbo browsing?

[commodore64_love]

The difference is that Opera's Turbo compression is free, whereas most dialup providers like Netzero or AOL charge an extra $5 for theirs.

Now I already have Netscape's Web Accelerator and they don't charge me anything, but that's a rarity not the norm.

Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[noidentity]

For some reason I thought Opera was a pay browser (or had ads or something making it not free-as-in-beer). Yesterday I happened to visit their page and apparently it's offered without charge for desktop platforms (and without source code, of course). Ironically, it's the only browser that still supports the older Mac OS X 10.3.9; Apple's own Safari hasn't for years, and Firefox 3.x doesn't either.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[Delkster]

For some reason I thought Opera was a pay browser (or had ads or something making it not free-as-in-beer).

It used to be that way years ago. You could either pay or watch ads. I think that was changed somewhere around version 8.x or so, though.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[imakemusic]

Opera has been free for the best part of a decade now. Before that it had an ad which you could pay to remove.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Irony has nothing to do with it. Please learn what the word actually means before it becomes the next Americanism of "done a 360" to change one's mind.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[IBBoard]

Camino still works on OS X 10.3.9. I've got the wife's old iBook and it's the best browser I can find. Not quite as good as Firefox, but most of the way there, plus it doesn't look ugly and out of place on not just one but all desktops!

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[kextyn]

Opera has only been ad free since 2005. Back when it had ads it was definately worth the $30 or whatever for the full version. Just look at the competition (or lack thereof) it had during those years. I started using it back in the v5 days and refuse to give it up.

There is one thing that bugs me about this article though. They say Firefox is more customizable. The main reason I couldn't get used to Firefox (this was back in v1&2, dunno about 3) was because I couldn't customize the UI to look like what I was accustomed to without using poor quality addons. As far as I can tell Opera has always been more customizable "out of the box" than Firefox.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[Anonymous Coward]

For a short period of time I was having to use Firefox at work, and I couldn't do something as simple as move the tabs to the bottom of the page. When I looked around online I got a lot of "Why on earth do you want the tabs at the bottom of the page?" and "You used to be able to go into such and such file and change such and such line, but that's not working for me with the newest version." Yeah, real customizable. I guess I could hunt through the addons, which I never did find one to put the tabs at the bottom, but when ever I open up a clean install of Opera I can instantly put it the way I want it.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[commodore64_love]

>>>it's the only browser that still supports the older Mac OS X 10.3.9

But not OS 10.2. Crud.

I see Windows Opera will work as far back as 1995. Nice.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[VGPowerlord]

For some reason I thought Opera was a pay browser (or had ads or something making it not free-as-in-beer).

It used to be that way years ago. You could either pay or watch ads. I think that was changed somewhere around version 8.x or so, though.

I think Opera ditched the ads in 8.5. Now they make money the same way Firefox does: through the Google search dropdown.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[PitaBred]

Really? It just doesn't look like what you're used to? You realize that something can't be better without being different, right? Give different a chance... it may grow on you.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[Delkster]

It's not just a matter of customising the UI layout or functionality such as behaviour of tabs. Opera has certainly been more customisable than Firefox out of the box in that sense, and might still be.

However, in my opinion the vast library of extensions boosts the customisability of Firefox ahead of Opera's; there's always only so much you can do with built-in configurability of the application, but with all the extensions available for Firefox the possibilities are huge.

Granted, there's an amount of effort involved, but in customising there always is.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[kextyn]

The tabs at the top is one of the things I just couldn't get used to in Firefox. There were some other issues with tab behaviour but I can't remember what it was now.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[Geirzinho]

Both Firefox and Opera lets you tune settings by going to the "about:config" page. On this page almost any setting can be twiddled, provided you know what and where.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[Omestes]

I think Opera ditched the ads in 8.5. Now they make money the same way Firefox does: through the Google search dropdown.

Their mobile market probably far surpasses what Google would pay them for a dropdown.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[noidentity]

Sorry, I misplaced the word. I meant to tie it to the fact that Apple's Safari is incompatible with older versions of their OS, while a third-party one is not. They broke compatibility a while back too, not just recently (and the old Safari, while fast, crashes consistently on way too many sites). I agree with you on the misuse of the word, but I don't think this is a misuse regarding Apple.

Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW

[noidentity]

Camino still works on OS X 10.3.9. I've got the wife's old iBook and it's the best browser I can find.

Thanks, it looks promising, as the latest release was just a couple of months ago. Two new, good browsers in two days, nice!

Firefox just has too many useful addons

[Octorian]

Yeah, so much of my web browsing today depends on a number of Firefox add-ons that simply JFW for a variety of things. Opera could be the greatest browser on the planet, but without AdBlock Plus (no, a manually configured host-filtering hack is not equivalent) or GreaseMonkey, or any other FF extensions I occasionally find use for (FxIF, del.icio.us, TwitterFox, , I simply can't adopt it seriously.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[kobaz]

I agree. If Opera had equivalents of Tab Mix Plus, Firebug, Liveheaders, Flashblock, and Adblock... I would switch.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[emocomputerjock]

I have to agree with this. I've been browsing for so long with NoScript and AdBlock that I can't go back. No one should have to endure purple monkeys and flashing balloon animations on their pages.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[Octorian]

I guess I spoke too soon on the GreaseMonkey bit:
How To : Greasemonkey in Opera

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[sznupi]

Mehhh...in every thread about Opera those misconceptions.

Adblock - http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/ that's basically the same list that Adblock addon uses. It certainly blocks everything just as well. And the functionality itself is built in, no messing around with plugins. According to my buddy who moved from FF to Opera, style file works slightly better at hiding empty spots. And, if something isn't blocked, you have a nice way of blocking this and similar elements through Opera UI.

GreaseMonkey - you do understand Opera pioneered also this functionality, right? Check UserJS (it is capable of running many GreaseMonkey scripts btw)

FxIF - built in. Didn't it ever occured to you to just right click on the frakking image and bring up properties?

del.icio.us, Twitter - something wrong with bookmarklets placed within one click, on navigation bar?

I guess the main problem of Opera is that people assume, because of beeing used to other apps, that there's now way it can pack so much in so little executable, so properly/speedy implemented.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to with Opera either. I haven't seen those in years now.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[moronoxyd]

If Opera had equivalents of [...] Flashblock, and Adblock... I would switch.

You may want to check out http://www.adsweep.org/ and http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46673.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[sznupi]

Adblock - built in (check this post http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1256745&cid=28208737 )

Firebug - built in.

Flashblock - built in.

Tab Mix Plus - sorta built in, similarly to the above, only more (of course other browsers won't copy functionalities from Opera in the same way as they are implemented in Opera) - it has sligthly different ways of navigating tabs, also no need for scrolling in menu listing tabs (no matter how many), also treeview in sidebar, and..."hold down RMB and move scrollwheel"

I haven't heard about Liveheaders funcionality though; I guess it could be done with UserJS.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[KDEWolf]

Yeah, so much of my web browsing today depends on a number of Firefox add-ons that simply JFW for a variety of things. Opera could be the greatest browser on the planet, but without AdBlock Plus (no, a manually configured host-filtering hack is not equivalent) or GreaseMonkey, or any other FF extensions I occasionally find use for (FxIF, del.icio.us, TwitterFox, , I simply can't adopt it seriously.

You do need to read some more /. hehe:
You just don't need addons, it's right here for you to use!

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[tnk1]

Actually, the main problem with Opera is compatibility with sites I use. It may or may not be Opera's fault, but it still means I have to open FFX or (shudder) IE to use them. If I have to open either of them to use one site, I almost would rather just use one of those.

People don't know about the add-ons/widgets and other features of Opera because they are called different things and people also assume they are FFX only. That's their fault, technically, but as you know, its not the consumer's job to change their mind about a product that works well for them.

On and BTW, I am posting this from Opera right now. It's too bad that it is having trouble with some of my sites I need to use for work, because I installed it in order to not have my browser take up 500MB of physical memory just to run a few tabs. In that regard, Opera is working much better than the gigantic memory hog that FFX has become.

I've installed and used Opera sporadically in the past. I've always wondered why it always ends up with such a small install base for a browser that actually works very well. I think they need better marketing (and to fix the compatibility problems).

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[Anonymous Coward]

Tab Mix Plus, Firebug, Liveheaders, Flashblock, and Adblock

GIYF.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[icebraining]

What about DownThemAll, NoScript, Brief and Vimperator? Maybe Opera can work for most people, but Firefox is still so much more adaptable...

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[sznupi]

The reason why some sites don't work well in Opera is that webdevs at your place still think in terms of browser monopoly, "we can just target IE", only they exchanged it for browser duopoly "we can just target IE and Gecko". I think it will improve though, with Webkit on the rise, which is similarly standards-compliant and nonstandards-intolerant to Opera. Yeah, a bit chicken and egg problem.

Once your part of the web becomes browser-agnostic, Opera will work great. Like it is here to a large degree; current stats:
  - Gecko 46.8%
  - IE 42.8%
  - Opera 8.4%
  - Webkit 2%

Even better in one neighbouring country, IMHO:
  - IE 41%
  - Opera 31.9%
  - Gecko 24.5%
  - Webkit 2.6%
And not because of much larger Opera usage; as you can see, they seem to go towards roughly equal usage share of all major engines (with Webkit/Chrome (no Macs here...) having also relatively more rapid uptake), of which I would be glad the most. Everybody could use the engine/browser they simply like more.

BTW, content-wise, my part of the web is rather poor so I usually browse through "IE & Gecko" dominated part...and it's already good IMHO (though that might have something to do with the kinds of sites I browse...)

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[parlancex]

Consider that with increased peformance ads no longer have any measurable perfect on your browsing anyway, or perhaps consider many other robust ad-blocking software packages that work directly at the socket level, blocking connections to black-listed ad-serving servers below the browser.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[sznupi]

Ehhh...

A variant of NoScript is built in, likewise for very comprehensive keyboard-only navigation (you can't expect that other browsers/extensions, to which you are used, will copy Opera functionality in exactly the same way)

Feedreader is built in.

DownThemAll is trivial to implement in UserJS; apart from that Opera can list all links on given page.

When will you see the pattern?

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[twidarkling]

DownThemAll is trivial to implement in UserJS; apart from that Opera can list all links on given page.

More than just list all links on a given page, you can do a search for specific links, including by extension. If you do ".jpg", you can then highlight them all, right click, and save them all to the default folder. Thus, you've downloaded them all.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[mdm-adph]

Just NoScript for me, thanks. Give me that on Chrome (or Opera!) and I'll start using them more.

However, I have a feeling NoScript's not going to be liked by Google...

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[sznupi]

And you think "see all links" view in Opera doesn't have filtering by given phrase (say, ".jpg") why, exactly?

Oh yeah, you haven't ever used it in more capacity than naked FF or IE.

(I seem to remember also specifically mentioning UserJS apart from "see all links"; hmmm...must be getting old)

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[twidarkling]

I believe you've misunderstood. I was SAYING that that's how the Opera view-all-links panel works. Way to misread and attack me. I was giving the next step in what you were talking about. You filter in the panel so you only have the pictures, and then you can download them all. No need for a plug-in or User JS.

Ugh.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, you realise both those extensions you mention come as standard in Opera...

It's called Content Blocking and UserJS in Opera world, and existed LONG before Mozilla got around to copying them....

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[sznupi]

Sorry, I seem to have cognitively interpreted the quote of mine that you included together with your post, it seemed to flow that way / talk about DownThemAll.

That, plus I'm at the moment slightly fed up with all the threads that go something like this:

"well, too bad Opera doesn't have this, this and this"
Yes it has...
"oh yeah? does it has this and that?"
[shakes head]uhmmm...yeah[/shakes head]

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[commodore64_love]

What about women who flash their breasts?
I like them ads. ;-)

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[tyrione]

Where are you getting those statistics? Seriously. They don't fly.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[sznupi]

They do in many european countries.

Like in those two:
http://www.en.ranking.pl/
http://www.en.ranking.com.ua/
(as you see you can check few more from the area)

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[freeridr]

It's the Firefox add ons that keep us from switching to Safari, Chrome or Opera. Little things like adding direct download links to the hypemachine, widening the gmail text box and removing adds, allowing google image search to go directly to the image rather than creating frames.....that level of customizability just isn't there yet in other browsers. The first will likely be Opera. The customizability really is incredible. My first install wasted aver an hour of exploration into the browser's abilities.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[amicusNYCL]

Headers can now be found in the new developer console.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[amicusNYCL]

How is it possible that inside every single Opera story on Slashdot, someone posts that they don't like Opera because it doesn't have something like NoScript, then they get corrected, then the next article they say the same thing?

Opera has always been able to block Javascript, globally or per-site. I'm going to explain how this is done, and I'm going to move pretty quick, so stay with me:

Step 1: press F-12
Step 2: click "Enable Javascript"

Let me know if you have any questions about that process, I understand it can be difficult to grasp for many people.

For more in-depth control, go to Site Preferences on the F-12 menu, and choose specific Javascript options for the current site. OR, you can also download one of the many toolbars to add a toggle Javascript button right on the damn UI. The JS button I have on the Opera UI right now (which has sat there for several years) toggles JS functionality if I just click it, and if I click and hold on the button it pops up the entire Javascript prefs window so that I can choose individual features to disable (like reporting right-clicks to JS).

Wise up, man. This stuff has been built-in to Opera for as long as I've been using it (since version 7, in my case).

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Opera is super non-standard code resistant. It's just that, as you said, webdevs think "target IE and Gecko" and don't bother even testing in Opera, it's really a miracle, that againts all odds, Opera displays almost every site correctly. IE and Gecko always got their compatibility for free, it's not that Gecko or Ie are resistant to non-standard code, it's just that webdevs code around various obscure bugs in those browsers, whereas Opera doesn't get that luxury.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[93 Escort Wagon]

I guess the main problem of Opera is that people assume, because of beeing used to other apps, that there's now way it can pack so much in so little executable, so properly/speedy implemented.

I love these occasional Opera stories on Slashdot because it gives the Opera fans a chance to make all sorts of these somewhat absurd little statements. Well, at least no one has dragged out the "it's so much more standards compliant than any other browser" line... yet.

I'm glad you like your browser. The more browsers we have to choose from, the better. But I've tried Opera on a number of occasions, and I just never found it at all compelling. To each his own.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[g00ey]

What about autopager?

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[IRWolfie-]

does it have anything like noscript? or vimperator? These two are the main reason i use firefox at the moment. Noscript is invaluable.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[Anonymous Coward]

Adblock - http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/ [fanboy.co.nz] that's basically the same list that Adblock addon uses.

Great! I can't speak for the GP, but I roll my own adblock filters. I've tried Opera's content blocking feature, but it's seriously lacking; things like blocking based on regexen or by specifying elements (check out the adblock element hiding helper some time) appear either impossible or very cumbersome at best.

There's also other extensions that have no equivalent in Opera.

I mean, sure, we get it, Opera is great. Yay. But honestly, if you're gonna scream bloody murder every time somebody raises concerns about Opera and says why it's not suitable for them, you're really nothing more than a fanboy. And for that matter, you're also a stupid one, since on a very general level, it's attitudes like yours that keep projects from actually making progress. You have to be able to admit that things perhaps aren't perfect (for some users, at least) before you can improve them.

Think about that for a while.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[gbarules2999]

*Applause*

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[sznupi]

There are valid reasons to prefer other browsers, of course. Actually, I believe they even...don't have to be rational! (if they are presented that way)

Also, there are things at which I think Opera should be better...implementation of tabs, while very good, is still lacking IMHO. Bookmarks mechanisms are useless (FF in this case is just two small steps from what I want). While they use heavily great UI concept of dialog "subwindows" in the form of bars, in many places there are still classic ones. Google apps dont work the way I would like. There are problems with performance in "background image heavy" CSS pages. That's just from the top of my head.

And there are things Opera definatelly can't do...there is, for example, sweet bibtex/bibliography extension for Firefox. Chrome has much better tabs presentation concept (different thing than I was talking about above) . And so on...

However in majority of cases claims of "why I can't use Opera" are simply not true! That's propaganda! That's fanboyism. This is what I was showing to other posters.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[sznupi]

Sorta, though manually invoked (mouse buttons gesture (yeah, involving only buttons) or key shortcut)

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[XMode]

The biggest problem is, as a user you get no control in what the webdevs decide to dev for. If they decide they are only going to make the site work in IE, then you use IE or don't use the site. As the 'dont use the site' option is, in many cases, not an option.....

This is why I STILL have the IETab extension installed in firefox (although I haven't used it in quite a while).

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[jp10558]

It sounds like you could do those things with userscripts. Those sorts of customizations are why I've kept using proxomitron myself, but it does finally sound like I may be able to migrate off of it.

Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons

[mdm-adph]

And like I always tell people like you who respond, while Opera has ways to block JavaScript, it doesn't offer anywhere near the amount of control that NoScript offers me, which is the reason why I use it.

I don't to "globally" block JavaScript. I don't want to block JavaScript "by site," manually, every time I go there. I don't want to have to use a toolbar -- I don't want to have to click a button every time I visit a site.

I want all top-level JavaScript allowed, while all other JavaScript loaded on a web page from other domains other than the top one (like adservers) blocked. I want this done automatically, as it will continuously block new ad domains from loading -- having to constantly update a blacklist is a bother I don't want to deal with.

Think Opera can do that?

Please, I like Opera -- I think it's great. But it *does not* have a the functionality I'm looking for, and you're not helping things.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[SausageOfDoom]

Well with the bandwidth bill they'll have after this little venture, I don't think you'll have to worry about them for too long.

Re:Nice slashvertisment

[Mystra_x64]

Pay? You are trolling it seems.

The significance of Opera Turbo

[Anonymous Coward]

is not so much for using public WiFi. The big win of Opera Turbo is when you use your laptop tethered to a cell phone.

Re:Ugly.

[moronoxyd]

The browser is eclectic, with too many preferences, too complicated preferences, too many customisation options. Features not everybody needs, or wants.

I'd rather have a browser that provides functionality that I do not (yet) need than a browser that's slimmed down so much it doesn't offer functionality that I do need.

If you don't like Opera -- fine, don't use it.
But please remember that not all people are like you, and some may like, want or even need what you despise.
If we would only write software with features that everybody or at least a majority of people would need, we wouldn't have any progress.

'turbo'

[SCHecklerX]

so, the software somehow uses a gas or liquid turbine? I'm confused.

Re:'turbo'

[Anonymous Coward]

so, the software somehow uses a gas or liquid turbine? I'm confused.

I imagine its turbochargers in cars that ruined the prefix 'turbo,' and probably with a lot of help from great products like TurboTax. Now it just means fast or extreme.

Evidence

[Saba]

> Opera 10 proved itself to outperform every other desktop browser on the planet, and there are graphs to prove it.

Well damn, colour me impressed!

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[elcid73]

A bespoke, custom made, tailored suit is only worn by one person- but I'd rather have that than some Men's Wearhouse off the rack number.

...if you're thinking about FF extensions at this point, you're not getting the metaphor, so I would add:
"A bespoke, custom made, tailored suit is only worn by one person- but I'd rather have that than some Men's Wearhouse off the rack number, ...or have to learn and build a suit myself"

Imagine Hamlet utter:

[WaroDaBeast]

“To be or to not be, that is the question.”

Re:Ugly.

[Goaway]

Yeah, the rest of the world actually gets work done without using Opera.

Re:Ugly.

[icebraining]

No, "user" software should be slim and have only basic functions. Extra functionalities should come in form of plugins/extensions, so everyone can choose and install what they want, according to their needs and PC resources.

Re:first

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 wanker

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[sznupi]

Opera uses its own UI toolkit. Qt is only used in things like file selector in Linux version.

Re:Ugly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many features, and it's not pretty enough.

Typical Mac user.

Re:Ugly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Calm down. This is the first beta of Opera 10. Fixing look and feel stuff usually comes near the end.

I remember when

[fast turtle]

I used to have a 33.6k dialup connection (that's all my modem did). What I ended up doing to speed up my web browsing and such was add as many of the damn advertiser websites into my hosts file. The advantages included never having to wait for a flaky doubleclick to respond, thus speeding up the page loading plus the obvious of never seeing the ads. The other trick I used to use was disable the loading of images and with IE I could at least get a placeholder to show where an image was. This really sped things up.

Opera test drive

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Opera 10 for about 24 hours now. It's smooth sailing. Everything works better than expected. My only complaint was one of my Opera Widgets stopped working, but maybe I just have to re-install it. Some sites that didn't work well in Opera before have been fixed.

My parents are still on dial-up (not their fault, there's no other service provided there) and I got them using it. The connection is 3-4 times faster in Opera 10 (when using Turbo) than in Opera 9 or Firefox 3. Some images get a little dulled in the Turbo transfer, but nothing serious.

Opera has been my main browser for a while now, but I always had to keep Firefox around for a few odd sites that didn't work 100% under Opera. Those days are over.

The new automatic spell-check in Opera is nice too, glad they caught up to Firefox in that arena.

Re:Ugly.

[Millennium]

I'm not an interface elitist or an apple fanboy, but I can't use software that gets on my nerves and Opera and Vista occupy the top two slots for that.

Sounds like an interface elitist to me. Possibly even an Apple fanboy, if you insist on "native widgets" instead of controls that are actually suited to a Web environment (for example, by responding to styling). Users of other platforms conceded the necessity of this long ago; only the Apple zealots hold out against it, and they hurt the Web by doing so.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[parlancex]

As someone who uses Opera, Chrome is inferior in many ways and I would never be willing to switch unless they are able to fill some serious gaps in features and efficiency (which yes, believe or not is not only based on your javascript score!). If you don't need an efficient browser with the fastest network and UI performance and low resource consumption, and lowest reported vulnerabilities, feel free to continue using whatever you're using, but please also remove yourself from this comment thread.

Re:Ugly.

[MrHanky]

Who made you king of software? Users may use whatever available software they choose to. You can fuck off.

This is great!

[HolyMackerelBatman!]

Hopefully the way things go will be something like this: The newest generation of browsers (Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Opera 10) all leave beta. They all pass acid3 (Chrome almost) and are standards compliant. Web developers can't resist all the HTML5 & Javascript goodness and a few killer apps start to support compliant browsers only. IE dies overnight, cue celebration scene from Endor!

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Bert64]

"fastest network and UI performance and low resource consumption, and lowest reported vulnerabilities"...

That sounds like Lynx..

Re:Ugly.

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ here. The initial install interface should be slim, sure. Have all basic functionality there and easy to use. Then, when you need more, I would just rather turn it on.

Opera is still a smaller download than Firefox (5.4MB for Opera 9.64, 7.1MB for Firefox 3.0). But has all the features of *dozens* of plugins. I personally find it extremely annoying to have to download a several plugins everytime I install the browser on a different machine. With Opera, it's all there.

As far as resources, Opera needs fewer resources than Firefox, especially when you start talking about plugins. Sure, while I'm running Opera I usually use something close to 1GB of RAM. But I have literally dozens of tabs open. And if I didn't have as much memory available, Opera wouldn't use as much and I could still have all the tabs open. I know, because my home machine and my work machine are about two "generations" apart and Opera is just as performant on one as the other.

Re:Ugly.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Wow, that critic seems oddly familiar

Turbo uses compression servers

[spaceturtle]

The turbo feature works by routing all your non https content via compression servers, which can ofcourse cause slowdowns: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/03/13/opera-10-alpha-now-includes-opera-turbo-compression/

This appears to be lossy compression that reduces image quality... Hopefully pretty much all html is compressed at the source these days: http://www.webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/

Re:Ugly.

[Rockoon]

The latest Opera has a bittorrent client, an email client, an IRC client, an instant messenger, a spell checker, web developer tools such as UserJS and Dragonfly, RSS reader, voice recognition, mouse gestures, history search, content blocking, and on and on and on...
The best feature of all: No AwesomeBar (mod me troll, please)

You stated that users should have a choice about features based on "their needs and PC resources" .. why is it that Opera packs so much more into less space than firefox, explorer, or safari, and how does that jive with your concern over resources?

Turbo

[nnet]

So I tried the beta, enabled Turbo, hit a page on my site that shows requester IP, discovered two things: src address wasn't mine, and ipv6 is not supported. Looks like this turbo feature is just a cache, similar to what some ISPs offer as "speed increase". The src address was 64.255.180.34

34.180.255.64.in-addr.arpa. 300 IN CNAME 34.0-24.180.255.64.in-addr.arpa. 34.0-24.180.255.64.in-addr.arpa. 6835 IN PTR r02-02.opera-mini.net.

Why would I want to fill up their cache with my browsing habits?

Re:Turbo

[hkmwbz]

Wow, aren't you clever. Leet DNS lookups and all that hacker-y stuff!

Yes, it uses servers to compress the data. This makes it faster on slow and laggy connections. They clearly state that it goes through their servers, and they also clearly state that it isn't much use if you are on a fast connection in the first place.

You are already filling up your ISP's cache with your browsing habits. If you can trust your ISP, you can trust Opera, which is based in Norway, which has some of the strictes privacy laws in the world.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

About Opera. Seriously.

Really? That build of FireFox you're using today would be barely recognizable if Opera had never come into being.

Re:Opera should get off the high horse

[Element119]

you should work for microsoft

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Smivs]

About Opera. Seriously.

Nobody except a total moron! Opera has been my browser of choice for many years because it blows all others into the weeds. It's fast, secure, fully customizable and has features (Wand, for one, and a nifty on-board email client) that make it stand head and shoulders above the so-called competition. It's also got serious geek value, as well.
I'm currently migrating to Ubuntu from (Ugh!) Windows, and one of the major factors in my decision was that Opera was available for Linux.
Yes, Chrome is good, as are Safari and Firefox, but Opera is the class leader by far.

"Javascript benchmarks"

[Anonymous Coward]

The story about the javascript benchmarks show Opera 9.6, not Opera 10.

Re:Opera test drive

[twidarkling]

The new automatic spell-check in Opera is nice too, glad they caught up to Firefox in that arena.

Little known fact: It was actually possible to add in a spell check using aspell and downloadable dictionaries.

Sloppy Summary

[Jamie's Nightmare]

The summary states:

Javascript benchmarks put the new browser in fourth place overall, after Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox, but it indeed passes the Acid3 test with a perfect score.

But the link provided in that statement? They didn't even test Opera 10 in that study, until the very end of the article where it placed fifth, not forth. The link in the previous sentence is the one showing the 4th place results.

Don't get me wrong, I love Opera, but I hate sloppy slashdotting.

opera, the best browser on earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera is the best browser on earth,
I've been using it for about 3 years now, and I cant stop loving it
It has so much features that you may need more than 10 firefox plugins to get the functionalities, but even with this plugins, opera feels always better ...
It more simple, faster, more powerful, very stable and very "natural"
This turbo feature may not be it's best point, but trust me everything else is great on opera

Re:Ugly.

[diegocgteleline.es]

If you don't like Opera -- fine, don't use it.

Which is, of course, what most of people do.

"every other desktop browser on the planet?"

[Anonymous Coward]

I love claims like this. It's like the radio station that plays the "top ten songs of all time" or a restaurant that serves "the best corned beef on rye in the Universe"

Re:Ugly.

[ifrag]

I'm not an interface elitist or an apple fanboy

Thanks for clearing that up. If you hadn't I'm sure everyone would have come to the wrong conclusion.

Re:Ugly.

[Anonymous Coward]

And how is that comparing the 7MB of Opera versus 140+ MB of plain Firefox. Firefox uses 400MB memory for 8 tabs, opera uses no more than 180MB for the same. An when you start with all that firefox extension bloatware to make it really useful - it starts like in 3-4 minutes.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[tyrione]

Stop beating your chest for a Browser that is playing catch up with standards and upcoming standards. It's a good browser. Everything else added to it is often overkill, just like the massive loads of plugin options on Firefox. Browsers should first actually be standards complete and secure, then they should fixate on extending its ability to interact with your desktop environment.

Re:Ugly.

[Anonymous Coward]

TI'd rather have a browser that provides functionality that I do not (yet) need than a browser that's slimmed down so much it doesn't offer functionality that I do need.

Take a look under Preferences>Advanced>Fonts. If I want to use a certain font throughout, I need to change it 23 times. Opera could certainly use some slimming down.

Re:Ugly.

[tyrione]

None of these features are very extensive.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple wants you to think that about their ideas why can't we say the same about Opera?

VPN

[SanityInAnarchy]

When I'm not at home, I just run OpenVPN, with compression on, and default-route everything through it -- either to my machine at home, or to a VPS that I'm not using for much.

That way, it's not just web, it's anything else I do, and it's all nicely secured. Ok, yes, I'm now trusting my VPS host, but better than trusting everyone else at the local Internet cafe.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Anonymous Coward]

"demise of KDE" Not really, look at how fast KDE 4 evolves after KDE 4.0. It is only possible because it is redesigned to be good. And like any other software, redesign takes time. Their only mistake was they didn't ask explicitly that distros shoudn't ship KDE 4.0 by default.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Anonymous Coward]

They have been doing server side compression for their mobile version for quite some time already. It makes a great cell phone browser because of it.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[fyanardi]

The Linux version really uses Qt for the whole thing. The Windows version seems to use WinAPI. But I also read from somewhere else that there is a thin layer between Opera and the underlying toolkit.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[shutdown -p now]

I always thought that Opera uses Qt for graphics rendering on all platforms, but just happens to style its widgets on its own.

Re:Opera should get off the high horse

[BtEO]

That's not how it works in reality though. Every browser ever made has bugs, sites will have to work around those bugs, and depending on the developers in question you might get one, two, or as many browsers as the developer is willing to test in, sets of workarounds.

Not to mention so much of the web is still a horrible mess of tag-soup where each browser vendor has had to make up support, and each other vendor has had to guess or reverse engineer what its competitors are doing.

Further to that Opera has, on at least two occasions that I remember, encountered examples of broken code because they support too many standards. Most notably in the case of when they introduced WebForms 2 support and several sites using previously non-standard values (the spec said all unknown values should be treated as "text") for <input type=""> suddenly were using values that meant very different things. There were also many problems caused because Opera was I believe the only browser to ever correctly support the third parameter of addEventListener(). Opera has since had to break its support because Mozilla concluded that too many sites would break if they implemented fully-correct support and ultimately I believe the spec has, or will be superceded with a version that reflects that end result.

And as a final point in my not-so-subtle suggestion that the biggest problem with site compatibility is actually web developers not knowing their job properly: Opera 10's user-agent is actually "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00" because several high-profile sites assumed that no browser would ever reach a double digit version number (Flash has also seen this problem in a few places since version 10 of the plugin arrived.)

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[VGPowerlord]

If Apple wants you to think that about their ideas why can't we say the same about Opera?

Because Opera didn't invent the Reality Distortion Field. That was invented by Apple (Stever Jobs specifically).

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Rockoon]

Tabbed browsing is 1994. Thats right... 1994.

Surely the Mozilla folks picked up on the idea soon after, right? Well, no.. Netscape 6 (Mozilla 0.6) was released 6 years later but did not support tabbed browsing. It was only in 2001 that there was even a hint of a decent browser comming from them that would have tabbed browsing, which they were calling Phoenix (later to be called Firefox)

Great ideas surely can be thought of by multiple people, but it very much seems like even when they don't have to do ANY of the thinking, it takes more than the idea... It also takes the will to implement it, which even the Mozilla boys seem to only do after years and years of the killer feature being right in their face.

Not only does nobody else but Opera seem to be innovative, it doesnt even seem like the others can even recognize a good idea when they see it, requiring years and years of sinking in.

I'm glad that the mozilla boys finally listened to the raves.. I'm sad that I have to include the word "finally" in there.

Major Issues

[freeridr]

I've been using Opera 10 for linux for the last couple months, trying the bleeding edge Opera 10 (upped to beta, not noticing much different behavior - tabs look great) and the latest stable 9. I had issues with 9, which is why I grabbed 10 early. The problems seem to be with specific sites, and I wonder if anyone has the same. As far as I can tell Opera cannot, for its life, deal with Slashdot. The browser greys out several times, I can't scroll smoothly, takes years to load. Ironically the Opera crew built in a feature where you just type "/." into the address bar to come here too. 9 and the bleeding edge of 10 also treated gmail poorly, when I move the mouse over an email's message box and click my middle button to paste something (which I can do over the subject and address fields) I get moved to a different page, losing the most recent typing. This was fixed for the beta realease and I am jumping with joy. Opera also likes to disappear when I click on the text box for messages on both gmail and Facebook and it hates loading google maps, sometimes just refuses. Google maps is still definitely an issue, but time will still have to tell about improvements to stability. For Slashdot and Goolge maps I usually give up and open a Firefox window, which is what I had to do to post (this morning it took 5 refreshes to get the title bar to show up, but the browser still greyed out several times). Crashes once or twice a day. Really too bad, it has some rad features (basically takes everything I liked in chrome and rolls it into something similar to Firefox, which is nice since there's no chrome for linux yet). Firefox still seems snappier too.

Re:Major Issues

[NEOGEOman]

It seems that some of your issues are limited to your specific installation. I've been using 9, switching to 10 only with the release of Beta 1, and I don't have most/any of the problems you describe:

Slashdot works fine, and has for a while, though it certainly suffered when they started working on this .js-heavy relaunch a few months back. Loads fine, scrolls fine, responds quickly. It's far better with 10 than with 9. Opera works fine with gmail and g-maps as well, at least for the recent past. Interestingly, google recently broke their regular search page with the live-search thingy: I can no longer edit the terms in a results page and hit ENTER, I have to TAB-ENTER or use the mouse. The same bug exists in 10.

As a fix, you might try a clean install (losing your precious profile data, sadly) or try it on another machine, as your OS may have something installed that causes trouble (like, say, microsoft products, heh)

Re:Ugly.

[Ant P.]

The latest Opera has a bittorrent client, an email client, an IRC client, an instant messenger, a spell checker, web developer tools such as UserJS and Dragonfly, RSS reader, voice recognition, mouse gestures, history search, content blocking, and on and on and on...

It's a shame Opera can not do any of those things well.

Non-Standard = Ambiguous

[Kelson]

So, have you got some specs for exactly the way IE and Gecko handle every single case of non-standard code? Including cases where it's clear the code is broken, but it's not clear what the author meant, and multiple interpretations are equally valid?

No? There's no specification? They'll have to reverse-engineer it by visiting every page on the internet with IE and Firefox and seeing what those browsers do with them? Gee, that sounds workable!

I think they're missing the major upsides of Opera

[malevolentjelly]

It's interesting that they focus so much on this Turbo-Feature while completely ignoring some of the most critical differences between Opera and Chrome/Safari or Firefox even. I don't know about you guys, but I run a ridiculously slow machine. I literally surf the web with a Powerbook G3. This means that I am hyper-sensitive to how well a browser uses RAM and threading.

If you don't quite get what Opera's strengths are, try it on a slow computer. Then open up like 30 tabs. You'll understand why Opera is so awesome very quickly. You would need a godly amount of RAM and cpu power to do a similar thing with Safari or Chrome and Firefox is generally just sluggish no matter how you look at it. Running Opera Turbo basically gives you a full-blown cell-phone style browser on your desktop. Some people like to throw the entirety of their system resources at their browser, but for those who would rather their browser be a lightweight application running in the background, Opera is a very good alternative.

I am dead serious-- there is NOTHING faster than this browser for general browsing on a slow computer. I have tested the hell out of this. The only notable exceptions are Gmail and Facebook, which are so disgustingly javascript happy that I keep Safari 4 around just for them.

As far as I can tell, there's no reason to run Firefox on any system, unless you run your browser like IE6 with toolbars and extensions galore.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr...surpassed made sense in his sentence. "Passed" does not.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[SausageOfDoom]

Yes, but the amount of traffic used by that will be dwarfed by the amount used on a desktop client.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Because obviously if Opera hadn't thought of some of the ideas implemented, then it would have been nigh impossible for somebody else to, right?

That's an excellent reply... ... to a hypothetical post witten in an alternate reality that had been phrased using the word 'never'.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[tekiegreg]

I wonder if they'll eventually go commercial with the Opera Turbo feature and offer for a monthly fee only. Try and make up the cost...

Re:Ugly.

[amicusNYCL]

That's some nice FUD, but Opera does them perfectly well. Opera's mouse gestures have always been the model for browser mouse gestures. History search works just like it should, content blocking is easy and effective, the web developer tools look awesome (haven't dove into them much yet). The few times I used bittorrent in Opera it worked perfectly fine. I stopped using email in Opera a few years ago in favor of Thunderbird, and I haven't used IRC, RSS, or voice.

Re:Ugly.

[amicusNYCL]

Nice catch

Re:Ugly.

[amicusNYCL]

The original author of that got destroyed on his own comments page. I'm not sure if he decided to also anonymously troll Slashdot or if another AC decided to troll for him. He's even saying he's going to rewrite the article:

addendum: As an apology to the community for the reckless and inadequate review I will be doing it again, properly, taking into consideration your fine comments.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[BikeHelmet]

Bandwidth? Do you have any idea how many 56k users it takes to clog a 100mbit line, let alone multiple gbit lines? :P

Compressing that data takes CPU power, and memory to temporarily cache it. But considering the quad or octo-core servers we have available now, all packed with 48-192GB of memory.... this service could probably run fine off four to eight servers. Just scale it northward as you approach capacity.

Not exactly breaking the bank.

In the fourth place overall

[chrysalis]

"In the fourth place overall, after Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox"

Or said in a different way: no other browser performs worse, except IE.

And just like IE, it's still closed-source, proprietary software.

Re:Ugly.

[Omestes]

Okay, I realize RAM is cheap and plentiful.. but... Saying that Opera is better because uses 10x the RAM another browser uses is silly.

Firefox 3.5b4 with 5 tabs open, and has been running for around 5 hours, I'm sitting at around 200 meg, this is with around 5 extensions as well. Last time I had a couple dozen tabs open, it was still well short of 1GB, if I remember right, I think it hit around 700MB.

A simple web-browser using 1GB is stretching things a bit there. I rarely can even get Photoshop to hog that much memory. I think even running Fallout3 uses less than that. Hell, I've got Firefox, Digsby, iTiunes, some TSRs, and WoW open right now, and I've barely over 2GBs used. And I'm even using Vista currently, with its basically 700mb overhead automatically on boot.

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[pwfffff]

"Nobody gives a shit about Opera."
"Nobody except a total moron!"

You do realize the logical conclusion of this, right?

"Nobody except a total moron gives a shit about Opera."

Re:Ugly.

[Omestes]

An when you start with all that firefox extension bloatware to make it really useful - it starts like in 3-4 minutes.

On what, a TRS-80? And what makes it useful? The only "essential" extension I use is ad-block, the rest are mostly visual tweaks (stylish, tree style tabs), that I probably could live without. I don't know how your defining essential here, and I'm not sure you've ever actually used Firefox, since even in the Phoenix alpha it never took 3 minutes to load.

Opera's "Smooth Scrolling"

[wintermute1974]

Since Opera 9.5, the browser has a new 'smooth scroll' feature that behaves as you describe. It may even be the default setting on the build you tried.

It's easily disabled from the opera:config page. Do a search for "smooth scrolling" from opera:config, then remove the check from the checkmark box.

Bandwidth bill

[porneL]

They have 20 million Opera Mini users, 40 million desktop users, and very few desktop users will use Turbo.

Re:Ugly.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, I wasn't sure myself. As you might have noticed, I'm pretty active on OsNews too. I was considering writing something critical about the review, but I figured other people would do it. Kroc, is generally a nice guy he just has some really strong opinions about some things. Even when I agree with him, I sometimes don't agree with the way he says it. But that previous statement could be applied towards just about everyone I know ;) So, it might just be me.

Th NoScript addon ...

[g00ey]

Something that prevents me from switching over to Opera is the FireFox addon called NoScript. I want to be in control of what scripts (such as flash and javascript) are being run in my browser. Many big sites are cluttered with those applets and swf's bringing down the perfornance and I'm happy to block 'em all out as this both cranks up the protection of my privacy a notch, gets a lot faster and a little less memory hungry.

Opera features what they call widgets (http://widgets.opera.com) which are claimed to be tantamount to FireFox addons but there is no such thing such as NoScript or FoxyProxy.

Re:Th NoScript addon ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... I hear this so often, it's funny. Opera has better than NoScript BUILT IN... you can edit it down to per site preference if it is allowd to run java, js , play sound or not, etc, or even what scripts are allowed to do or not. Sigh... Oh yeah, it also has very configurable proxy settings that can be toggled. (thus no need for foxy proxy). Opera can do what any of the most common plugins for FF do (adblock,noscript,firebug,spellcheck,greasemonkey, and many many others), and generally better. Among so many other lesser known features like delayed script execution and evaluation. (I have a custom user js script that evalutates scripting on the page for exploits (keylogging, cookie stealing, unsafe hyperlinking, heap spraying and dos vectors, rogue http requests) before it even has a chance to execute, a feature not even the grease monkey scripts for FF can do to the same extent)

Re:Th NoScript addon ...

[jp10558]

Actually, I don't think anyone has claimed that Widgets are like Extensions. That said, I do believe there were UserJS that is like NoScript.

Re:Ugly.

[amicusNYCL]

I haven't seen a lot of what he's written, but his review about Opera 10 is pretty pathetic. The entire review seems to focus on aesthetics and little else of substance, and apparently he has a hard time dealing with anything non-mac. Like I said, I'm not familiar with his writing, but that's the way the review makes him seem. I especially liked the part where he says that the color scheme he chose clashes terribly with OSX.

Re:Phenomenal browser : 110% agreement here! apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"Opera is a phenomenal browser." - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04, @06:28PM

Per my subject-line above? Well, I've been saying the same as you have, & for years now (since around 2001 really before I came here around 2005)!

Evidences thereof are here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=286721&cid=20452183 about version 9.23, & here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=367219&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=21434061 about version 9.24, & here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169309&cid=14112880 about version 8.51 (when it became FREE shortly after that) & before that!

Let's put it THIS way: When others COPY YOU? Only 1 saying applies - "Imitation IS the sincerest form of flattery", & just about everyone knows where tabbed browsing came from (Opera), & where other webbrowsers got their ideas for to use it also... answer IS Opera!

Opera? Hey - it truly is "the good stuff"!

AND?

Opera's been shown in tests to be consistently overall FASTER than other webbrowsers, in tests such as this one -> http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win & ESPECIALLY in Windows (the MOST USED OS THERE IS, bar none)...

Opera's also been shown to be more standards compliant than its competition (passing the ACID tests @ the same time as others, or before others even)!

Opera's lastly (but not least) been shown to consistently bear less "bugs" in the way of security vulnerabilities as well, per test results I noted in the url's above from SECUNIA & the like...

(Hey - What more could somebody want?)

Typically, as far as "programmatic efficiency" also (not just for speed)? Opera's the browser that though it bears more features "natively" (meaning without addons)?? It occupies LESS MEMORY than its competitors also... & starts up faster to boot!

Can't beat it!

APK

P.S.=> Others have said it here in this thread though, & it's true: MOST of the others are pretty damn good though (especially FireFox imo @ least, & they are great in particular @ fixing bugs fast, I have helped they in this capacity in the past & they fixed what I noted in less than 1 day's time (regarding a home-grown message board over @ NTCompatible.com a few years back to which they responded to myself, AND OUR FORUMS THERE, in person no less - talk about fast, personable service! What I like about FireFox is their wealth of addons (for myriad purposes))... Opera has an addon widgets community, but, it's NOT as "fast moving/growing" as that of FireFox... still, what is my "weapon-of-choice" online? The truly "Superior Warrior", in Opera! apk

Re:Opera test drive

[NEOGEOman]

The spellcheck is great, but the dictionary seems to be very old. It doesn't recognize words like URL, internet, or slashdot. At least it recognizes OPERA, though I'm sure that's only 'cause the other uses predate the browser. =)

Fails to mention many other tidbits...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody seems to have noticed the nice things added to opera dragon fly with this update, first thing I noticed (with great joy) the addition of the FF equivalent of the "Why Slow" plugin. Or the quick configure speed dial at the bottom right, and the addition of some new prefs under opera:config , like auto updating.

Personally the primary reason I have always loved opera is it's fantastic tabbed browsing. I simply can't live without the duplicate tab option, which not only duplicates the tab, but duplicates the history and session of that tab. (so few understand how incredibly usefull this can be). I love the new tab preview pulldown,(I always have dozens of tabs open) Opera is also a very secure browser. It does not allow many things that are used to exploit other browsers. I know everyone is so gagga over FF plugins, but frankly FF's plugin model leaves security holes big enough to drive a mac truck thru. The difference between 0wning , and being 0wned.. is Opera. =p

Re:Nobody gives a shit

[Smivs]

Oh, don't be pedantic! You know perfectly well what I meant.

Re:Opera test drive

[hkmwbz]

Outdated? It uses the OpenOffice dictionaries! :D