Slashdot Mirror
Opera Goes To 11, With Extensions and Tab Stacks
surveyork writes "Opera Software released Opera browser 11 for desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc). The main features are support for extensions similar to Chrome and Tab Stacks, Opera's version of tab management. The extension catalog is still small, with roughly 200 extensions, but steadily growing. The browser is very fast — Chrome-fast — and lightweight, with a new installer which is 30% smaller than the one in the previous version. Other enhancements include visual mouse gestures and better address field. There's no hardware acceleration yet, but it could be coming in a further dot release and benefit XP users as well as Mac, Linux and Windows 7/Vista users."
Why don't you just make 10 better? And make 10 be the top, number... and make that a little better?
No, you weren't... http://www.zdnet.be/zd_images/2010/48/opera11.jpg
Manuals are your last resort only
I can't be the only one who thought of this...
Ya, I'm sure the guy who wrote the headline Opera Goes To 11 never thought of the connection to Spinal Tap.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Firefox is my primary browser, but I do have Opera installed and keep it updated. One annoying bug that's been around for a while is that middle-clicking on a link does not set the Referrer header. This causes a number of *ahem* "image-hosting" websites to throw their hotlink prevention message at you.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Actually FF4 looks a lot like Opera. The big thing is Opera has always had a URL attached to each tab that is unique to each tab. Opera also added a menu button in the top left. FF4 has copied both of these to a point where it looks like exactly like Opera now.
What on earth are you talking about? I've been using opera for years, it does a fine job for well over 99% of the sites I visit. Opera 11 is really smooth-feeling and quick. Haven't tried the extensions yet, but the browser itself is excellent, at least on FreeBSD and OS X.
Caveat Utilitor
Actually, it does have the ability to use hardware acceleration for graphics in both opengl and direct3d, it just has not been implimented in general release versions of opera yet. See this discussion for more details and a post by an Opera developer. Currently, as the links mention, Opera's rendering engine is pure software, but it seems to keep up well enough with the browsers that have opted for hardware acceleration so far. I'm guessing they wont implement it until they can make sure it works on Windows/OSX/Linux/Unix, since they try to keep uniform support most of the time on all major Operating Systems.
I've been a long time Opera user, switching from Mozilla (pre firefox) to Opera when it became free (as in beer). However, I do get irritated by their efforts to keep up with Chrome's speed while screwing over long time users (they cant win that fight in the long run anyways, Google has way too much money). Numerous bug reports on long time stable features and major regressions happen every time they release a major update for Opera and take months or years to fix. From Opera 10.5 to pre 11, tool tips would cover up other applications even if Opera was located in the background. If you happen to have a mouse with arrow buttons for back and forward, the forward arrow button has been broke as far as using the "fast forward" feature since 10.5. At one point, during the version 11 betas, the arrow buttons were broke period (though it was a development release so one cannot really complain about that). With Opera 11, their famous mouse gestures are also partially broken with their implementation of a graphical interface for showing what gestures do what when you hold down the right mouse button. One of the more useful gestures was "right" + "left" + "right" (closes the current window). Now, with the changes they have made, this gesture only works half the time, but they have said they will fix it, but it's tied into the UI they implemented, so it will probably be a while.
They do generally listen to their users. They decided to force chrome like urls on their users during the Opera 11 development (removing "http://" and any of the args after *.com such as ?id=12345) claiming it would make users less likely to click fraudulent links. However, if you're a developer, seeing the arguments is a must and not seeing "http://" or "https://" or "ftp://" is just kind of silly, since sometimes you like to know what protocol you are using instead of guessing through some abstract replacement graphic. Since opera has never been a browser to appeal to novice internet users, dumbing it down seems kind of counter intuitive.
Opera is still my primary browser (except for development--I prefer Firefox/Firebug for that over Opera Dragonfly, but it seems every new version they release, I dread what long time feature they will break next. They haven't frustrated me enough to want to modify the Chromium source code to natively have all the features of Opera, but I wouldn't hold my breath on it for Opera 12.
Starting Opera 10 as a normal user triggers UAC randomly. Eventually I started to skip that by pressing ESC since it will still run the program normally. Hard to believe the devs caused that since Opera doesn't know how to seamlessly automatically update itself or inform you why UAC is needed and why you need to cooperate. Lots of Opera forum users sadly type their PW everytime Opera asks, many fellow forumers have no idea what's going on, so they're are just told to DISABLE UAC! Disable UAC because of malware --the exact reason UAC was created!
The devs screwed up royally and I've so far not found any workaround on their forums or elsewhere.