Anything in Opera that doesn't require editing the *.INI files will take effect immediatly. Including theme changes, or anything "extension like" (bookmarklets, buttons, etc).
Although the bittorrent support is still only in the "preview" versions, as the only things changed in official 8.01/8.10/8.50 releases were security fixes/crasher fixes/registration removal (I think they are really holding off on releasing it official for a major version.. 9?), it does seem to work pretty well. And, on the Opera beta support groups, of course when it was implemented in 8.02preview, there was a flood of "WHY, GOD, WHY?! WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS?!" type messages, and the response from one of the devs was something like "being a web browser, it already had all the functionality, it was trivial to glue the functionality together into a torrent client". Another reason that has been mentioned as to why it's still not in the main releases is because it does require having the mail client enabled, as it shares some code with the mail client. Apparently that is a dependency that will be removed before bittorrent support goes in the main distribution.
The "clunky-breakyness" is something that's really attributable towards Firefox. A version change will occasionally break some or all of your extensions. THen, time to go get all new extensions while the features you depend on aren't working.
I see someone replied with some kind of an answer, but also the Opera IMAP client is, from what I hear, rather deficient, and they have several new developers that are working on fixing its problems (and perhaps redoing it entirely? the IMAP users on the beta forums are certainly hoping something gets done soon).. so, I'd be looking for major improvements on that in the next major Opera release.
I agree with that last part there, as well, although I'm obviously a huge Opera fanboy. (not Huge, like comic-book-geek-from-Simpsons huge, but huge fan.. oh, n/m)
Current Adblock for Opera is less than optimal, especially compared to the Adblock firefox plugin. I'm not sure if that's just because the developer (s) of the adblock solutions just haven't got there yet, or if it's that they aren't able to find a way to control Opera to that extent. (I did rather like Nontroppo.org's C++ Adblock for Opera, but doing the upgrade from 8.01 to 8.10 did overwrite part of the configuration that made it operate, and I never got to re-installing it.. and it was sorely sorely sorely lacking the ability to remove some things that Adblock just went "click.. poof!" on)
There's a lot of hope that future versions in the 8 series, and especially Opera 9 will make this a lot easier.
When I have more time to spend in development areas, I do intend to look into improving on the existing solution(s), if they aren't already better by then.
I use "Open tab" (more so when I was using Linux, and could then use the middle-click to paste in a URL that I'd just copied out of another program, now i typically use ctrl-n then ctrl-v, since i'm already on the keyboard to copy/paste anyway, now that i use Windows almost exclusively), Forward, Back (which are also implemented via right-click+left click, and left-click+right-click, as some firefox extension made popular, i think), and especially "close tab" gestures. I never really learned any of the others...
I also recently learned that right-button+scroll-wheel changes tabs. I almost never have to move my mouse anymore more than the distance to trigger a gesture. It's beautiful:)
(and without having my hand on the keyboard either)
It's like adding in all those extra sources of input that the mouse took away from those of us who used to use keyboard exclusively for everything before GUIs completely took over the world.
I love it. My companion does not have gestures installed in Firefox (and Firefox's gestures extension takes input INCREDIBLY slowly and inaccurately compared to Opera) and it drives me nuts to use it.
Or, let's ask that from the other side of the coin?
Why did Firefox take all these functions away from Mozilla?
I am not aware of any mobile device makers that have actually put ALL of the functions of Opera, rather than just the rendering engine, into their devices, but it is certainly feasible that you could have the IRC, Email, and everything else built into one small app on one small device.
Also, for as rarely as I use IRC, I find it incredibly convenient to have it built into the browser. And I had never used a bittorrent program until Opera's came out -- the first few bittorrent clients required absolutely insane hoops to go through to get them operating on a system that did not already begin with a totally complete and extended python environment.
I download virtually everything that I download on the Intarwebs using my browser -- but I couldn't download items using the bittorrent protocol. Why not add it to the browser? The regular bittorrent software is used as a file helper, right? It seems to me like it'd make a lot more sense as a protocol (torrent://) instead of a file type.
I just opened up my copy of Firefox 1.0.4 here, that I don't normally use, and cut-and-pasted the 6 URLs that I have open in Opera to Firefox tabs. ctrl-alt-del, and taskman shows that the freshly opened Firefox now takes up 85MB, and the Opera that I've been running for at least 48 hours is running around 45MB.
And it also has mail and news and RSS opened and running.
In Firefox, you can "trust" a site to allow that site to willy-nilly open any popup it wants to. It's a way to mostly get the function of "Only block unwanted popups" that Opera has, as far as I can tell.
The one problem that I had had with Opera's pop-up block was with a website that would pop-open new windows if you had messages waiting for you, on any page refresh. Setting it to "unwanted popups" didn't help that site much. That may have changed in recent revisions, I haven't operated that site in a couple of years now.
In all seriousness, out of boredom, I played with Opera Voice control for about 20 minutes the other day, just to see how it worked. It didn't seem to very well. (but, I haven't tested the mic setup with any other voice control or dictation programs or anything, either) And, lacking any pages that seem to explain or give demonstrations of the X+V, it seemed particularly useless to someone who's not physically handicapped, although it would be pretty neat to use it during presentations, with a wireless mic. (And I'd love the ability to change the "keyword" that triggers Opera to listen for it's commands)
Er.. where are you dragging text to? Several of the Adblock-like solutions for Opera do ad a right-click "Block this..." type thing.
Find-as-you-type pops up right at the bottom (in the same place it makes absolutely no sense in in Firefox) with "not found".. what more is needed? I haven't used Firefox regularly since that feature was in beta (and had been in Opera for months), so i'm not sure how that compares.
I'm not familiar with download status bar. How does it compare to what exists in Firefox (which is awful, if I remember correctly) or in Opera? (Opera's download manager doesn't strike me as the greatest thing ever, but i'm not sure how it would be improved upon)
Middle click is "open clicked item in new tab".. and Opera's trashcan has an absolutely huge history, and it keeps the history of all of those closed windows, too. Last I remember finding that function in Firefox, it simply reopened the last closed page in a new window.
The speech engine is IBM ViaVoice. That's it, for now. Perhaps a request for something else would be better? Know of anything with an open API?
right clicking an image, then shift clicking "open image" opens in a new tab. Middle click there SHOULD work as it does in all the other menus, but doesn't seem to. at least not with an image that has a link as well. (since i'm just looking at slashdot right now, all the images I have handy all have links, so i haven't tested that)
Also, click-dragging a link to the tab bar works fine, thank you for helping me to find that feature. (though I normally just middle click, and use the "tabs open to right of current" option)
The fact that middle-click does not open a new tab when on the Image right-mouse-popup has now been reported as a bug.
Just so everyone knows, Opera has been free for a very long time, the ad-box could be converted from a banner sized ad to a 2-line text ad, just by turning off the completely useless toolbar with the back/forward/home buttons on it (that toolbar was integrated into the address bar in... v6? v7?), and they have been previously giving away registration codes for referring downloads of opera, and then just plain free for the asking, and now not even bothering with it.
I think the amount of time that it's taken from the first point to the last point is simply because a huge amount of the developers took some well needed vacation time after the release of 8.0, and the new developers are working in areas far more important to the browser than "removing the ad banner and registration code support"
But, it was part of CSS. Opera has absolute #1 priority on supporting to the letter all open standards. And, even if it were a microsoft extension to CSS, can you give me one good reason why NOT to support it?
My old personal website actually rendered perfectly in Opera, nearly perfectly in Firefox, and with serious glitches in color and display elements in IE6. IE4 however, displayed it perfectly. I was mindboggled.
While this is true, this is something that I have run into in every larger open source project that I have attempted to work on. If the feature or fix or whatever that i've done doesn't personally scratch an itch of the developers, it's "why the hell would we want to add this?"..
Ran into that problem with everything I've done except for some serious cleanup that I did on WineHQ's AppDB software.. which I had absolutely no personal interest in actually fixing, I just did it out of boredom. I wanted to completely re-write the thing, but wasn't quite THAT bored.
Right.. I forgot to mention that since the vast majority of Opera users have in the past BEEN European, I highly doubt his claims on code page support. I don't use anything but standard American though, so I can't comment knowingly on that one.
When I found out that instead of paying for it, several months ago, they had gone to "refer 35 people to download it", I had my free registration key in about a week.
Even my companion, who is an absolutely devout Firefox person, is starting to use it.
And the children, and friends, and other people that use the computers, don't even notice that there's something different amiss. It's nice. All my other software installed, if anyone wants to sit down and play with the computer, they have a learning curve on. Opera, just goes.
"getting better about standards compliance"? Opera is involved in desigining the standards, and their browser fits virtually every standard out there. And has been virtually forever...
There was no such thing as IE pre version 3. It started at version 3, to equal the Navigator that was available at the time. Opera has had the ads since version 3, at least, when I started using it.
Are you sure you are even remotely sane? And Opera is about 1/5th the size / memory footprint of Firefox, and 1/10th Mozilla.
(and still includes the mail/news/etc functions, whereas Firefox doesn't.. oh, and Gmail was based on Opera's mailer)
Here's 3 different ways to implement an adblock within Opera.. they aren't quite as nice as Mozilla Adblock, but (a) there's not a lot of polish on that piece of software, (b) any parts that aren't possible in opera may become possible in the future, as more developers are working with the opera developers to get the features they need to do certain things.
It is true right now that firefox has more extension capability, although a LOT of what isn't already built into Opera can be done via it's buttons, bookmarklets, user javascript, and other functions.
In the desktop Opera 8.10, the Identify As was changed to default to Opera rather than IE, except for sites that are known to feed Opera intentionally bad data, or break horrendously in other ways when given an Opera identifier.
I imagine that this change also went along to the mobile browser, but the 8.10 engine being less than 2 months old, hasn't exactly taken over the mass market of embedded applications, where upgrades aren't so frequent.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but that doesn't retain that entire windows history, and all other state information about it.
Anything in Opera that doesn't require editing the *.INI files will take effect immediatly. Including theme changes, or anything "extension like" (bookmarklets, buttons, etc).
Although the bittorrent support is still only in the "preview" versions, as the only things changed in official 8.01/8.10/8.50 releases were security fixes/crasher fixes/registration removal (I think they are really holding off on releasing it official for a major version.. 9?), it does seem to work pretty well. And, on the Opera beta support groups, of course when it was implemented in 8.02preview, there was a flood of "WHY, GOD, WHY?! WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS?!" type messages, and the response from one of the devs was something like "being a web browser, it already had all the functionality, it was trivial to glue the functionality together into a torrent client". Another reason that has been mentioned as to why it's still not in the main releases is because it does require having the mail client enabled, as it shares some code with the mail client. Apparently that is a dependency that will be removed before bittorrent support goes in the main distribution.
The "clunky-breakyness" is something that's really attributable towards Firefox. A version change will occasionally break some or all of your extensions. THen, time to go get all new extensions while the features you depend on aren't working.
I see someone replied with some kind of an answer, but also the Opera IMAP client is, from what I hear, rather deficient, and they have several new developers that are working on fixing its problems (and perhaps redoing it entirely? the IMAP users on the beta forums are certainly hoping something gets done soon) .. so, I'd be looking for major improvements on that in the next major Opera release.
I agree with that last part there, as well, although I'm obviously a huge Opera fanboy. (not Huge, like comic-book-geek-from-Simpsons huge, but huge fan.. oh, n/m)
.. poof!" on)
Current Adblock for Opera is less than optimal, especially compared to the Adblock firefox plugin. I'm not sure if that's just because the developer (s) of the adblock solutions just haven't got there yet, or if it's that they aren't able to find a way to control Opera to that extent. (I did rather like Nontroppo.org's C++ Adblock for Opera, but doing the upgrade from 8.01 to 8.10 did overwrite part of the configuration that made it operate, and I never got to re-installing it.. and it was sorely sorely sorely lacking the ability to remove some things that Adblock just went "click
There's a lot of hope that future versions in the 8 series, and especially Opera 9 will make this a lot easier.
When I have more time to spend in development areas, I do intend to look into improving on the existing solution(s), if they aren't already better by then.
I use "Open tab" (more so when I was using Linux, and could then use the middle-click to paste in a URL that I'd just copied out of another program, now i typically use ctrl-n then ctrl-v, since i'm already on the keyboard to copy/paste anyway, now that i use Windows almost exclusively), Forward, Back (which are also implemented via right-click+left click, and left-click+right-click, as some firefox extension made popular, i think), and especially "close tab" gestures. I never really learned any of the others...
:)
I also recently learned that right-button+scroll-wheel changes tabs. I almost never have to move my mouse anymore more than the distance to trigger a gesture. It's beautiful
(and without having my hand on the keyboard either)
It's like adding in all those extra sources of input that the mouse took away from those of us who used to use keyboard exclusively for everything before GUIs completely took over the world.
I love it. My companion does not have gestures installed in Firefox (and Firefox's gestures extension takes input INCREDIBLY slowly and inaccurately compared to Opera) and it drives me nuts to use it.
Or, let's ask that from the other side of the coin?
Why did Firefox take all these functions away from Mozilla?
I am not aware of any mobile device makers that have actually put ALL of the functions of Opera, rather than just the rendering engine, into their devices, but it is certainly feasible that you could have the IRC, Email, and everything else built into one small app on one small device.
Also, for as rarely as I use IRC, I find it incredibly convenient to have it built into the browser. And I had never used a bittorrent program until Opera's came out -- the first few bittorrent clients required absolutely insane hoops to go through to get them operating on a system that did not already begin with a totally complete and extended python environment.
I download virtually everything that I download on the Intarwebs using my browser -- but I couldn't download items using the bittorrent protocol. Why not add it to the browser? The regular bittorrent software is used as a file helper, right? It seems to me like it'd make a lot more sense as a protocol (torrent://) instead of a file type.
Spatial Navigation? What's that? Sounds nifty. (Opera user for years)
I just opened up my copy of Firefox 1.0.4 here, that I don't normally use, and cut-and-pasted the 6 URLs that I have open in Opera to Firefox tabs. ctrl-alt-del, and taskman shows that the freshly opened Firefox now takes up 85MB, and the Opera that I've been running for at least 48 hours is running around 45MB.
And it also has mail and news and RSS opened and running.
In Firefox, you can "trust" a site to allow that site to willy-nilly open any popup it wants to. It's a way to mostly get the function of "Only block unwanted popups" that Opera has, as far as I can tell.
The one problem that I had had with Opera's pop-up block was with a website that would pop-open new windows if you had messages waiting for you, on any page refresh. Setting it to "unwanted popups" didn't help that site much. That may have changed in recent revisions, I haven't operated that site in a couple of years now.
In all seriousness, out of boredom, I played with Opera Voice control for about 20 minutes the other day, just to see how it worked. It didn't seem to very well. (but, I haven't tested the mic setup with any other voice control or dictation programs or anything, either) And, lacking any pages that seem to explain or give demonstrations of the X+V, it seemed particularly useless to someone who's not physically handicapped, although it would be pretty neat to use it during presentations, with a wireless mic. (And I'd love the ability to change the "keyword" that triggers Opera to listen for it's commands)
Er.. where are you dragging text to?
.. what more is needed?
.. and Opera's trashcan has an absolutely huge history, and it keeps the history of all of those closed windows, too. Last I remember finding that function in Firefox, it simply reopened the last closed page in a new window.
Several of the Adblock-like solutions for Opera do ad a right-click "Block this..." type thing.
Find-as-you-type pops up right at the bottom (in the same place it makes absolutely no sense in in Firefox) with "not found"
I haven't used Firefox regularly since that feature was in beta (and had been in Opera for months), so i'm not sure how that compares.
I'm not familiar with download status bar. How does it compare to what exists in Firefox (which is awful, if I remember correctly) or in Opera? (Opera's download manager doesn't strike me as the greatest thing ever, but i'm not sure how it would be improved upon)
Middle click is "open clicked item in new tab"
The speech engine is IBM ViaVoice. That's it, for now. Perhaps a request for something else would be better? Know of anything with an open API?
right clicking an image, then shift clicking "open image" opens in a new tab. Middle click there SHOULD work as it does in all the other menus, but doesn't seem to. at least not with an image that has a link as well. (since i'm just looking at slashdot right now, all the images I have handy all have links, so i haven't tested that)
Also, click-dragging a link to the tab bar works fine, thank you for helping me to find that feature. (though I normally just middle click, and use the "tabs open to right of current" option)
The fact that middle-click does not open a new tab when on the Image right-mouse-popup has now been reported as a bug.
Opera's page on UserJS, including how to use greasemonkey scripts virtually unmodified
Just so everyone knows, Opera has been free for a very long time, the ad-box could be converted from a banner sized ad to a 2-line text ad, just by turning off the completely useless toolbar with the back/forward/home buttons on it (that toolbar was integrated into the address bar in... v6? v7?), and they have been previously giving away registration codes for referring downloads of opera, and then just plain free for the asking, and now not even bothering with it.
I think the amount of time that it's taken from the first point to the last point is simply because a huge amount of the developers took some well needed vacation time after the release of 8.0, and the new developers are working in areas far more important to the browser than "removing the ad banner and registration code support"
But, it was part of CSS. Opera has absolute #1 priority on supporting to the letter all open standards. And, even if it were a microsoft extension to CSS, can you give me one good reason why NOT to support it?
They may not expect normal users to patch their code, but they sure do treat the average users like they expect that.
My old personal website actually rendered perfectly in Opera, nearly perfectly in Firefox, and with serious glitches in color and display elements in IE6. IE4 however, displayed it perfectly. I was mindboggled.
While this is true, this is something that I have run into in every larger open source project that I have attempted to work on. If the feature or fix or whatever that i've done doesn't personally scratch an itch of the developers, it's "why the hell would we want to add this?" ..
Ran into that problem with everything I've done except for some serious cleanup that I did on WineHQ's AppDB software.. which I had absolutely no personal interest in actually fixing, I just did it out of boredom. I wanted to completely re-write the thing, but wasn't quite THAT bored.
Right.. I forgot to mention that since the vast majority of Opera users have in the past BEEN European, I highly doubt his claims on code page support. I don't use anything but standard American though, so I can't comment knowingly on that one.
When I found out that instead of paying for it, several months ago, they had gone to "refer 35 people to download it", I had my free registration key in about a week.
Even my companion, who is an absolutely devout Firefox person, is starting to use it.
And the children, and friends, and other people that use the computers, don't even notice that there's something different amiss. It's nice. All my other software installed, if anyone wants to sit down and play with the computer, they have a learning curve on. Opera, just goes.
Usability problems? From the version of Firefox that my companion has installed on this computer:
:-D
Are you sure you wish to exit?
(OK) (No) (Cancel)
huh? What the hell do those choices mean?
"getting better about standards compliance"? Opera is involved in desigining the standards, and their browser fits virtually every standard out there. And has been virtually forever...
There was no such thing as IE pre version 3. It started at version 3, to equal the Navigator that was available at the time.
.. oh, and Gmail was based on Opera's mailer)
Opera has had the ads since version 3, at least, when I started using it.
Are you sure you are even remotely sane?
And Opera is about 1/5th the size / memory footprint of Firefox, and 1/10th Mozilla.
(and still includes the mail/news/etc functions, whereas Firefox doesn't
Here's 3 different ways to implement an adblock within Opera .. they aren't quite as nice as Mozilla Adblock, but (a) there's not a lot of polish on that piece of software, (b) any parts that aren't possible in opera may become possible in the future, as more developers are working with the opera developers to get the features they need to do certain things.
It is true right now that firefox has more extension capability, although a LOT of what isn't already built into Opera can be done via it's buttons, bookmarklets, user javascript, and other functions.
In the desktop Opera 8.10, the Identify As was changed to default to Opera rather than IE, except for sites that are known to feed Opera intentionally bad data, or break horrendously in other ways when given an Opera identifier.
:)
I imagine that this change also went along to the mobile browser, but the 8.10 engine being less than 2 months old, hasn't exactly taken over the mass market of embedded applications, where upgrades aren't so frequent.