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Opera 11.60 'Tunny' Released With Ragnarök HT
First time accepted submitter iZarKe writes "Version 11.60 of Opera Browser for Desktop was released today. Significant changes: the inclusion of their new HTML5 rendering engine "Ragnarök", a revamped address bar, full ECMAScript 5.1 support, support for CSS3 Radial Gradients (finally), and a very revamped Mail panel. Originally, these features were set to be released with their next major version, 12.00. However, due to more work needed for the hardware acceleration feature also to be included in Opera 12, the 11.60 intermediary release came to be, as they didn't want to hold back the other new features for that long a time."
Known issues
Flash Player 11 crashes on Mac. We recommend disabling it or downgrading for the time being.
Being the default browser of dozens of smartphones, selling themselves on the Wii console, etc.?
Opera make more than enough to keep themselves going, even if you can't "see" it. Hell, their entire Opera Link & Opera Turbo facilities must cost a bomb to run as it is. They'd have gone under long ago if they weren't making money.
Release notes are always better when sung to a festive tune http://youtu.be/4TlPU0QWv6g [Opera's Bruce Lawson giving a moving rendition of 11.60]
Please define "doesn't work".
I just navigated there, clicked on the sliding fancy menus, clicked on a video, played it, etc. and couldn't see anything that "didn't" work.
Nor could I spot anything wrong before I installed this version of Opera this morning, and have been using Youtube with Opera for years. I don't even do anything like user-agent faking any more (haven't needed that for years now).
What does it matter? If you don't want to use it, it never gets in the way. And no, it doesn't add to bloat either, Opera is really fast and lightweight. This means also their own "extensions" are since they're all coded by the same team and integrated. Of course, now a days there's real extensions too, so if you need something, you can install it really easily. And they don't break with every new version like with Firefox.
Opera is one browser I have always wanted to like and make my primary browser but have never been successful in doing it. The browser is fast and has great features but a few things have always prevented me from making it my primary browser -
1. No RSS live bookmarks. Once I got a taste of live RSS bookmarks in Firefox, it was hard for me to read RSS feeds in any other way, no Google Reader, no RSS reader would do it. I don't want to open a separate window/program and pile up RSS feeds in there. I love it the way it is in Firefox. You just read them in a drop down menu off the bookmarks bar and they automatically get discarded as new ones come in.
2. Website compatibility - This may not be Opera's fault but nevertheless it works against them. Lot of sites still don't work right in Opera and some flat out refuse to proceed unless some other browser is used.
3. Per site default zoom level - These days screens have high resolutions. Lot of sites show up as very small text (Tom's Hardware is one, another in NY Times). In Chrome when you zoom a website, it remembers it forever. The next time you go to the website, Chrome shows it at the zoom level you set earlier. It remembers different zooms for different web pages. Opera has just one global default zoom setting that applies to all websites and actually lot of websites look terrible when zoomed in Opera (try Tom's Hardware). Also, Opera's rendering of input search boxes get screwed up when a web page is zoomed. Try editing a query on Google when the web page is zoomed and you'll understand what I mean.
If they fix these three issues, I would make it my main browser immediately. For now it has to be Chrome (sigh!).
I'm willing to bet that you've got an address blocked that is now "needed". Had the same thing happen and actually assumed the same thing, but yeah, not Opera's fault, it was some Doubleclick address I believe.
I've been using Opera for many, many years and they are constantly innovating. The were the first browser that I know of with tabbed browsing, the first with the speed dial, among many other features. The browser has a built in mail client, which I use mainly for reading RSS feeds, which is nice because it keeps the entire history of the feed, and it also has a built in BitTorrent client, which has been convenient on a few occasions when sites have BitTorrent download links. It supports extensions, but they aren't quite as advanced as Firefox extensions, although from a security standpoint that might be a good thing and installing them doesn't require a browser restart. Opera Link is great for syncing up your bookmarks, history, speed dial, etc with all your other Opera browsers (desktop and laptop for example). Opera Turbo is similar to Amazon's Silk browser feature to use a compressing proxy, although Opera Turbo can actually detect a slow connection and only use the feature when it needs to and then only when it is turned on. I haven't really messed with Opera Unite, but it seems like a pretty cool feature which allows you to basically set up a limited web server on your own computer for sharing files, broadcasting a web cam, accessing your home media library remotely, among other things. Back in the day I had to have another browser on standby because there were many pages Opera didn't work with, now it is very rare to find pages that don't work with Opera, plus Opera supports masking the browser as IE and Firefox for those pages that perform browser checking and tell you that your using an unsupported browser.
If you haven't tried Opera, give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised at how advanced and slick it is.
Gestures. Use the mouse to back, forward, close tabs, open tabs, refresh, etc
Fast. The back button reloads the page from cache - without having to re-post form data!! (duh, chrome)
Tabs - the tab state is saved - even if you suddenly pull the power cable from the back of your computer
Never let a mediocre career stand in the way of a good time
Here is Opera's response to this question:
http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/01/03/how-does-opera-make-money-aka-our-most-asked-question-ever
(for those of you who don't feel like clicking on the link, it provides a short answer with a link to a longer answer. The short answer has something to do with underpants)
I was under the impression (read on slashdot, so YMMGV) that Adblocking on opera was sub-par (still requested the ad, and just hid it, etc... rather than blocking it completely)?
Nope, Opera doesn't download blocked content, I just checked using Dragonfly (the built in developer tool). Blocked content only shows up as downloaded once you go to the visual click-to-block option, to allow you to see exactly what is and isn't blocked. Otherwise, in normal browsing, it doesn't download it.
Can't speak about Noscript, as I've never used it, but there does seem to be a similar extension in Opera. PasswordMaker has an Opera Widget (which is slightly less convenient than an extension), but there is another proper extension (Password Hasher) that seems to work the exact same way. I just use LastPass, though.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Opera's default search seems to be Bing - Microsoft. So what do we think about that?
Opera's search features are one of the most simple and time-saving features. You can click in the address bar and type "g", then what you want to search for, and it will search for that term on Google. There are several quick searches like that built-in, and it's easy to make your own. If you go to php.net, for example, and see the search field in the upper-right, you can right-click in that field and select Create Search. I used the keyword "p", so if I type "p file get contents" into the URL then it takes me to the manual page for that function on php.net. There's a search field on the top of this page also, if you want to create a quick search for Slashdot. And, as always, if you type "/." into the URL it takes you right here. Quick search keywords for wikipedia and youtube are great ways to save time when I'm trying to waste time online.
I haven't seen Bing as the default search though, if I highlight words and right-click, the Search item takes me to Google. I may have changed that at some point though.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Adblock Plus (isn't everyone?): I was under the impression (read on slashdot, so YMMGV) that Adblocking on opera was sub-par (still requested the ad, and just hid it, etc... rather than blocking it completely)? Since seeing the ads is the smallest part of why I use ABP, and I'm more interested in blocking the scumbags from tracking me, then this, if true, doesn't do me much good.
Not true. What's blocked is blocked.
Also, one curious thing: Opera has had blocking capabilities under the hood since version 6.02, which was out in April 2002, so that's a whole nine and a half years now. I think Opera was the first web browser that allowed you to block certain URLs natively.
I found that the Adblock list for Opera
works quite well. At home I use AdMuncher, at work I use the list above. Never had any problems with it. It's not as advanced as ABP, but at least it allows you to unblock stuff easily - I could personally never figure out how do to that with ABP, but I could just be stupid.
NoScript: See ABP.
Yeah, that one isn't really there. You can turn off JS entirely for a site - it's all or nothing.
PasswordMaker: This is a biggie at the moment. It's great for keeping a different password for every site without having to store them in "the cloud" or transfer much between machines.
Well... "PasswordMaker solves all of these issues. It is a small, lightweight, free, open-source tool for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, iPhone, Opera, PHP, Windows, OS/X, Linux, Flock, Yahoo! Widgets, Android, Python, and many other platforms & systems."
It's a widget, though.
Or you could use the built-in Opera Link functionality. Auto-sync everything important, including passwords.
DownThemAll would be nice too, but honestly, I use that infrequently enough that I could just fire up ChromeFox when I need it. But the other three are really tying me to this albatross.
Kind of. Open the Links panel (Tools, or Ctrl+Alt+L), filter what you want, select, download. Again, not as advanced as this extension, but it's there.
It bothers me how Google undersupports Opera and how much effect it has on usability of their services. Plus is not working very well, for example the translation of link inserted into new stream entry does not work as in other browsers, Picasa is just lame in it, extensive usage of Javascript in Gmail can make the responses slow sometimes... Opera has to update the browser.js to make it work at least somehow.
However I love the way how can I customize Youtube with extensions or usersrcipts, how add blocking works (btw here's a generator for common ad source in many formats, one of them is Opera's urlfilter.ini here http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/ It completely different experience to surf the web with ads blocked or not.
Microsoft services like Technet and MSDN forums are also crippled in Opera but I know it is not Opera's fault.
Opera is unbeaten in working with lots of tabs - try working with 30+ tabs in other browsers and compare the speed and responsiveness of the user interface. Opera link is just great - there is simply no need for services like Readitlater on Instapaper if you have Opera Mini or Mobile on your phone / tablet, the bookmarks just sync there too. If it has problems it is most probably Flash error or situation where too many extensions and/or userscripts are processing the page.
I miss just better session manager preferably with syncing via Link.
I wasn't aware of that. So far, I've been unable to find a way to replicate the ability to create custom searches of any website that you can GET or POST to in a browser other than Opera.
Just looked through the Chrome and Firefox menus and there's nothing. If it's functionality provided by addons, is there a name associated with it so I can actually find them?