OSNews

Since the 8.x series, Opera has been the best browser in all areas (speed, features, security, etc...). Much faster and feature-rich than Firefox or IE for instance. I yet have to see what they could do to improve it!

But yet, Opera has lost the battle because of the ads. People got pissed off having to pay or to see ads. Many people have been mad at Opera since then even if it's now free of charge and ad-free at the same time. Some ignorants also still think Opera is adware.

Opera Software understands that and now left the desktop and targets the mobile market.

Left the desktop? I think not.

Many people have been mad at Opera since then even if it's now free of charge and ad-free at the same time. Some ignorants also still think Opera is adware.

There's still the matter of Opera being proprietary software.

Firefox was not only able to build a stronger brand and a larger extention ecosystem, but embedded developers are using the Firefox codebase to build specialized web environments without paying for Opera. If that wasn't enough to contend with, WebKit has enormous momentum behind it now that Apple and KDE are reunited.

That said, Opera 9.5 seems to be somewhere in between Firefox 3 and 4 in terms of core technology. It doesn't have the offline application functionality of FF3 or the high-level scripting support slated for FF4, but the ECMAScript virtual machine is probably more comparable to the latter.

Opera is great technology. But a web platform certainly qualifies as a basic commodity these days, and that doesn't bode well for a proprietary software vendor with a marketshare problem. You have to wonder whether Qt-style dual-licensing is inevitable for Opera.

>Opera is great technology. But a web platform certainly qualifies as a basic commodity these days

Depends: average web platforms such as Firefox are a commodity yes, but Opera is much better.

I really wonder how could Firefox spread so much even though unless you use extensions (which few do) it's really inferior to Opera (sluggish).

My only grip with Opera is its UI which has some annoying warts that prevent it to be truly great: for exemple Opera can reflow a webpage so that it fits your window's width which is really nice but you have to do it page per page, there's no way to toggle a switch 'fit width' to have it permanently: a great feature spoiled by a poor UI choice (and that's not the only one).

My only grip with Opera is its UI which has some annoying warts that prevent it to be truly great: for exemple Opera can reflow a webpage so that it fits your window's width which is really nice but you have to do it page per page, there's no way to toggle a switch 'fit width' to have it permanently: a great feature spoiled by a poor UI choice (and that's not the only one).

Tools > Preferences > Web Pages > Check "Fit to Width"

Please do research first.

You have a gripe. Get a grip.

>> I really wonder how could Firefox spread so much even though unless you use extensions (which few do) it's really inferior to Opera (sluggish).

It also has proper marketing team on it, it's almost like a virtual company that even makes profits! Opera could use the same too...

But none of those matter to the general user. Firefox got momentum because geeks of all stripe and by whatever means pushed it out to friends, and friends of friends, and so on.

But none of those matter to the general user.

Agreed. The average joe doesn't know what open-source means. Heck, most people I know think Windows came free when they bought their computer. IE is also "free", LOL.

Joe User:

Hold on, Joe... A brand new desktop version finally released after more than a year of active development means that Opera has now left the desktop?

Where's the logic?

@Joe User

This is complete baloney.

You produce one single quote which supports your point! In fact, the question has been asked, and the answer has been clear: You are wrong.

Opera Software has clearly stated that the desktop is a key product which they expect to make good money from.

Never has anyone at Opera stated that they are on the desktop "just to be present". Never has anyone at Opera stated that they don't count on money generated by the desktop market.

On the contrary.

More than a quarter of their revenue comes from the desktop product. In the second quarter of 2007, desktop revenue increased more than 160 per cent (compared to a growth of about 140 per cent the quarters before that).

You didn't even answer the OP's question about how a product that has been in active development for more than a year means that they have "left the desktop".

Please stop making baseless claims and completely bogus statements.

Edited 2007-09-05 18:11

The 64-bit support is pretty sweet, too. About time.

If I close a firefox window full of tabs, when I start firefox again it ask me if I which to restore my session or start a new one... Is that what you're talking about?

Nah; Opera has had the ability since 8 I think to let you re-open TABs you closed.

With this they are letting you re-open Windows (full of TABS) you have closed while you are using Opera.

Say you have 3 windows open, one with News websites, one with tech sites, one with personal fluff and you accidentally close your News one, you can now get it to reopen it, including all the pages you had at the state they were at before.

Beforehand one you closed a *window* you could not retrieve that from another window.

If you close Opera by mistake, simply re-open it and all your tabs go back to the state they were in when you closed it.

This may be a setting you need to adjust (although I thought it was the default behavior), but the feature is still there.

I'm not talking about closing Opera completely.

If you only ever have one Opera window open then Opera's session saving will restore the windows, but that doesn't work when you have multiple windows open and just close one of them.

If you have more than one Opera window open, each displaying multiple pages, there's no warning when you close one of those windows. Prior to Opera 9.5 there was no way to restore the lost pages if a window was closed accidentally.

This was my main complaint about previous versions of Opera, one of the few things that even IE did better, so it's very nice to see it fixed.

Guess Opera isn't as hype-happy as MS or Apple. Besides, they give away the desktop version now with no ads, so the only way marketing would help is in the mobile version.

While Opera is much faster and more efficient that Firefox (no having to re-download stuff you already have in cache if you save to disk, for instance), I have to admit I got used to FF's interface quirks and extensions. Opera 10 vs. Firefox 3 should be an interesting match-up.

Merlin is the current 9.2x browser.

Kestrel is the 9.5 that has just been released in alpha (and as the basis of the OperaMini4 rendering and Wii Browser)

Peregrine is being worked on as the next version which will probably become v10 some time down the track.

Maybe they should have v10ed it but given they had publically said already that Peregrine was going to be the 10.x version they'd no doubt get hammered by some *yawn* types if they changed with with Kestrel.

according to a blog 9.5 is transitional on
the way to 10.0

If I remember correctly, starting with qt4 KDE style will be used for pure qt4 apps (please correct me if I'm wrong). So say hello to Kopera and sKype .

Pure Qt apps can already use the same style as KDE apps within the same revision, ie Qt3 apps can use the same style as KDE3, so naturally one can expect Qt4 apps to be able to use the same style as KDE4. That would be nothing new.

Regardless, it is irrelevant as far as Opera is concerned, since Opera uses their own custom cross platform widgets. The only part of Linux Opera that can obey a Qt style is and will be the menu bar.

Your only hope for fitting in just right is with painstakingly made Opera skins like http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/info/?id=3336 or http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/info/?id=1717
Better get to hoping someone makes an Opera skin to match the Oxygen style.

Edited 2007-09-05 00:41

Opera's fonts have always been fine for me on Gentoo and Arch, so it must be something missing on Slackware or your particular setup.

Flash has always worked for me too, but not always perfectly. I used to be unable to play embedded flvs in Opera, but they work fine for the most part now. It's still a little buggy with flash on multiple tabs.

I dunno about resources... In the past when I've compared it to Firefox it used a lot less, but I never really pay attention these days since it doesn't seem to affect the rest of my system when I run Opera.

I suspected that may have been the case.



Flash 7 or 8 used to work, but I can't seem to get Flash 9 to work. Maybe some tinkering will fix it. Not really had the time to properly investigate the issue.



This used to be the case for me too but FF2 seems much nippier on my system than Opera. Again, this might just be down to Opera's defaults not being ideal for my system.

1) fonts look ugly in Slackware 12. This may well be my set up, but every other app has nicely AAed fonts.

For me they look just great on OpenSUSE.

2) No Flash support. As much as I dislike flash, it would be nice to have the option to run flash plugins from time to time.

Maybe check your path to Flash? How did you install it? From the package or from the Adobe web site? Works fine here also.

3) it's a little bit too resource hungry.

Here it uses 13MB or RAM. Firefox uses 52MB.

On the Solaris static build its only consuming 6.5MB memory for two tabs (osnews.com and neowin.net).

I don't know where the poster was getting off claiming it was bloated because both you and I demonstrate how slim Opera is compared to firefox.

No way 6.5Mb of ram, besides if you have plenty of ram it's not a problem, even 52Mb for firefox is nothing and it gets freed anyway when closed.

You say no way, I say way:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v420/kaiwai/screenshot5.png

I have 2gigs of memory but it doesn't give application writers a green light to allow their applications to let it 'all hang out'.

Bullsh*t. All you've demonstrated is how slim Opera is on /YOUR/ system. Opera is more memory hungry than FireFox 2 on my slackware build. However, unlike you, I ("the poster") was not paraiding my personal experience as fact - I was only pointing out a few niggles I had with an otherwise exceptional webbrowser.

Perhaps next time, instead of posting meanless self-benchmarked statistics, you could actually post something constructive to help streamline my install (like the other replies managed to in varing degrees)

Hey, firefox is hungrier here as well... about your comments relating ugly fonts, are you using static-qt or shared-qt build? If you use shared-qt, you will get nice fonts and I think that Opera will also be lighter, it will use slack's qt lib.

I find it interesting that you're abusing me on the forum for the exact thing what you did. You posted here your experience based on your 'meanless self-benchmarked statistics'.

I never made an attack on your personal itegrity, I jjust find it interesting how there can be such a large disparity between the reported memory usage that I and the previous posted reported and what you claim.

Also, just to add to my previous reply - Bloated was your words, not mine.

Next time show a little respect and read peoples posts properly before putting people down for them

You actually said:



If you didn't want that interpretation mangle beyond what intended then you should have stated something to the effect, "I, however, do not mean that Opera is bloated, but I am surprised as to the amount of resources which Opera consumes " - I assume you're making the statement with no comparison to an existing browser.

To me, it sounds like you were complaining that Opera was bloated. If that wasn't your intention then should you clearly state it in your post - that you're not saying it is bloated, just that resource usage seems a higher than what one would expect.

Solutions!

1) Opera will not respect your qtconfig or Kcontrol font settings but can change the font face and size under Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Fonts. Also make sure you are using a "shared" QT version of Opera, not a static one (Slackware should be packaging the shared version).

Here is a screen shot of the new Opera 9.50a1 amd64 build on my Gentoo/Gnome desktop so you can see what can be achieved:

http://rs178gc2.rapidshare.com/files/53443019/opera950a1.png

2) Flash will work on Opera provided Opera can find the flash plug-in library, which is probably somewhere in /opt. You really should file a distro bug for this since it's a packaging issue. You can also point Opera to the correct location in Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced tab -> Content -> Plugin Options

3) ...but a lot more snappy than Firefox!

http://rs178gc2.rapidshare.com/files/53443019/opera950a1.png

Why are your fonts so blurry?

Because you're using a CRT?

I have an issue with your applet. Namely, it eats every resource imaginable framecounting three 3D rendered gears turning so your employer can tell whether their game engine is viable or not.

I'd also like to know why your game library needs special permissions.

BTW, the loading isn't "stalling," it's an issue with your libraries needing individual permissions unlocked. Reload the page and you'll see the thermometer move further then the browser asks a final time for permissions. Given that Opera is a codebase designed for both desktop and embedded applications, it's understandable that it doesn't hew to the one platform which requires plugins to access Java.

Edited 2007-09-06 16:26

Uhm, what zoom rendering bug?!? Opera flat out handles zooming of content BETTER than any other browser.

So what your saying is that, similar to IE, the popularity of Firefox is not due to technical excellence but to the fact that it's bundled with just about every linux distro? Oh the irony!

All joking aside, Firefox is a simple, easy to use browser. It obtained "critical mass" while Opera was still an ad-supported browser and I think that's the real reason it became so popular.

Personally, I prefer Opera (I even paid for it before it became free)for it's speed, configurability, and its great features (gestures, ad-blocking, tabs, session saving, etc.). It's exciting to see it moving forward.

File > Import > Feed List (It doesn't get much simpler than that!)

Good call