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100 Comments
- IndigoChill, on 06/15/2009, -4/+34Opera is a very capable browser and largely underrated, but unless they put together a campaign to rival Firefox's impressive grassroots campaign, it won't mean much. The fact is, with Firefox being open source, anything that Opera has as an advantage can be replicated by plug-ins.
- feelfree86, on 06/15/2009, -2/+25http://www.opera.com/freedom/
...get ready people (not sure for what though) - CrazySpaniard, on 06/15/2009, -4/+25***** yeah opera
- scy1192, on 06/15/2009, -2/+20dugg for a browser other than Firefox or Chrome being on the front page
- CrazySpaniard, on 06/15/2009, -6/+19that's the whole idea
instead of memory hogging extensions, most of the good stuff is already built in - MeLikeyTacos, on 06/15/2009, -5/+16Opera: The best browser you've never used. I run Opera on all of my older, not-so-fast computers. The app loads fast and it browses nice and snappy without thrashing the drive like IE and FF do on those systems. I also like the "Speed Dial" it uses for the home screen.
- cedwick, on 06/15/2009, -3/+14Ya know, "why don't you install these extensions or skin" is what my firefox friends tell me when I mention a feature Opera has and firefox doesnt.
- cl2yp71c, on 06/15/2009, -3/+14Opera has had and always will have the out-of-the-box advantage over Firefox. Getting and experimenting with a plethora of extensions before having a fully functional browser doesn't really do it for me, no thanks, FF.
Let's not forget about: http://www.opera.com/freedom/
*holds breath* - DiscoLando, on 06/15/2009, -11/+20Can it make a dent in the desktop? No.
- Llanowar, on 06/15/2009, -1/+10Chrome was released by a giant corporation called Google.(you might have heard of them) With their size it was easy to make a lot of people aware of a new browser which, geeks especially, really wanted to try out. (Not saying that it's not any good)
But in any event, ther is no real comparison. An equally good browser from a smaller company wouldn't get such a marketshare so quickly.
Opera has chances to make a dent in the Desktop, but there are some changes that need to be made. If they go Open Source that would certainly help a lot, but it ain't needed. A good commercial campaign could do wonders.
It's surprising how many people still think Opera is a pay to use browser filled with ads for the free users.
It's also surprising how few people know that a lot of ther favorite firefox plug ins are a standard in Opera and have been for quite some time.
So I think the biggest blame for their lack of a big browser market is a pervious pay to use system and a lack of a good commercial campaign.
Also, note that it was Google (who can't do anything wrong according to so many fanboys) was the one who enabled Opera to go free. - cedwick, on 06/15/2009, -2/+10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)#F ... < I suggest reading that about Opera10 and the Acid tests. 100/100 which not many other browsers score.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 - nutmac, on 06/15/2009, -2/+10Site failing with only 62 diggs.
Joe Brockmeier
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
Opera has done well with mobile, but can it take the desktop by storm? Opera 10 beta 1 was released last week, and Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier takes a look at Opera 10 to see if it can make some noise next to Firefox, IE, Safari, and Chrome.
Last week, Opera released the first beta of Opera 10 with a visual refresh and a number of enhancements and new features. The question is, can Opera make a dent in the desktop or is Opera on the desktop just a Quixotic effort in the face of Firefox and Internet Explorer?
It’d be silly to say that Opera isn’t doing well — the Opera mobile browser is one of the most popular around. But Opera on the desktop has less market share than Chrome or Safari according to some measures, consistently around 2.2% in the reports from W3Schools.com.
Can 10 change that? Let’s have a look.
What’s new in 10
Opera 10 includes several new features and improvements that are worth a look if you spend a lot of time on the Web. Mostly, 10 is an incremental update that hones existing features and makes Opera a little better in several areas.
Some of the features are new to Opera, but not new to users. For instance, Opera now has an auto update feature, and inline spell checking. Those features aren’t new to Firefox users, but they’re a nice addition to a solid browser.
Opera has also tweaked its Speed Dial feature, which allows you to create several “speed dials” for favorite sites. The original feature allowed users to choose nine sites for speedy access, but now the sky’s the limit. If you can fit ‘em in your browser window, the more the merrier.
A book shouldn’t be judged by its cover, but it’s really hard not to judge a program by the way it looks. Previous releases of Opera have looked, well, really clunky. This has improved over the years, but even the 9.x series was a bit clunky looking. At least to my tastes and to others I’ve spoken to. This is, of course, highly subjective.
However, 10 is really attractive. (Again, subjective.) For once, Opera doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb on my desktop, though a few of the UI choices are a bit different. For example: When I pop out a chat window in Google Mail, it opens a new window. In Opera, the new window is opened within the existing window - it doesn’t pop out of the border of the existing Opera instance, unless you specifically “detach” it.
If you have a lot of screen real estate, the tab bar has a really nice improvement. By default, you’ll see the standard tabs. But you can drag the tab bar down a bit and see thumbnails of the sites in the tabs instead of just the site’s “favicon” and page title. This is pretty handy if you have the room to take advantage of it.
Speed, and Does it Matter?
Opera 10 adds “Opera Turbo” for the browser, so you can speed up browsing on slower networks. According to the site, Opera “uses Opera proxy servers to compress the traffic before it reaches the Opera browser on the client’s computer.
In my experience, turning on “Turbo” means fuzzy graphics and slightly faster load times. I tested the build for openSUSE, so I can’t say for sure if this is true across all platforms. Maybe there’s something wonky with Opera interacting with a graphics library on openSUSE, or who knows what. But the Turbo didn’t seem to make a huge difference when using broadband, anyway, so I turned it off pretty quickly. For the poor souls stuck on dial-up, a little fuzziness might be acceptable if it means not waiting 30 minutes for a Web page to load.
Overall, page rendering in Opera 10 beta 1 seems slightly faster overall than in Firefox 3.5 beta 4. But, the difference is marginal, and unless you’re really impatient, the speed differential probably isn’t going to make a major difference.
A Word about Widgets
Firefox has add-ons, Opera has Widgets. Opera has actually managed to garner a fairly healthy community of widget developers. It has hundreds of widgets ranging from games to RSS readers, to Twitter tools,and Web developer tools.
I hate to keep measuring Opera with the Firefox yardstick, but looking through the widgets available from Opera, I don’t see quite as many useful or interesting add-ons for the Opera browser. Granted, you’ll find more games for Opera, but I haven’t found the variety of tools that you’ll find for Firefox.
Has the Fat Lady Sun for Opera?
Opera does have one thing going for it that you won’t find with Firefox. It’s sort of a one-stop shop for browsing, email, IRC, and productivity (at least notes). While Firefox can add IRC (via the Chatzilla plugin) it doesn’t offer integrated email. So if you want it all in one fell swoop, try Opera.
I really love the Opera Notes feature. Using Notes, you can copy bits of Web pages to Notes in Opera, which is pretty useful if you spend a lot of time gathering information on the Web to pull together later. This includes text and URLs, though — oddly — not images.
Opera 10 is a really solid browser, it’s fast, it’s stable and the week of testing I’ve put it through suggests that it’s very compatible with most Web sites. I’ve only run into a couple of sites that complained about my browser choice, and they worked just fine with Opera — it was mostly a matter of browser detection run amok.
Will it overtake the desktop like Firefox? I sort of doubt it. While Opera has a lot to recommend it, there’s not a huge reason to switch. It’s at par with Firefox, better at some things, not so good at others, but it needs to have a few killer features to get the sort of momentum that Firefox does. However, as a testbed for Opera’s mobile devices — which I suspect is the chief reason for keeping it around — Opera does just fine. - chrysalis, on 06/15/2009, -2/+9Simple question, short answer: not a chance.
Unless its engine goes opensource, maybe. - dextermanas, on 06/15/2009, -1/+8Thank you, Captain Vague.
I use facebook all the time on Opera 10; I for one don't know WTF you and those digging you up are talking about. - dextermanas, on 06/15/2009, -2/+8A dent? It's already been made. A minor dent, but a dent none-the-less.
Opera has been behind many of the browser innovations since more than a decade now, starting from browser-tabs to the speed-dial and now Turbo (which is still yet to be copied by any other browser). Whether you use Opera or not, chances are quite a few of the features you see in your browser would have its roots in Opera.
So has it made a dent? Hell yeah. - nutmac, on 06/15/2009, -6/+12Opera 10 is designed for Opera users, with its idiosyncrasies/personalities and hidden power features that Opera users love. For average IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari users, Opera represents a strange world (although 10 feels a bit less so than 9) with complex customization options made worse by odd defaults. Criticizing Opera will almost undoubtedly result in Opera users pointing you to "why don't you install these extensions or skin" or "why haven't you set this and this settings here?"
- Lst01, on 06/15/2009, -1/+6I usually use Firefox but tend to use Opera a lot as well, if for no other reason then trying to support innovation in the browser industry.
- Rudegar, on 06/15/2009, -1/+6no it just went from alpha to beta thats not being released
- Kazbaeden, on 06/15/2009, -1/+6Facebook works fine fore me. What's giving you trouble?
- cl2yp71c, on 06/15/2009, -3/+8For most users, Opera has the same functionality as Firefox with a handful of extensions.
In terms of speed, Opera also trumps FF- but not Chrome(which is hardly functional regardless).
Unless you're a dev or an internet fiend, Opera is the way to go. And with the new Opera 10 release, that too will soon change.
I just wish the Opera team implemented a stronger OpenSource platform than the ***** widgets. - gamepr0, on 06/15/2009, -1/+5He's right, opera doesn't support some commonly implemented CSS3 stuff, acid probably won't test that as CSS3 isn't standard yet.
- bonjourmr, on 06/15/2009, -2/+6Opera 10, once again, introduces stuff that is going to be copied by the other browsers next release and the consumer is going to think that it is new, simply because they haven't tried Opera. Opera is a fantastic browser, the only thing letting it needs is a bigger open source community and better plugins!
- merreborn, on 06/15/2009, -0/+4Chrome overtook Opera in a matter of months.
If a newcomer can beat Opera's marketshare that easily... things just don't look good for Opera.
However, I think they'll continue to own the mobile market for another couple of years. Opera Mobile is still one of the best mobile browsers on the market (although, that reflects more on its competition than it does on opera) - fjsferreira, on 06/15/2009, -7/+11Unfortunately, no. Opera, the browser who could claim all these years to be the fastest, is losing very fast in this area to almost all it's rivals.
Unless Opera 10 implements the new Carakan javascript engine, in terms of speed, it'll still be one generation behind Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and Firefox being capable of implementing almost all of opera features through extensions, and being faster, why the switch?
I feel very sad when I compare opera opening pages side by side with google chrome and firefox. The once fastest browser is a shadow of itself today, I really hope Opera 10 restores some of it's glory. - dextermanas, on 06/15/2009, -1/+5"strange world"? wtf? It's just a frikkin minor difference in UI.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out where the stop/back/foward buttons and the address bar is! Even my Mom was able to use Opera at its defaults without having to explain anything to her.
The "average user" doesn't need to dive into the "complex customization options" world. If the user is above average, he/she should be able to easily figure out how to customize stuff. - HonoredMule, on 06/15/2009, -1/+4IE was just on the front page...did you digg that too?
- archer75, on 06/15/2009, -11/+14Opera. The browser nobody cares about.
- FearlessFreep, on 06/15/2009, -3/+6After every forum discussion about browsers turned into grass-roots sales pitches for Opera, I finally decide to give it a try.
Tried it for a few hours but was un-impressed. On Mac, it just had a messy and disorganized UI. A bazillion options with poor logic behind how they work or where to find them.
They pioneered some interesting concepts but with mediocre execution that the others have since done better. - Rubis1, on 06/16/2009, -1/+4@ HonoredMule
Opera is much lighter than Firefox even without any extensions installed. Gecko is just too big compared to a light engine like Webkit. That combined with the fact that I have tried at least 10 extensions to add decent mouse gestures to Firefox and none of them were nearly as good as Opera's.
Also, Opera is more standards compliant than Firefox. It is debatable if it or Safari passed the Acid 3 test first. - fjsferreira, on 06/15/2009, -1/+4Are you from 2005? Hey man, great things here in 2009. watch the wikipedia page on one man called barack obama, he'll be very famous.
- svivian, on 06/16/2009, -1/+4Speed is NOT just about Javascript! For starters Opera is generally faster at regular page rendering (i.e. HTML/CSS).
But the main advantage is the Opera interface is lightning fast. Try opening 20 tabs in the background (e.g. from Digg) in Firefox, then Opera, and you'll see how massive the difference is. Firefox starts locking up, Opera stays responsive. And Opera's fast-back hasn't come close to being equalled yet. - merreborn, on 06/15/2009, -1/+4"I do not have full support of the JCXP team on the Opera Boycott"
lol, awesome. You couldn't even get the people on your own site?
If you can't convince them, what makes you think you're gonna convince anyone else? - dextermanas, on 06/15/2009, -1/+4^ Well it's just proof that most sites today do work properly in Opera. It's not because Opera had to make some major rendering changes, it's because websites are starting to wake up to web standards issues.
Opera scores a 100% on the Acid3 and it's standards are widely regarded as compliant as webkits. If a website isn't rendering properly, chances are, it's the websites fault, not Opera's.
@ejhansen71:
Instead of sitting here doing nothing, complain to the webmaster and additionaly, use the "Report a site problem" feature in Opera. - BobWoodshed, on 06/15/2009, -2/+5I'm a former Firefox user and used to think the same thing, but I switched to Opera for one very simple reason. Sure all of Opera's features can be replicated with plug-ins, but most of them break every time you upgrade Firefox. I want all of my features to work all of the time and I'm certainly not going to hold onto a dated version to keep functionality.
I'd like to preface, though, that I never used a ton of plug-ins to begin with. If you're somebody who uses a ton of very specific plug-ins then Opera obviously isn't a solution. Just my 2 cents. - dtfinch, on 06/15/2009, -4/+6Opera is the browser that I always keep up to date, but never use apart from trying each new version and hoping I like it this time.
- cedwick, on 06/15/2009, -1/+3So your running linux and complaining that you have to customize it? wow... I thought us linux users would be used to that by now, I guess your new to this.
- merreborn, on 06/17/2009, -0/+2For Joe Sixpack, yes, all browsers are nearly identical.
...In the same way that a Prius, a Ferrari, and a pickup truck are identical to my great-grandmother. - merreborn, on 06/15/2009, -1/+3For basic, user-facing functionality, yes, they're pretty much all the same -- except for the huge performance differences.
From a developer's perspective however, they're very, very different. - dextermanas, on 06/15/2009, -1/+3The keyword here is "can". People have different requirements, but they might not always be fulfilled by extensions or the fact that Fx is open source. For instance, I use the Turbo feature all the time, but there's no telling when Fx will get such a feature.
Also, being open source hasn't helped overcome the bug (which I've submitted multiple times btw) that causes Firefox to re-download all images on a page, even though the page has been recently visited and all images are (or should be) in the cache. - Eddyvillain, on 06/16/2009, -0/+2I have had a few issues with Facebook similar to what AdmiralAcbar is saying. Chat has issues at times (although as far as I can tell it seems to mainly manifest when I am in certain apps within Facebook).
And yes, commenting on status has been iffy as well. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Haven't figured out what is triggering it to not work. - HonoredMule, on 06/15/2009, -0/+2Quite the contrary...the "whole idea" is that we can have our cake and eat it too. We get the security and political friendliness of open source, the real-world safety of non-profit leadership instead of commercially-driven interests, great javascript performance and standards compliance, powerful extensibility and customization, and the option for barebone installations that minimize memory use (as if that were a meaningful benefit for a primary application over actual usability).
As the platform continues to grow, we're starting to see major focus on ease of (extension) development, overall performance/responsiveness, and memory usage/management in any configuration. What will you have left to complain about then, other than "it's too powerful?" - cedwick, on 06/15/2009, -1/+3<!--
We start our little story with the invention of the modern day computer.
Over the years, the computers grew in numbers, and the next natural step in the evolution was to connect them together. To share things. But as these little networks grew, some computers gained more power than the rest and called themselves servers. Today, millions of people are connected together in a great web ...
-->
From the source - nutmac, on 06/15/2009, -1/+2Like I said, even with the customization, Opera feels different from other apps. And Opera isn't really that easy for average users to customize, with options scattered in many different dialog boxes and menu option. The point is, an average user shouldn't have to customize much to feel at home. It's okay to have a ton of options for power users, but the defaults should be designed for average users.
- svivian, on 06/16/2009, -0/+1I agree with nutmac, though you should have left out "Chrome" in your initial post, because that suffers from the same problem of looking alien on the OS.
- Rubis1, on 06/16/2009, -0/+1I'm hoping for a better plugins wrapper for 64 bit Linux builds. That is really the only complaint I have with Opera.
- svivian, on 06/16/2009, -0/+1I love Opera, but you're right. It will never be a mainstream browser and won't ever get above 5%. It's a shame but the truth.
- Frayed_Knot, on 06/20/2009, -0/+1I have Opera installed with 32-bit flash as an alternative to Firefox with 64-bit flash (which is still alpha (and sometimes it shows)).
- hardeep1singh, on 06/17/2009, -0/+1For that, they'll have to offer a new Opera version for Symbian s60v3 and s60v5 phones, otherwise they'll be dead in mobile space too, they've already been bettered by Nokia's Browser.
- cjnkns, on 06/17/2009, -0/+1If Opera looked better on linux I would probably use it more ...
- DeathRay2K, on 06/16/2009, -0/+1dextermanas, the Acid tests are not a measure of standards compliance, they are a measure of javascript speed and a variety of obscure functions designed to test the limits of a browser's niche capabilities.
Both Webkit and Firefox are well ahead of Opera in CSS3 and HTML5 implementations.
No one outside of Opera's tiny fanbase considers it to be on par with WebKit. -
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