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Opera 10.60 Released, With Faster JS, WebM Video Support
teh31337one writes "Four short months after Opera 10.50, the latest version of Opera's lightweight web browser has been released. It not only claims to be the fastest browser, but also the first final browser with WebM video support. It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux." Update: 07/04 21:53 GMT by T : Headline updated to reflect that this is Opera 10.60, rather than 10.6. Thanks to the readers who spotted this goof.
damn, it's fast!
At first I was confused by this article, since I was reading it in Opera 10.11. The new version is called 10.60, not 10.6.
Simon's Rock College
Opera brags about this, but my experience is that it's generally quirky in comparison to other browsers (not IE) with valid (X)HTML/CSS. For instance, W3 specs say that a blockquote should be rendered with equal whitespace before and after (link here) , yet Opera won't give it any whitespace in a after the closing blockquote tag. This breaks the appearance of many sites, including imageboards.
Why should I care about a non-extensible browser that does some artificial benchmarks a millisecond faster? Not trolling, I'm trying to figure out what practical benefit Opera has for its users.
For a long time it was the only browser to support border-radius CSS. It's currently the only browser with WebM support. I like it because of its right click->Validate feature, which sends the cached copy of the current page to the w3 validator. Plus it also has Inspect Element (like Chrome), mouse gestures (like the Firefox addons), and it looks good in Mac OS X and Windows (although not so much in Linux). Plus Opera Unite is really cool too. Opera Mail is also pretty decent. Also, I can't find in the spec where W3 recommends equal whitespace before and after blockquotes. All it says, as far as I can tell, is that it should be indented.
Not trolling, I'm trying to figure out what practical benefit Opera has for its users.
The 80-20 rule, 80% of the benefit of Firefox with 20% of the effort fiddling with all the extensions. Firefox without any extensions at all is a poorer browser than Opera, and I got better things do to than to custom design my browser.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux."
No, it's available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.
FYI, on my system the opera:about page shows it as version "10.60 internal", but its browser identification is:
"Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.60"
which could be construed as meaning either version 9.80 or version 10.60.
You can thank idiots who do browser sniffing the wrong way for that.
Basically, some people who should have never been allowed to do any development checked for Opera's version by the first digit. When Opera went to 10.00, some scripts suddenly thought it was Opera 1, and things went very bad. Therefore, all future Opera versions will fake-identify as "Opera/9.x" in order to prevent that from happening.
Chrome seems to be the next in line to hit version 10 by the way things are going, so I don't doubt they'll be in the same boat when it happens.
You can thank idiots who do browser sniffing the wrong way for that.
If you're doing browser sniffing you're already doing it the wrong way.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Perhaps, but who cares? Let those sites break. Sites should display identically on every browser and adhere to all standards, not utilizing any browser qwirks. If they don't they are badly designed pages, plain and simple. It's not the browser's responsibility to compensate for an incompetent web developer.
Ask their geek friends who read Slashdot.
I'll bite.
NoScript: disable scripting and enable it selectively using the F12 "site preferences" shortcut.
AdBlockPlus: You can get various urlfilter.ini if you really want to. I really dont need this, just block the most annoying ones with right-click:block_content. Some sites need the "normal" advertising, and once you block the top-10, you don't have much to complain about. Anyway, I will give you that point.
Flashblock: Here. Myself I just "enable plugins" (F12 again) on sites I want. *And* you can block the flash content with the normal "block content" too.
Firebug: Meh. Have you worked with dragon fly?
RefControl: Hmpf. F12, disable "send referrer information". Maybe it is just me, but I never needed to spoof referrers.
And yes, I use every one of these extensions on firefox, because it is not there as default. And some more. In a *memory-limited VM* just so it does not goes haywire and swaps the hell out of my current apps to oblivion. Lucky me.
eliphas
Tested on FF, Opera, Chrome, and IE8. The only difference in rendering the blockquote appears to be based on font and relative sizing, determining at which point the text wraps and how far over it is when it does so.
Opera 10.60 is still roughly twice as fast as Firefox 4.0b1, and less aggressive gobbling memory than either Firefox or Chrome (the hog) on average.
You generally only need extensions if something's already broken; on Opera, you can load up an ad blocking filter+CSS element hider, enable/disable both per-site, enable cookies/JS/etc on a per-site basis, and run many but-not-all user javascript. All of which require 'extensions' on Firefox.
It's also widely accepted to be the most standards compliant browser on virtually any comparative time frame, and also typically gives equal treatment to all supported OSes, so there are lots of reasons to use it and enjoy it.
People seem to like to complain about Opera, like they like to complain about XP x64. They heard about it once and so it just must absolutely be horrible, because giving it a real chance is too much work.
The last time I had any rendering/formatting problems was with old buggy javascript layout in 2006. Those were with Opera 9 beta(ish) I think? By 9.5 the problems (on minor, entirely non-public code) were gone again. And now (as in, for all of recent memory), like most browsers, you can report websites that don't work directly (and can post code snippets on the forums, IIRC).
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris