Posted by
Hemos
on from the getting-another-browser dept.
bigdan writes "A new interview with the lead programmer of the Linux team
porting Opera has him (Darren Starr) stating that they hope to have
a public beta by Christmas (of Opera 4.0). The interview also
goes on to mention a Sparc version coming soon.
"
Re:It's a valid design decision.
by
phred
·
· Score: 2
Opera chokes all the time. Of course, I look at upwards of several hundred to over a thousand web pages a day on several dozen to upwards of 100 sites, and it might barf on a dozen pages a day. Under NT, it always can be terminated and restarted gracefully. Always.
In my experience, Netscape crashes about five times as often and IE is unusable about three times as often.
Opera renders pages much faster and the multi-page MDL display mechanism that others disdain is more efficient.
In other words, Opera is by far more stable for general-purpose browsing.
Mozilla is coming along nicely but if Opera ships for Linux with the browser features it now has under Windows, it will be a huge step forward. I'm quite happy they're not planning to include mail or other stuff in the Linux version; that makes it cleaner and I never never ever use a browser for email for both efficiency and security reasons.
No offense to others who prefer other browsers. But be sure before you fling your arrows that you've actually used Opera enough to have a valid judgment of your own.
No flames here, just a suggestion that you actually read before commenting. It's not hard to find information about Opera and there are plenty of reviews around the net.
No, Opera is not a text-only browser. Why would they do that when Lynx has been the category-killer there for years?
-------
-- Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
Re:Giddyup! . .but will it do W3C specs?
by
aallan
·
· Score: 2
We don't have mail and news but we should have everything else.
Good! I don't want my web browser to support mail or news. I wouldn't mind it being able to spawn a pine or trn session inside an xterm when it hits a mailto: or news: URL though.
Al. --
-- The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
The main time that money is greatly needed is before the software is available. You need to build up a development team before there is software available.
Thus, for people to bounce in $10 here and there after the software is available is effectively the wrong time for this to happen.
There may be some nice people that will contribute $10 after the fact, but it is more appropriate, to my mind, to use things like CoSource, or the Free Software Bazaar, pledging payment before the fact, so that the funds are contributed towards commissioning production of free software works.
FSB, CoSource, and SourceXchange are all taking somewhat different approaches to this...
-- If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Giddyup! . .but will it do W3C specs?
by
Money__
·
· Score: 3
from the interview:How will the Linux version compare to the Windows version when it comes to features?
DS We don't have mail and news but we should have everything else. In a lot of cases we will have more features to make Linux users happy.
Like what?
DS Control from outside programs so that it may be used with other programs such as KDE and Gnome.
Good news for Gnome users
What I found interesting is how short the interview was, and how little discussion there was about WC3 standards. In order to maintain control ov the client side of the net, it will be very important to be at least minimaly complient with the specs.
But a 2 MB executable, isn't that a bit bigger than anticipated? Yeah. But let's not worry about bloat until we actually see what they're giving us. I for one will download with a semi-open mind, and if it doesn't live up to expectations, well it's only a beta. They'll make it better. Let's face it, though, it'd have to be pretty bad to be worse than netscape. There's nothing worse than proselytising on the uncrashability of Linux if you're talking to someone who mainly uses the computer for surfing. A decent browser is vital to the success of Linux, and I'll happily shell out my credit card number for something good to use until Mozilla is fit for public consumption.
Any browser competition is good..
by
xtal
·
· Score: 4
In order to prevent a real mess on the web, lots of browsers using standard specifications are a good thing (tm). If mozilla, opera, etc gain mindshare, then in turn sites will be designed with this in mind.
A good browser is absolutely essential to the success of linux, be it open or closed source - BillyG isn't dumb, and there's a reason that IE5.0 is one sweet product. Lots of people on/. have pointed out that they boot windows to use it - this isn't a good thing, we want the "list of reasons" for/dev/hda fat32 to go down, not up!:)
Otoh, it _is_ closed source, although the Opera team did a excellent job on their windows browser, which runs quite nicely on an old 486/75 notebook in the living room displaying my channel listings:).
Mozilla will stomp them all given time.. open source will always win over time, because companies can't/won't commit to infiniately developing and improving a product line - look at the slowdown with Netscape on Linux.
I'm incredibly pleased to see Sparc Linux support. When closed-source programs do support a non-x86 Linux platform, it's almost invariably Alpha and/or PPC. This is great news for those of us running Linux on a Sparc.
-- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Nearly, but not quite. IMHO, all versions should be focused on browsing. Oddly enough, my primary requirement for a web browser is that it browse the web. Mail, news, instant messaging etc., are done perfectly well in their own standalone packages. Integrated solutions almost invariably suck (witness Communicator, StarOffice, etc.) I'm not saying it's impossible to do a decent integrated solution, but it should be done with dynamically loadable components, so you don't have bloated executables when you're not using the optional bits. Sadly, all too few apps work this way:-(
-- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Keyboard Shortcuts are Outstanding
by
voidzero
·
· Score: 2
I do appreciate the keyboard shortcuts in Opera.
For example, I can navigate links in a Webpage without a mouse, move forward/back document windows, amble to next/previous document in history and so on.
What about Open Source ShareWare?
by
Nicolas+MONNET
·
· Score: 2
Nobody seems to do that, though it seems to be a rather straightforward: what about releasing a software under the GPL, for example, and ask the users for money? "If you like this program, please send $10 to xxxx to help advance its development"
You can then send them a nice certificate, or license or whatever that your PHB can be proud of. Hey, you don't have to tell him you could have had it for free!
Also, I remember, back when I was using a MAc, there was that thingie called Kagi shareware, where you could really easily pay for the shareware. Why not do the same for open source? I've heard about source-xchange, but that's slightly different in concept, though it MIGHT be a better even more elegant, I believe that selling (bogus) certificates or packages would appeal more to people / phbs used to closed software.
What d'ya guys think?
--
Re:What about Open Source ShareWare?
by
Foogle
·
· Score: 2
Well if the donation is optional, it's not really shareware. Shareware generally has a clause in its license requiring the user to pay money if they use the program. If the donation is an option (which it would have to be under the GPL) then it's still freeware.
That said, there are a lot of applications out there that ask people for donations. The GNU homepage encourages donations to the FSF and the OpenBSD site does the same with regards to hardware.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Has anybody actually used Konqueror? I hear a lot of good stuff about it... but how 'bout the people who have actually used it step up and comment on how good it actually is, at this time. Let's all hear the pros and cons of Konqueror, and (for this discussion) compare it with Opera.
Yes, but he already said that they are getting more email than they can handle.
More testers = more feedback, so they spend more time looking at bug reports and less time coding.
Thats the whole idea of a Beta test. Once they have got it stable enough to be used by everybody, they release the Beta. Then they gather info about the hard to find bugs, and squash them.
I know it's difficult to understand, coming from an open source background. Closed source development is very different to open source:) With open source everybody gets to hack at the code, send in patches whatever. With closed source, the bugs are harder to pin down, because the people who can don't have the source code. This makes release cycles longer, and the code quality lower. Not that I'm dissing the Opera guys. I've used their browser on Windows, and I think it's very good, but it is closed source, so I doubt I'll use it on Linux. I actually voted for them to make a Linux version, and I said that I would pay for it. Back then I would have, but that was a long time ago, and a lot had happened. Now I won't use it, because there are many good open source alternatives available.
I haven't used Konquerer BUT just type http://www.slashdot.org into kfm (the kde file browser for any who don't know) and I promise you'll be impressed. I have every confidence that the team that did this can and are going the rest of the distance.
Slashdot Mirror
Opera chokes all the time. Of course, I look at upwards of several hundred to over a thousand web pages a day on several dozen to upwards of 100 sites, and it might barf on a dozen pages a day. Under NT, it always can be terminated and restarted gracefully. Always.
In my experience, Netscape crashes about five times as often and IE is unusable about three times as often.
Opera renders pages much faster and the multi-page MDL display mechanism that others disdain is more efficient.
In other words, Opera is by far more stable for general-purpose browsing.
Mozilla is coming along nicely but if Opera ships for Linux with the browser features it now has under Windows, it will be a huge step forward. I'm quite happy they're not planning to include mail or other stuff in the Linux version; that makes it cleaner and I never never ever use a browser for email for both efficiency and security reasons.
No offense to others who prefer other browsers. But be sure before you fling your arrows that you've actually used Opera enough to have a valid judgment of your own.
-------
Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
No flames here, just a suggestion that you actually read before commenting. It's not hard to find information about Opera and there are plenty of reviews around the net.
No, Opera is not a text-only browser. Why would they do that when Lynx has been the category-killer there for years?
-------
Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
We don't have mail and news but we should have everything else.
Good! I don't want my web browser to support mail or news. I wouldn't mind it being able to spawn a pine or trn session inside an xterm when it hits a mailto: or news: URL though.
Al.
--
The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
Thus, for people to bounce in $10 here and there after the software is available is effectively the wrong time for this to happen.
There may be some nice people that will contribute $10 after the fact, but it is more appropriate, to my mind, to use things like CoSource, or the Free Software Bazaar, pledging payment before the fact, so that the funds are contributed towards commissioning production of free software works.
FSB, CoSource, and SourceXchange are all taking somewhat different approaches to this...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
DS We don't have mail and news but we should have everything else. In a lot of cases we will have more features to make Linux users happy.
Like what?
DS Control from outside programs so that it may be used with other programs such as KDE and Gnome.
Good news for Gnome users
What I found interesting is how short the interview was, and how little discussion there was about WC3 standards. In order to maintain control ov the client side of the net, it will be very important to be at least minimaly complient with the specs.
But a 2 MB executable, isn't that a bit bigger than anticipated?
Yeah. But let's not worry about bloat until we actually see what they're giving us. I for one will download with a semi-open mind, and if it doesn't live up to expectations, well it's only a beta. They'll make it better.
Let's face it, though, it'd have to be pretty bad to be worse than netscape. There's nothing worse than proselytising on the uncrashability of Linux if you're talking to someone who mainly uses the computer for surfing. A decent browser is vital to the success of Linux, and I'll happily shell out my credit card number for something good to use until Mozilla is fit for public consumption.
In order to prevent a real mess on the web, lots of browsers using standard specifications are a good thing (tm). If mozilla, opera, etc gain mindshare, then in turn sites will be designed with this in mind.
A good browser is absolutely essential to the success of linux, be it open or closed source - BillyG isn't dumb, and there's a reason that IE5.0 is one sweet product. Lots of people on /. have pointed out that they boot windows to use it - this isn't a good thing, we want the "list of reasons" for /dev/hda fat32 to go down, not up! :)
Otoh, it _is_ closed source, although the Opera team did a excellent job on their windows browser, which runs quite nicely on an old 486/75 notebook in the living room displaying my channel listings :).
Mozilla will stomp them all given time.. open source will always win over time, because companies can't/won't commit to infiniately developing and improving a product line - look at the slowdown with Netscape on Linux.
Kudos..
..don't panic
I'm incredibly pleased to see Sparc Linux support. When closed-source programs do support a non-x86 Linux platform, it's almost invariably Alpha and/or PPC. This is great news for those of us running Linux on a Sparc.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Nearly, but not quite. IMHO, all versions should be focused on browsing. Oddly enough, my primary requirement for a web browser is that it browse the web. Mail, news, instant messaging etc., are done perfectly well in their own standalone packages. Integrated solutions almost invariably suck (witness Communicator, StarOffice, etc.) I'm not saying it's impossible to do a decent integrated solution, but it should be done with dynamically loadable components, so you don't have bloated executables when you're not using the optional bits. Sadly, all too few apps work this way :-(
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
For example, I can navigate links in a Webpage without a
mouse, move forward/back document windows, amble to
next/previous document in history and so on.
A list of shortcuts is available here.
Nobody seems to do that, though it seems to be a rather straightforward: what about releasing a software under the GPL, for example, and ask the users for money? "If you like this program, please send $10 to xxxx to help advance its development"
You can then send them a nice certificate, or license or whatever that your PHB can be proud of. Hey, you don't have to tell him you could have had it for free!
Also, I remember, back when I was using a MAc, there was that thingie called Kagi shareware, where you could really easily pay for the shareware. Why not do the same for open source? I've heard about source-xchange, but that's slightly different in concept, though it MIGHT be a better even more elegant, I believe that selling (bogus) certificates or packages would appeal more to people / phbs used to closed software.
What d'ya guys think?
--
Has anybody actually used Konqueror? I hear a lot of good stuff about it... but how 'bout the people who have actually used it step up and comment on how good it actually is, at this time. Let's all hear the pros and cons of Konqueror, and (for this discussion) compare it with Opera.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Yes, but he already said that they are getting more email than they can handle.
:) With open source everybody gets to hack at the code, send in patches whatever. With closed source, the bugs are harder to pin down, because the people who can don't have the source code. This makes release cycles longer, and the code quality lower. Not that I'm dissing the Opera guys. I've used their browser on Windows, and I think it's very good, but it is closed source, so I doubt I'll use it on Linux.
More testers = more feedback, so they spend more time looking at bug reports and less time coding.
Thats the whole idea of a Beta test. Once they have got it stable enough to be used by everybody, they release the Beta. Then they gather info about the hard to find bugs, and squash them.
I know it's difficult to understand, coming from an open source background. Closed source development is very different to open source
I actually voted for them to make a Linux version, and I said that I would pay for it. Back then I would have, but that was a long time ago, and a lot had happened. Now I won't use it, because there are many good open source alternatives available.
-- Hulver's site
I haven't used Konquerer BUT just type http://www.slashdot.org into kfm (the kde file browser for any who don't know) and I promise you'll be impressed. I have every confidence that the team that did this can and are going the rest of the distance.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.