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Opera Dominates CNET Survey of "Underdog" Web Browsers
An anonymous reader writes "Whether you consider Opera an underdog browser or not, it came out on top in a feature on CNet this weekend. It was up against 'underdog Web browsers' Camino, K-Meleon, Shiira and Arora in a piece loosely aimed at determining whether these browsers are yet ready to steal significant numbers of users from Firefox, Safari, IE etc. Interesting most to me, however, is that it transpires that Shiira, the Mac browser from Japan, is one of the fastest browsers on the planet, beating the original Chrome v1.0, Firefox 3.5 and more in its benchmark tests."
Am I the only one who finds that 99%+ of my time is spent waiting on DNS and data transfer and shit? I'm never actually sitting there, data downloaded, waiting for my browser to respond.
I looked at that like a year ago, and it looked as if it hadn't been updated in years then. Are they back to work on it? It was quick, but it was also very crashy when I tested it out. Now that KDE4 is in Ports, Konqueror works nice and fast on OSX also, however it crashes way too often too.
...checks site... Yeah, looks like Shiira has seen some activity since February of this year. Prior to that the previous news item on their site was Jan '08, and before that, July '07. Could be nice.
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The Acid3 test sort of bugs me. Yes, it's nice that browsers are fast, but even the most complex pages have lower kilobyte counts than most internet connections allow for, which means servers are the lag points, not your browser. I'd love to see a usability test sometime, rather than a flat-out speed rating. Webkit's neat, but with so many people using their browsers as a primary operating base - and we see proof of this approach in Google's development of the Chrome OS - usability is being sorely ignored in many technological benchmarks. I can't tell you how annoying it is to have Firebox' Live Bookmarks fail to load every ten minutes, it breaks the RSS experience. And while IE has its flaws and benefits, it's emulated, not inovating and old hat. Chrome is nice, I like how my computer treats it, but it's still in the works. Who's going to decide to pick up a new browser based on a speed test? Yes, CNet included some key features and noticed bugs, but Shiira and Arora both get termed works-in-progress, which does not make them underdogs now, it makes them next year's underdogs. And by the time they're ready for mass adoption, all of their good points will likely have been emulated as thoroughly as anyone cares for. Acid3 is like telling people your browser has 700 horse power, instead of the 300 horsepower their browsers have. No one cares if you top out at 200mph, the speed limit's still 60, folks.
Those things you're doing with that stuff you just bought? That's not what it's for! -
Woulda been nice to add the reasons these browsers exist - e.g. Arora was created specifically as a test wrapper for the Qt WebKit component. In fact, right now I'm compiling the current git of Qt so I can compile the current git of Arora because Ubuntu 9.04 only includes Arora 0.5, which is rather old and rickety ...
Camino exists because AOL made an abortive move to make a lightweight Mac Gecko browser and it's still around from that. K-Meleon exists because there was no lightweight Gecko browser at the time, i.e. it's before the mozilla/browser internal fork that became Firefox.
So what's the story behind Shiira?
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Sadly, it's riddled with bugs. The current full release wouldn't run on our Mac, and although the latest developmental build would, it suffered frequent crashes, making it hard to recommend.
I think that qualifies as a showstopper. It is, after all, a browser for a computer touted as "it just works".
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It has a few interesting features, like being able to have the browser refresh a page every x seconds instead of having to code that in. Useful for the web-based admin panel that lets users request 3 hours of internet time at the coffee shop. We use it with Google Docs and Gmail as well as Pandora. Seems to use less memory than FireFox and it's not IE. It also seems to be stable enough to last days before having to be restarted. It even has a bittorrent client built in.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Do I get a Firefox prize in the mail if they hit 72%?
This is the nerd equivalent of celebrity gossip.
What? It's a private company, if they don't want to release their code you cannot force them, and there's nothing wrong with that, it's not like you don't have any alternatives.
I personally don't care if a software package is open source or not as long as it does the job properly, and I don't think it's less relevant for not opening up the source
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Right, closed source and still more secure and less vulnerable then Firefox and dedicated to privacy and quality. Open Source is good as a concept and should obviously be furthered, and maybe Opera will eventually go Open source, but to want a company to burn and their quality product to die off simply because they want to remain closed source is probably the most childish thing I can think of.
I'm not sure if a browser like Opera, which is available on many many [many many] platforms - from set-top boxes to game consoles to mobile phones to actual PCs - can responsibly be called an underdog browser by anyone - regardless of the opinion of the submitter. And it runs pretty well on all those platforms too. The only thing I've seen Firefox, Chrome or IE run decently on is a PC (Fennic? Mobile IE? Surely you jest!). (Disclaimer: I never use Opera on my PC's, but I do use it on all my mobiles)
Probably most of what you enjoy today from your browsers have some origin in Opera. Not remember if was my main browser ever, but had been using it since 1996. Small, fast, secure, multiplataform, usually the most innovative in its own time (tabs, gestures, fast javascript, starting page with captures of your preferred sites, i think i saw all of that in opera years before than in any other browser, open source or not).
Would be great that it become open source (originally was commercial, then ads sponsored, then free, the evolution looks like going in that way), but anyway they did and keep doing a great work as they are, and you owe a lot to them even if never used their browser.
Open source seems unlikely as Opera's main business is browsers for mobile devices and other devices that do not run normal OSes (like the Wii). I assume their various browsers share a good amount of source code with their desktop browser.
Opera's desktop has almost 4% market share and is bigger than both Chrome and Safari. Check the latest numbers at www.statcounter.com. Even Net Applications, which is more skewed towards US and western Europe, show Opera's global market share at 2%. CNET's visitors does obviously not represent the Internet population so it's a bit weird to compare Opera, the world's 3rd biggest browser, to small unknown providers.
Besided this, Opera's mobile browser is the biggest in the world, still bigger than iphone. Worth mentioning is Opera as the only browser available on Nintendo Wii or DSi.
Allow me to correct myself. While I was right in that an IE shell came up with the innovation, it wasn't MyIE2. It was actually NetCaptor. From Wikipedia:
"It's full featured and well established browser and quality is unsurpassed, and it's in widespread use on other devices like cellphones, PDAs, gaming systems (Nintendo DSi), etc. The only problem Opera has is that no body is using it on the PC"
How would you know?
For a fairly long time Microsoft would detect Opera and throw junk at it so it didn't work as well as IE. So for a while Opera identified itself as IE. That's why those geniuses at CNET don't think Opera ever hits their site, and why their, and eveyrones, IE numbers are wrong - they're artificially high.
Out of the box, for many years, Opera didn't identify itself as Opera. Veteran Opera users know thwe first thing you do with a new release is make sure it identifies itself as IE if it isn't still set that way from "the factory".
http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/843/
http://sillydog.org/forum/sdt_3373.php
http://news.cnet.com/The-Acid2-challenge-to-Microsoft/2010-1032_3-5618723.html
"Microsoft's own Web servers are configured to send different versions of Web pages to disparate browsers. For example, the servers sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets from the ones they send to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. As a result, Opera renders pages differently."
And by differently, they meant "largely unreadable" but were being polite to their advertisor.
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"Personally, I hope Opera doesn't gain any further market share, because it is not open source. It is becoming less and less relevant."
And there you have it. Open source has now been elevated from a cult to a full blown religion.
"I don't care if it's the best, it doesn't mesh with my personal belief system, and must die".
Choices are good. I'd choose Opera even if I had to pay for it. It's good that poeple have choices.
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer.html
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