Slashdot Mirror
Opera Beta Released
Wil Mahan writes "According to the LWN daily updates page, a beta version of the Opera browser has been released for Linux, and is available at Metalab (1.9 MB). Looks like Opera fufilled its promise of a full public beta before Christmas."
Hey, when did they become opera.com. They used to be "operasoftware" and "opera" really had something to do with singing.
However, I would like to call attention to a truly free (beer and speech) browser that has been available for Linux (as well Windows, Solaris and AIX). This is the W3 consortium's Amaya browser.
Some features (adapted from the w3 page):
1. Is a browser as well as editor
2. Amaya maintains a consistent internal document model adhering to the DTD.
3. Amaya is easily extended.
Several APIs and mechanisms are available to change and extend its functionality with the least modification to the source code. Amaya thus allows for easy customization by providing a means for extensions to access Amaya's internal procedures and functions.
4. Support of MathML protocol.
But best of all, it's released under the W3 Copyright which is fully compatible with the GPL
Why not give it a try?
Binary Distribution
Source Code
RPM distribution
Hmm, as far as I know, 'Opera 4.0a' indicates that it's an alpha release...
It hung after I resized the window.
i got pretty excited, so i downloaded it run it and quickly became disspointed. it rendered the screens horribly. i tried www.cnn.com and it butchered it to pieces. i tried amaya, it was not all that great (almost same as above), but i have the source code, and i can try to fix it if i want to. but if i am going to pay for a browser, it better work better than stuff i can get for free (Mozilla, Netscape, Amaya). yeah, it loads quicker, and it has a much smaller footprint, but if Netscapes renders the screens properly, i'll stick with the bloat and lagginess until Opera looks better or Mozilla is complete
Seriously.. Stop complaining about people wanting to make a little money. If you use a program all the time, 100$ is not a lot. Hey, you payed for the computer, right?
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sick and tired.. and it's christmas
Wow, this is pretty cool. I downloaded it, installed it and pointed it at slashdot. Yes, it's obviously beta with some things to fix (and a somewhat odd UI) but it's fast. Starts up within 1/2 second or so and seems to render pages fast ...
... although Mozilla seems to have 'shrunk' (in terms of bloat) over the last few releases ... still, the Linux space should be large enough to allow them to continue development/support of Opera under Linux ... I wish them well even if they're not open sourcing Opera ...
I think we have another (serious) entry in the Linux browser market with Opera. I've obviously just played with it for a few minutes now, but for a 1.5M download, it's pretty cool. The important question now is: how come it's so small? What features doesn't it have that Mozilla does have? All in all, I welcome the Opera people/browser to the Linux world. The more the merrier. Competition is good and will force any other browser makers out there to keep on their toes.
I still prefer Mozilla as it's open source, but this seems to be a nice addition to the Linux software world. What I'm wondering is: with Mozilla and (the rapidly aging) Netscape out there for free, what kind of market penetration do these guys hope for? This might be a good browser though for low end machines that don't have the RAM/CPU that mozilla seems to eat
Hmm, if I were trying to release a browser for the Linux market, I'd be sure PNG was at least partially supported in the beta version.
When I saw that the beta was out I downlaoded it quickly beofre it was hit by the mass crowds who were bounds to slashdot the page. I untarred it and ran the script expecting it to goto the Opera webpage... but it didn't, just a grey background. After fidling around for awhile I figured out how to make it goto a web page. But unfortunatly every every web page I pointed it to either didn't render at all, or came up horibly mutilated. If anyone else had any beter luck with this, I would like to hear about it.
Screenshot
It was quick as hell, but it really does not matter when it cannot load any pages huh??
The whole thing has StarOffice-ish "look and feel" -- large window, MDI in it, widgets are exactly the same as in StarOffice.
It has good chances to become usable, however MDI shouldn't be the only option for windows handling -- while it may be tolerable in Windows, in X it looks like an insult to the idea of window manager.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Nobody loses any money directly as if it was stealing, but undirectly losing money because of pirated software is as real as it can get. If you give out those 10000 copies you just made, someone who would have bought it otherwise doesn't do it now.. piratism isn't any worst possible crime, but you must be pretty damn stupid to claim it doesn't cost one penny to commercial software makers..
And windows-version may lack some of the features compared to IE or Netscape, but it is *FAST*, *LIGHT*, and *STABLE*. That is why people think it is so good.
I was able to run it under Debian potato. I've had the same problems with logging in to /.
;)
/tmp/opr. (That last may have been /var/tmp/opr, I've symlinked /tmp to /var/tmp). There was no man page or info page.
What did work worked fast. I didn't check memory use. I almost forgot what browser I was using!
I did think that I'd be willing to pay even $100 if the final version is as solid as I expect it will be. I'm glad to see someone mention that the expected (announced?) price is only $35. Geez, I haven't bought software since OS/2 in 1993! (Unless you count the MS tax *sigh*, I did reformat immediately
I haven't checked on where to submit bug reports yet. There is one 'bug' I haven't seen mentioned yet. I have no idea what files the binary installs on my system. I checked a few common places. It wrote directories ~/.opera and
Well, besides not knowing what a binary is doing, I have no other problem; it is a first release, after all!
No frames support, poor "tactile" feel for when something is clickable, can't handle a simple redirect, often loads a page but won't display it, segfaults in a minute or so.
This has miles to go. What's interesting to me is that this is supposedly part of a port series that uses a common codebase. Based on that statement, I expected it to be a buggy cousin of the BeOS version in terms of where it stood in feature support. From the looks of this, it certainly doesn't look like they're managing to write cross-platform code.
Contrast this with everyone's favorite oft-delayed vaporware, Mozilla. A baseline Mozilla-based Communicator 5 now seems about 6 months away, and some 18 months past initial targets. But the codebase is by most measures 98% cross-platform, and it shows in the way the Win32, Unix and MacOS versions are progressing in lockstep.
Indeed, at the moment, Konqueror is in much better shape. Heck, the GNOME and Tk HTML widgets are in better shape.
I'm sure Opera will get something nice out the door. I'm still not sure what Opera's place in the world is, though. Consumers who use old, slow computers generally don't buy software. Companies that want to use old computers would probably be better off from a manageability standpoint if they turned them into X or ICA terminals (running Linux, DOS, *BSD, or whatever), and made full-featured browsers available on centralized servers.
As far as a lean, stripped-down browser goes for local execution, it looks like perfecty good Opera clones could be built out of Mozilla code. And since the MPL allows for BSD-like commercial extension, Mozilla's support for XML, DOM, plugins and so forth makes for a more realistic browser for the future. As DHTML continues to go mainstream and become a staple of web-based application development, Opera's austerity will come to look quaint.
Thank you, http://www.W3C.org (location: http://www.w3c.org/), for standing athwart the tide of them who would take shortcuts and shouting "enoughttp://"!
If all you are using is Windows programs, then why not jsut use Windows. It is a catch-22. You can make Windows programs to run under Linux, but then why use Linux? That's where OS/2 lost. OS/2 could run Windows programs, but why use OS/2 to run Windows programs if you can jsut use Windows.
We need Native ports that take advantage of the OS. Wine is Fine. And it'd even be nice if Opera would be wine compatible. But certainly not what we want to see for a browser on Linux.
-BrentI'm still not sure what Opera's place in the world is, though. Consumers who use old, slow computersgenerally don't buy software.
.1 second. (no, really) From my experience with Opera on Windows I'd say that opera is the only browser that comes close to being able to meet my criterion. The Windows version is also about the most stable browser I ever used. I really think the Linux version will be even better, once it's done. I'm not going to dump on them for releasing a little early just so they could get it out before Santa comes.
I'm not a consumer. I'm running a 300 MHz, and typical browsers whether by Microsoft, Netscape, the KDE team, or whoever, take a ridiculous time to launch, let alone what they do to my machine performance by hogging all the memory. In my book, no program you run should take more than a second to load. Personally, I prefer load times less than
I guess Opera's best strategy would be to open-source their code the rest of the way, let us geeks fix the code some more, proclaim themselves a linux company, and cash in with an IPO.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I looked on the site and didn't even *see* a place to report bugs. I would be surprised if it was even possible to report bugs.
Even if Opera wants to make money, (nothing wrong with that, of course), they could still be more open. How about using a SCSL which is not free, but certainly allows more flexibility.
-BrentBecause this is a kludge. Instead of using a native API, they are using one API pretending to be another API. The end result would inevitably be something that didn't work quite right, and would never work quite right. Not to mention the fact that it would "feel" like a "piece of windows" running under linux, rather than a real linux app. If you're willing to stoop to this, why not just run the native windows version on native windows under vmware ?
I've had the native Windows version almost running properly under recent versions of wine, so I'd imagine that it would have been trivial for them
No, it wouldn't. Part of the problem with WINE is that they need to emulate the bugs in win32. It's not just a matter of debugging wine, it's making a perfect clone of win32, that does exactly what win32 does. When you are running through an emulation layer, you are tying yourself to an API that is unreliable. Using a bad API puts you in a very bad position, because your chance of ever getting something that works properly is very slim ( unless you fix the API, which in the case of WINE is not easy ).
On the other hand, by using QT, which is a very nice API btw, they have managed to port most of the code in a very short timeframe, and now they only need to worry about their own bugs, as QT is pretty solid.
And how do you propose to "replicate" the creative efforts of the software author ? Are you attempting to argue that the software author is not worthy of compensation for his/her efforts ?
Nobody loses any money because of piracy
This statement is extremely dumb. If the author puts in time and effort into a piece of software and isn't properly compensated because a bunch of leeches don't pay their dues, they have lost money.
I certainly will NOT give them one penny for Opera but I may use it if someone comes out with a crack or a key generator for it
If you are not prepared to give money for it, you have no right to use it. BTW, if you think it "sucks", don't use it. Myself, and a lot of people disagree with you though.
At around $39, Opera was much cheaper to buy than a hardware upgrade for my mother's 486SX with 8 MB RAM, which she used until early this year. Without Opera, the web was effectively unusable on this hardware.
Mozilla may well win in the longer term, but my experience with Opera on Windows has been very good.
Haven't yet tried the Linux version but the Windows version does have frames, redirects, etc - I'm surprised they've released such an incomplete version since it sounds more like an alpha than a beta.
Opera was, perhaps unfortunately, never designed to be cross-platform as far as I can tell (which is one reason it has a small memory+disk footprint).
For someone running Linux on a low memory 486 or Pentium, Opera may still be the better choice. Since a lot of Linux boxes appear to be 'recycled', there may actually be a good market for Opera here.
(a) You lack write permission to system directories. This has NOTHING to do with linux.
(b) You appear unwilling to learn how you can install libraries in your home directory and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to make the app search your home directory for shared files.
It's hardly linux's fault that you lack sysadmin priveliges and that you are lazy.
Are you just trolling, or are you that dumb? Read the original poster's problem. It's a library version issue.
Come on! Lighten up! Is this how the Linux community is going to react every time some piece of commercial software is ported to our fine OS? Cut these guys some slack! Have you ever tried to write an application as complicated as a browser? Even targetting ONE platform is immensely complex.
Yes, the rendering quarks and their time to port might suggest some slight problems in their cross-platform architecture, but geez! Software just isn't that easy, folks! Personally, I'm amazed they have it working at all...
If someone were to ask me to port some huge piece of graphic code to X-windows, I'd estimate about a year for a completion time. X ain't easy, HTML rendering ain't easy, cross platform threading ain't easy, making money off software ain't easy...and these guys are trying to do it all. So the version they're throwing out before Christmas is a little buggy. Big freaking deal. They're a small company supporting several different platforms! X and UNIX are not the most natural environments to step into.
Cut them some slack and offer some words of encouragement when a company is willing to port their software over to Linux. That's what most people want, right? Application support under Linux? Even if it's not an application you're gonna use, it's still a step in the right direction. The more companies that support Linux, the more well known and accepted out platform becomes. Before long, you have companies *assuming* they'll have to support Linux rather than asking if they should bother or not...
It's great to get Opera for Linux too. As we so often want to point out: the freedom to choose is important. Also Opera and Mozilla will definitely battle each other and result in better products.
I downloaded both. Opera starts up fast. I pressed enter and there was the window. Then I visited slashdot with it. The front page loaded fast and it also showed this topic nicely. The feeling I got is that Opera loads slashdot pages faster than Mozilla but Mozilla renders the page faster. Just resize the window to see the difference. However, Mozilla's slowness with big Slashdot pages come from early incremental reflow code and still unoptimized table code. However, some new code has gone in lately to make Mozilla faster.
Opera also lacked features. If you click on submit buttons, nothing happens. Also it has big problems with some web pages. But as programmers know, this is very normal at this stage.
Check out the latest Mozilla. The Linux version has become a lot faster lately. It also crashes a lot more seldom and renders pages better than ever. There's still a lot of bugs left but this one is almost good enough for daily browsing. And as Mozilla could use some good testers, report the bugs you find at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org
In a nutshell: Opera is still far behind Mozilla. It's not possible to use it for daily browsing. Mozilla is almost there.