"Opera already have a very nice version resized to fit in a PDA and it's integrated with Google Gears persistence. It would be a *perfect* execution plataform but unfortunately Windows Mobile is so buggy that it deactivates the IP stack if you're not physically connected to the network so it's impossible to run an offline version of the application. But if Opera includes an embedded web server... "
This is the most insightful and cogent point made on this whole page.
And what he said about windows on phones. Holy crap what a disaster. I've seen more people return phones because they kept "freezing" than I can shake a stick it. Funny how it only happens to phones running windows. And from what I've seen it happened to all of them among people I know in the area.
"What about auto-updates? This is something what prevents me from even considering Opera as main web-browser. IE (in a way) does it. Chrome does it. FireFox does it. Opera - doesn't. "
THANK FUCKING CHRIST!
Firefox's annoying habit of doing something I don't want it to do is disgusting.
You can't help people that don't want help and firefox updating a browser to something I know doesn't work right with sites that are important to me or XP updating and rebooting when I left my machine in a complex and known state are inexcusable. *my* computer, *I'M* in charge and don't you dare change stuff "just cause".
"Opera is definitely not the fastest when it comes to JavaScript performance, since they don't have a JIT. It does however render pages pretty damn fast, and, in my experience, it's got the smoothest scrolling of them all (yes, even Chrome"
I dunno about that. At the beginning of this year with Opera 9.6 facebook was downright snappy. Af their last "upgrade" FB began, because of javascript, to take up to a second or 5 to render a complex page. With Opera 10 its instant. Similarly so but not as bad for ebay.
I haven't seen any other browser be as responsive on the worlds worst JS pages like FB.
"I used Opera for a while, then moved to Chrome when it came out. Opera is too "feature-complete". I want fast and light, and Opera 9.5 felt bulky. Their new default theme didn't help that impression, either. "
I hear ya. I wish there was an "opera lite" that just did web. Or that you could configure in parts you want and parts you don't and not have to pay the memory/disk footprint for them.
I don't use mouse gestures, ever, for example. Nor mail.
"Speaking of CNN.com, if you use Opera to look at it, do you ever have caching issues? "
No.
updated 6:23 p.m. EDT, Tue June 16, 2009
Tools --> preferences --> Advanced --> history.
Check documents: always Check images: every 5 hours
just like it was in the default configuration, and it should work just fine. If it doens't try another browser, your ISP may be caching it with squid or something.
"But for the exact reason you cited, I don't use Opera. It's a constant reminder that the web is a complete wreck. I'll often give people examples of how huge websites bite it when you load them on Opera. So in the end what have you gained? Are you suffering for a cause? Do you want to constantly reminded that most "web developers" don't know there is a standard?"
I hear you, and I do the same thing. But I program for opera then hack it to make IE and FF work. I think anybody that makes it work in IE deserves what they get.
Occasionally I'll have to use IE or FF for some site that dosn't work with Opera, but that's getting less and less often, in fact I don't think it's happened once this year yet.
"What are the big features of Opera you actually find useful? "
Couldn't name one in particular. I work at home, on the web. And what I notice is if I try to use any other browser it takes me longer to do everything. Little things like with opera you can "paste and go" a url into the addess bar. With everything else you paste the url then hit enter or click the go button. Little things add up and my gut feel is it'd take me 12 hours to do 10 hours work with anything else. And all things being equal the more fiddly stupid stuff I don't have to do the happier my work day is. Plus I just hate waiting and every other browser seems to keep me waiting more and not let me know what on earth is happening.
If I couldn't use opera I'd probably go back to the unix shell and find different work. I realize opera may take some getting used to but once you are used to it every other browser seems like its 10 yrs old.
"I concur, 10 alpha was pretty rough. 10 beta is a huge improvement over 9.64."
Opera 10-alpha didn't work at all for me. External source viewers didn't work and I use vi. It crashed every time, was a known bug and is fixed in 10 beta.
"I don't want my pictures, banking, email (thanks Gmail!), etc to rely on a P2P network of home computers. I want servers doing what they do best, serving data from a facility with backup power, redundant connectivity, and some sort of physical security. And I want my laptop/desktop doing what they do best, fetching info from the rest of the world."
How hard is it to say "Here's your www directory. Stuff you put there, pretend the whole world can look at". All the computers here have a www directory anyway for local home page so this is no great stretch.
"I agree overall, although with one exception: Grandma? Are you going to explain to Grandma what P2P is? Or how to server content from her computer? Would that be before or after you explain to her the finer points of the TCP/IP stack?"
She knows all that stuff except the tcp/ip stack stuff which she doesn't need to know. She's not gonna "rent a VM at a datacenter though".
"This reminds me of Nero. Once a nice, light-weight CD burn software product, it is now so full of other cr*p that you have to spend 10 minutes going through the install menu pruning almost everything off."
It's not just Nero, it's everything. Norton Ghost stopped being useful at version 11.5, a 7 meg program. Version 14 is like 600 megs and isn't functionally that better.
"The acid 3 test is good, but so last year. Here is what would be cool. A mechanism that would allow the browser to use firefox plugins. Opera does not seem to have the wealth of plugins that firefox does, and from what I can tell, plugins is why people use firefox. Instead of wasting effort, why not make Opera so it can use the Firefox model?"
True 'dat.
Every now and then I try Firefox. Every time it seems, by comparison to Opera, a klunky, slow, featurelss POS. I can never understand why most of my my friends, who seem pretty smart otherwise, use it. In a word: plugins.
"OMG! OMG! Opera is leveraging their dominant position in the web browser market to unfairly compete with Apache! Why does everybody whine when Microsoft does this and Opera gets away scot free?"
Because Miscorosft doesn't actually have anything that really competes with Apache.
"Exactly. Slashdot 2.0 is horribly broken on Opera, and has been for months. Sometimes they fix something and it temporarily works what I assume is supposed to be correct, but generally something is wrong. "
Some Opera betas aren't that usable. Like 10-alpha. 10-beta is usable, I tried it meekly, it holds up and I've been using it exclusively ever since it came out. The javascript engine is wicked fast and now things like ebay and fb pages don't take abnormally long to render.
"I disagree. Its not that difficult to rent a VM somewhere in a datacenter."
Let me just explain this to Grandma.
"I just don't see the need for a home user to ever serve web content. Binary file sharing, yes, but not web content."
And some poeple just couldn't see the need for more than 640K, ever.
Nothing new and innovative on the net made sense when it first came out. It took from 1999 to 1996 for the web to go from 0 to 500 sites. Brian Reid once sent me a "hyperlink" to "Palo Alto, the first city on the web" in 1993 or 4 and I had to download Mosaic to see it. And I thought it was really stupid and hoped he hadn't spent too much time on this.
As if there needs to be another way to sink (lots of) money into the black hole that are commercial celphones. I'm still trying to figure out how to actually get Telus' "$15/mo unlimted text messages" to actually only cost $15/mo.
WHY DO YOU ASK WHY? DON'T YOU NO THE C= MACHINES ARE THE BEST EVER MADE? ASK YERSELF HOE MUCH YOU"VE SPENT ON STOOPID PC HARDWARE SINCE THE C64 CAME OUT... YOU COULD HAVE GONE TO PARIS FOR LUNCH EVERY DAY WITH THE MONEY INSTEAD IF YOU"D JUST STUCK WITH A PERFECTLY GOOD WORKING COMPUTER! LIKE, DUH
I MEAN REALLY IF ~x~~~~~~~~x~X~x~~xx~x~X~ NO CARRIER
Slashdot Mirror
"Opera already have a very nice version resized to fit in a PDA and it's integrated with Google Gears persistence. It would be a *perfect* execution plataform but unfortunately Windows Mobile is so buggy that it deactivates the IP stack if you're not physically connected to the network so it's impossible to run an offline version of the application. But if Opera includes an embedded web server... "
This is the most insightful and cogent point made on this whole page.
And what he said about windows on phones. Holy crap what a disaster. I've seen more people return phones because they kept "freezing" than I can shake a stick it. Funny how it only happens to phones running windows. And from what I've seen it happened to all of them among people I know in the area.
Gears is indeed a keystone.
"What about auto-updates?
This is something what prevents me from even considering Opera as main web-browser.
IE (in a way) does it. Chrome does it. FireFox does it. Opera - doesn't. "
THANK FUCKING CHRIST!
Firefox's annoying habit of doing something I don't want it to do is disgusting.
You can't help people that don't want help and firefox updating a browser to something I know doesn't work right with sites that are important to me or XP updating and rebooting when I left my machine in a complex and known state are inexcusable. *my* computer, *I'M* in charge and don't you dare change stuff "just cause".
"Does it look Mac-like yet?"
Download the right theme and it can. My 15 year old daughyter did this.
" But at least you can say it's rendered properly. "
Oh really?
http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/slashdot/slashoops.jpg http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/slashdot/sldot.jpg ---- Opera 9
The last slashdot "upgrade" in the CSS was never checked against opera. Please don't do that again.
" Opera is definitely not the fastest when it comes to JavaScript performance, since they don't have a JIT. It does however render pages pretty damn fast, and, in my experience, it's got the smoothest scrolling of them all (yes, even Chrome"
I dunno about that. At the beginning of this year with Opera 9.6 facebook was downright snappy. Af their last "upgrade" FB began, because of javascript, to take up to a second or 5 to render a complex page. With Opera 10 its instant. Similarly so but not as bad for ebay.
I haven't seen any other browser be as responsive on the worlds worst JS pages like FB.
"I used Opera for a while, then moved to Chrome when it came out. Opera is too "feature-complete". I want fast and light, and Opera 9.5 felt bulky. Their new default theme didn't help that impression, either. "
I hear ya. I wish there was an "opera lite" that just did web. Or that you could configure in parts you want and parts you don't and not have to pay the memory/disk footprint for them.
I don't use mouse gestures, ever, for example. Nor mail.
"Dude, necrophilia is wrong. "
Not if you're both dead.
"Speaking of CNN.com, if you use Opera to look at it, do you ever have caching issues? "
No.
updated 6:23 p.m. EDT, Tue June 16, 2009
Tools --> preferences --> Advanced --> history.
Check documents: always
Check images: every 5 hours
just like it was in the default configuration, and it should work just fine. If it doens't try another browser, your ISP may be caching it with squid or something.
" But for the exact reason you cited, I don't use Opera. It's a constant reminder that the web is a complete wreck. I'll often give people examples of how huge websites bite it when you load them on Opera. So in the end what have you gained? Are you suffering for a cause? Do you want to constantly reminded that most "web developers" don't know there is a standard?"
I hear you, and I do the same thing. But I program for opera then hack it to make IE and FF work. I think anybody that makes it work in IE deserves what they get.
Occasionally I'll have to use IE or FF for some site that dosn't work with Opera, but that's getting less and less often, in fact I don't think it's happened once this year yet.
"What are the big features of Opera you actually find useful? "
Couldn't name one in particular. I work at home, on the web. And what I notice is if I try to use any other browser it takes me longer to do everything. Little things like with opera you can "paste and go" a url into the addess bar. With everything else you paste the url then hit enter or click the go button. Little things add up and my gut feel is it'd take me 12 hours to do 10 hours work with anything else. And all things being equal the more fiddly stupid stuff I don't have to do the happier my work day is. Plus I just hate waiting and every other browser seems to keep me waiting more and not let me know what on earth is happening.
If I couldn't use opera I'd probably go back to the unix shell and find different work. I realize opera may take some getting used to but once you are used to it every other browser seems like its 10 yrs old.
"Yeah, IIS7 is sufficiently far ahead of Apache in almost every way that you're right - Microsoft doesn't have to compete with Apache. "
Thank you Mr. Ballmer. Any other fantasies you'd care to share with us today?
" I concur, 10 alpha was pretty rough. 10 beta is a huge improvement over 9.64."
Opera 10-alpha didn't work at all for me. External source viewers didn't work and I use vi. It crashed every time, was a known bug and is fixed in 10 beta.
" I don't want my pictures, banking, email (thanks Gmail!), etc to rely on a P2P network of home computers. I want servers doing what they do best, serving data from a facility with backup power, redundant connectivity, and some sort of physical security. And I want my laptop/desktop doing what they do best, fetching info from the rest of the world."
How hard is it to say "Here's your www directory. Stuff you put there, pretend the whole world can look at". All the computers here have a www directory anyway for local home page so this is no great stretch.
Online banking has very little to do with this.
" I agree overall, although with one exception: Grandma? Are you going to explain to Grandma what P2P is? Or how to server content from her computer? Would that be before or after you explain to her the finer points of the TCP/IP stack?"
She knows all that stuff except the tcp/ip stack stuff which she doesn't need to know. She's not gonna "rent a VM at a datacenter though".
"This reminds me of Nero. Once a nice, light-weight CD burn software product, it is now so full of other cr*p that you have to spend 10 minutes going through the install menu pruning almost everything off."
It's not just Nero, it's everything. Norton Ghost stopped being useful at version 11.5, a 7 meg program. Version 14 is like 600 megs and isn't functionally that better.
http://oldversion.com/ is your friend.
"The acid 3 test is good, but so last year. Here is what would be cool. A mechanism that would allow the browser to use firefox plugins. Opera does not seem to have the wealth of plugins that firefox does, and from what I can tell, plugins is why people use firefox. Instead of wasting effort, why not make Opera so it can use the Firefox model?"
True 'dat.
Every now and then I try Firefox. Every time it seems, by comparison to Opera, a klunky, slow, featurelss POS. I can never understand why most of my my friends, who seem pretty smart otherwise, use it. In a word: plugins.
"OMG! OMG! Opera is leveraging their dominant position in the web browser market to unfairly compete with Apache! Why does everybody whine when Microsoft does this and Opera gets away scot free?"
Because Miscorosft doesn't actually have anything that really competes with Apache.
" Exactly. Slashdot 2.0 is horribly broken on Opera, and has been for months. Sometimes they fix something and it temporarily works what I assume is supposed to be correct, but generally something is wrong. "
This is what that looks like in Opera 10:
http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/slashdot/slashoops.jpg
Some Opera betas aren't that usable. Like 10-alpha. 10-beta is usable, I tried it meekly, it holds up and I've been using it exclusively ever since it came out. The javascript engine is wicked fast and now things like ebay and fb pages don't take abnormally long to render.
"I disagree. Its not that difficult to rent a VM somewhere in a datacenter."
Let me just explain this to Grandma.
"I just don't see the need for a home user to ever serve web content. Binary file sharing, yes, but not web content."
And some poeple just couldn't see the need for more than 640K, ever.
Nothing new and innovative on the net made sense when it first came out. It took from 1999 to 1996 for the web to go from 0 to 500 sites. Brian Reid once sent me a "hyperlink" to "Palo Alto, the first city on the web" in 1993 or 4 and I had to download Mosaic to see it. And I thought it was really stupid and hoped he hadn't spent too much time on this.
"I'm sure all seven Opera users will be thrilled."
Funny about that. I'm one of them and have used nothing but Opera since version 6 which came out about 7 years ago.
Did you know slashdot looks like crap in Opera? Given that Opera is the most HTML compliant browser out there what does that tell you?
I mentioned this to "management" and he said "Most of our poeple use IE so it doesn't matter".
So, carry on degrading the web and open standards while bleating the opposite.
"No kitchen sink?"
No, that's a widget that you have to download separately.
That's such a delta thing to do. Sheesh.
As if there needs to be another way to sink (lots of) money into the black hole that are commercial celphones. I'm still trying to figure out how to actually get Telus' "$15/mo unlimted text messages" to actually only cost $15/mo.
Android/wifi/skype pls hrrythfckup.
R
While my guitar gently weeps.
"First "Why""
HI! I AM BIFF!
WHY DO YOU ASK WHY? DON'T YOU NO THE C= MACHINES ARE
THE BEST EVER MADE? ASK YERSELF HOE MUCH YOU"VE SPENT
ON STOOPID PC HARDWARE SINCE THE C64 CAME OUT... YOU
COULD HAVE GONE TO PARIS FOR LUNCH EVERY DAY WITH THE
MONEY INSTEAD IF YOU"D JUST STUCK WITH A PERFECTLY
GOOD WORKING COMPUTER! LIKE, DUH
I MEAN REALLY IF
~x~~~~~~~~x~X~x~~xx~x~X~
NO CARRIER