Slashdot Mirror
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"
Words cannot describe how ugly this is on OS X. The purple colour (a colour option picked up from an earlier version) clashes with the grey of any other window, that can be changed though. The black is overbearing and doesnt meld with the title bar. The whole thing stands out like a sore thumb. I somehow feel like the chrome looks like a webpage, rather than something for browsing web pages.
I cannot believe someone who created the Firefox icon could create something so hideous and inappropriate, especially when Opera marketshare is bad enough already. I could not bear to look at this all day, every day, it would drive me mad.
A browser should be transparent, a thin veneer between me and the web page. Not a clown honking his horn in my face.
I went into preferences and changed to the Mac "native" theme and no particular colour, mildly improved, but still the black is overpowering, the new-tab button is the wrong colour, and the side pane has a tinge of blue that doesnt work well with the OS X grey. The tab touching the title bar also just looks poor and conflicting.
This is the same terrible interface design they've had since 2006. It's goudy, non-native, clashes with the websites you view, and generally gets in the way, the toolkit underneath still rears it's ugly head in how the app works, and the general layout of the widgets. The dialogues throughout the app crap all over the spacing guides in the HIG. Every inch of this app is annoying and grates on me. 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.
The browser is eclectic, with too many preferences, too complicated preferences, too many customisation options. Features not everybody needs, or wants.
After the demise of KDE, Opera is our example of a Qt application done right.
I would try it out if it was open source.
I would perhaps consider it if it at least came with source code (even under a proprietary license).
Being accustomed to open-source, it seems very unnatural to pay for software and get no source code,
when the free equivalent comes with source.
Firefox is reasonable for my use.
And get on a smaller horse, by making itself by default behave _exactly_ like Firefox (or IE) regarding those "non-standard-compliant-enough" sites. :)
Add "I want to browse Opera style" for those who prefers principles over ability to view most sites normally
Once it gains, say, 10% of the marketplace across most high-traffic sites, developers will bother to try to make their sites compatible with Opera too.
Otherwise it's like making a car that is great, user friendly, but can only drive on fully standard-compliant roads, causing horrible clunking and unpredictable turns and jumps on not-so-compliant roads (that won't be re-paved because other cars don't have many issues). Good for principles, bad for market share.
Hyperom.com
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.
it takes more than the idea... It also takes the will to implement it
Exactly.
Opera is full of all these "amazing innovative ideas"... and yet it can't implement any of them properly.
The UI is competing with MS Office on number of the number of nested menus they can hide under a shiny menubar which fits in with no desktop. The HTML renderer has half-assed things all over the place and it screws up simple things like CSS3 opacity. The JS engine is the slowest out of every currently released browser (on real webpages, not some propaganda benchmark).
Who needs extensions when your browser has everything? 200 million people.
Who needs everything when it all sucks ass equally?
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.
#DeleteChrome