Opera Software on Tuesday plans to release a second preview version of Opera 9, the next version of its namesake Web browser. For the first time, the new version will include support for so-called widgets, Opera representative Thomas Ford said. Widgets are essentially small browser windows that display information taken from the Internet on a user’s desktop. The notion is similar in concept to the widget idea that Apple Computer uses in the Dashboard feature of Mac OS X. “It is really a big jump for us into Web applications,” Ford said. “They give people the information they want right on the desktop. Even if it is a Web page, people don’t have to go to the browser to see it.”
I can allready see this will be the year of the widgets/gadgets/whatever companies will call them.
Widgets in OS X for a long time allready, but if MS releases Vista this year we’ll have gadgets aswell… Then there is all the smaller companies (like Opera) that will follow up with their widget engines… 
Am I the only one who thinks that we are begining to reach market saturation on so-called ‘widgets’? As a long time Opera user, I feel that they may endanger their core market by concentrating on an arena ruled by Yahoo! (Konfabulator), Apple (Dashboard), as well as new projects such as KDE Plasma and Symphony OS. I’d rather have an ultra-efficient, standards-following browser than yet another widget engine.
As long as it doesn’t require to many resources from Opera to maintain their widgets, it’s simply some fun that desktop Opera enthusiasts can have with css. If I were an Opera user, I would play with it just like I had written some of my own karamba apps for fun.
BTW, Apple’s Dashboard will also run on KDE 4.
Correction, widgets for Apple’s Dashboard will also run on KDE4
.
In my opinion it seems like an attempt from Opera to compete with Firefox’s extension functionality. If that’s true, I don’t see it working too well, unless those widgets can do awesome stuff like foXpose.
This is not similar to Firefox’s extensions. Firefox doesn’t have anything similar to widgets either.
TP2 is out:
http://labs.opera.com/
Where do you have this info from? (dashboard on kde4)
OSNews had a story earlier:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13141
Where do you have this info from? (dashboard on kde4)
You can find this info here:
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1715
This would be really good as a hosting system for web-based applications.
Instead of running everything from within a browser window, you can have your own window pop up.
Imagine something like Writely looking as native on your desktop as MS Word, with no fancy browser paraphenalia. If they add the ability for launches (a la Java Webstart) they could really be on to something.
Who cares about widgets when the core rendering engine barely functions. I’ve tried Opera on several occasions, and always dumped it because it just does not display the page correctly (or in some cases, not at all).
Not trying to start a flame war – but what is the “big deal” about Opera when it can’t display simple pages the way they were coded?
Opera does have some rendering problems, but you are incorrect. Or at least exaggerating.
I use Opera everyday for browsing, banking, e-mail (both web-based and the m2 mail client) and all of the other standard web-browser activities and hiccups are rare. As rare as Firefox in my experience.
These widgets sound like a bad idea to me. I’m not interested. I’m sure others will enjoy them.
Edited 2006-02-06 20:02
Nice one troll.
Who cares about widgets when the core rendering engine barely functions. I’ve tried Opera on several occasions, and always dumped it because it just does not display the page correctly (or in some cases, not at all).
Splorfle!
Uh, no, that’s called lame ass coder who’s using IE/Mozilla specific coding.
I build and test webpages as a big component of my job and my default browser is Opera because, with rare exception, if it renders right in Opera, it renders right in any browser that supports CSS.
I am inclined to agree that Opera has rendering issues.
For example, espn.com does not show its flash stuff correctly, on my Opera 8.51 setup anyway.
Mostly I like Opera but I would prefer rendering improvements to gadgets I will never use.
This sounds more like Replicants from BeOS than it does the widgets from MacOSX. Sais they are on the desktop, which to me would indicate they are larger than those in the widget thing in OSX. I’ve had a Net+ replicant in one of my woprkspaces for years now, well before OSX was released.
Widgets aren’t nothing new in computing world, but combining them with Browsers that supports voice commands can be very, very interesting and powerful feature. With .torrent support coming up fully implemented we will certanly see some interesting widgets, and hopefully thse won’t stop on binary clocks, stock reports or weather information ^_^
On bad side, allowing 3d part developers to digg into Opera’s SDK might lead to security problems, though knowing the previous Opera records these if do appear will be minumum.
Looking forward to see how it turnes out.
Opera is all I use, I don’t use anything else. I am not a sophisticated user, I don’t even know what you guys are talking about. But I do know Opera doesn’t work for things like the U.S. Gov’t site to buy stamps online, the J.C. Penney catalog shopping cart, certain yahoo functions which change from version to version, and it has an infuriating glitch where it locks up if it displays an illegal cookie notification or something at the same time some other window requiring a response pops up(Alt-Tab will often get you out but not always by any means). Also I’d like to see a priority on responsiveness of the buttons. If Iclick a link leading to a crappy webpage that won’t quit loading and ties up my whole pc, I want to be able to kill it RIGHT NOW without ctrl-alt-del’ing the whole freakin’ browser; it needs a kill button that’s always on to halt whatever it’s engaged in. Stop designing a browser on the assumption everyone has a cable modem, design it to work correctly on a dial-up if you respect your own roots. Also I have yet to make it display the flash animation at one certain site that nobody else has trouble with, but in all fairness when I tried Firefox it displayed a “searching for plugins” thingy and went to sleep while it scratched it’s nuts and pretended to be searching.
That reminds me, by now shouldn’t about a dozen obnoxious Firefox zealots be trying to hijack this Opera thread like they usually do?
That reminds me, by now shouldn’t about a dozen obnoxious Firefox zealots be trying to hijack this Opera thread like they usually do?
Shhhhhhh! They´re probably sleeping… 🙂
(Typing this on Firefox on Windows…)