“This interview with Opera Software CEO and co-founder Jon S. von Tetzchner covers the Norwegian browser company’s history, products, and roadmap. It sheds light on the growing importance of Linux in the embedded market, and the growing importance of the embedded market to Opera.”
It is always interesting to get inside the mind of someone working on big/interesting problems. Managing memory when page sizes will vary and the OS provides no/limited memory management is an interesting problem, to me anyway.
I would also go so far as to say that their work with embedded, ultra low ram environments has helped them a LOT in the PC space.
I switched to Opera a few weeks back and have been very happy with it, especially from memory usage and speed of page loading points-of-view. [Unfortunately it doesn’t render some flash stuff, not sure why.]
One wish list item I would like is a button in an application that “swaps all”. Sometimes when Opera is completely idle, no pages loaded, it takes under 5MB of memory. Other times it takes 50MB. At those times I would like to “swap all”.
Floyd
http://www.just-think-it.com
Man, they really need to get the text-to-speech thing working in Linux. There are quite a few things keeping me away from Linux, and this is one of them. I’ve gotten quite used to having Stephen Hawking in the Windows version of Opera read stuff to me. In fact, I had it read this article to me via wireless headphones while I was cleaning my apartment. I’ve converted ebooks to audiobooks with it so I can listen to them in my car. I usually listen to the news every day through it as well. This little capability is (IMHO) the greatest thing to happen to web browsers since popup blocking. I sitll use Firefox mainly, but it’s always Opera when I want to use the voice feature.
And a quote from the article:
It’s the same browser, but we lost all the chrome. We’re not including the mail client and chat client and Usenet client and RSS reader… or the installer. If you throw all these things away, you have an even smaller package.
It would be nice if we could get a version of Opera on the desktop without this crap included.
text-to-speech
Sounds interesting, I think I’ll pick up that plug-in. Thanks!
It would be nice if we could get a version of Opera on the desktop without this crap included.
The Windows opera.dll is about 2.5MB, the .exe is 0.08MB. The article states they can barely fit the dechromed version on a floppy (i.e. 1.44MB). Doesn’t sound like much of a gain can be made here. Note that the features listed (but not used) are not taking up your RAM either.
Floyd
http://www.just-think-it.com