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The Internet

Opera 6.03 - The Wild Child of Browsers? 723

Posted by timothy from the home-of-the-singing-fat-lady dept.
IEEE1394 writes: "Ever wondered what other Internet browsers are available outside of Internet Explorer? Opera 6.03 from Opera Software boasts itself on being 'the fastest browser on earth.' Does it really live up to its claim of being unique and being fast? Is it the wild child of the browser family and can it ever surpass Internet Explorer as the browser of choice? Let's find out." Funny, IE isn't my browser of choice ...
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Opera 6.03 - The Wild Child of Browsers? More

Opera 6.03 - The Wild Child of Browsers?

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  • Lynx (Score:5, Funny)

    by 00_NOP ( 559413 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @08:39AM (#3630053) Homepage
    Will be faster. GIFs are for whimps.

    • Re:Lynx (Score:2, Funny)

      by vr ( 9777 )
      well.. you can turn off images in Opera. you think that will help? :)

    • Re:Lynx (Score:3, Informative)

      by Sarin ( 112173 )
      actually I think gifs work under lynx and or w3m. A while back I ran an xwindows session and had to look up a page from a terminal and I saw some gifs/jpeg/png whatever they were in my little xterminal window.

      • Re:Lynx (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Install the w3m-img package (for Debian, at least), and you'll get images right in the terminal. Really scared me the first time I saw it... I didn't think that such a thing was possible!

      • Re:Lynx (Score:3, Funny)

        by cyborch ( 524661 )

        NY Times random login generator [majcher.com] there should be more of these, we need to make our lives easier, there is no need whatsoever for nytimes to require my userinformation to display free articles. If they want to display their articles freely why have these login requirements at all?

    • Lynx users try links (Score:5, Informative)

      by rwa2 ( 4391 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @09:30AM (#3630340) Homepage Journal
      I discovered links [freshmeat.net] while browsing through dselect a few years ago, and it's pretty awesome for a text mode browser: It supports tables, frames, and will even pass mouse clicks through when run through an xterm... it's almost exactly like using a GUI browser with the graphics off! I'm really surprised more people don't know about it by now.

      Hmm, from freshmeat, it looks like the new version even has graphics support now :/ . Oh well :P . Give it a shot!

      dillo [freshmeat.net] was the only graphical browser I could ever get running on a 486/33Mhz with 16MB RAM (mozilla 0.8 ran, but swapped too much to be usable). Actually, come to think of it, Opera (5.x?) didn't work too bad either.

    • Re:Lynx (Score:2)

      by joss ( 1346 )
      Bah, I bet you're a vi (as opposed to ed) man.
      wget is the way to do it.
  • ... a very very slow monday for you to post such a story ... i think everyone slightly interested in opera that reads /. already tested it

    • Re:must be ... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by xtermz ( 234073 )
      Hmm... I guess car magazines shouldnt run reviews of new models, because anybody interested in those new cars already test drove them... and Money magazine shouldnt give any stock advice, because people who buy stocks already know what to buy...
      ...
      ..
      now do you see how flawed your argument is? So what if "everyone slightly interested in opera that reads /. already tested it ", believe it or not there actually are people who have _never used it_.. ...
      • I've got to agree with the other guy on this point. Opera's well-known, and they occasionally have stories about new releases and such. To just spontaneously put an intro story like this is a little silly.

        To take your car magazine analogy, it would be like Car and Driver publishing a story that assumed its readers never heard of Chevrolet.

  • IE often HAS to be your browser of choice (Score:4, Insightful)

    by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @08:42AM (#3630061)
    Many banking and other websites do not render properly with Mozilla, and I'm never going to pay for a browser like Opera.

    So unfortunately, sometimes you must choose IE.
    • In the UK, the Halifax bank (www.halifax.co.uk) has a very nice internet banking system. It even works with konq, and seems *very* standards complient. Username, password and a random question (like "Where were you borne"), and you're into the system, which is quite fast, minimal and clean, and all basic HTML as the frontend.

      In contrast, Natwest's banking system (www.natwest.co.uk) is awful. IE only, and with ActiveX and a stupid policy of typing in only randomly generated letters of your password (ie. to get in, you have to type in your access code, pin, and your xth, yth and zth letter of your password. Stupid. Legacy from phone banking, I expect.)
      • Okay, you can mark this a flame (it's certainly a bit of "grammar police"), especially since "Shade" probably just made a typo, but "borne" and "born" are not the same thing (at least the way most people use them). "Borne" is the past tense of "bear." When you ask someone where your were borne you are asking them where they were carried. "Born," in this context, is an adjective. This is especially confusing since it is okay to use "born" where you mean "borne," but it is NOT okay to use "borne" where you mean "born." (In other words, "born" is both an acceptable spelling for the past tense of "to bear" and it is the adjective "born" relating to birth, but "borne" is ALWAYS the past tense of "to bear" and is never the adjective. Muddy enough?)

        This has REALLY bugged me since "Imation" decided to use the slogan "Borne of 3M innovation." Apprently they think the extra "e" adds a touch of class and gravity. Never mind that it means they were carried on 3M's back like a lame donkey.

        Phew. I'm glad I got that off my chest. (I'm sorry everbody - I know it's bast taste to do a grammar flame - but it's meant to help, not to flame the poster who may have simply slipped a finger!)

  • It's my graphical browser of choice (Score:3, Informative)

    by tshoppa ( 513863 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @08:45AM (#3630071)
    When I've got to use a graphical browser on my Linux system, I choose Opera. IMHO the CSS support is much more consistent with the CSS standards than Netscape/Mozilla, and it's damn fast for all those godawful sites filled with graphics and tables everywhere - sites that bog down recent Mozillas even on multi-GHz CPU's.

    (I do have to admit that Netscape/Mozilla is much better with respect to CSS support than it was a few years ago, but they still aren't there.)

    Of course, I still do most of my browsing with lynx and/or links in text-mode, but Opera is really pretty good when I need graphics.

  • IE doesn't do png-transparency (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eddy ( 18759 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @08:46AM (#3630084) Homepage Journal

    MS has had 4+ years to get transparent PNGs working, but now I "begin" to think there's some kind of prestige in not getting it done. libpng is Open Source, so they can't use that without losing face. Apparently IE on Mac gets it right, which just adds to the bizarreness of the whole thing.

    For humor, run this PNG-test page [entropymine.com] through IE and some other browser. Opera: 100% correct, IE: ~5% correct

    (this is not a 'troll', nor is it a 'flamebait'. Use 'overrated' instead, if that is how you feel. Thanks)

    • Re:IE doesn't do png-transparency (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tack ( 4642 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @09:14AM (#3630247) Homepage
      IE can to PNG transparency; it just does so using a proprietary extension. With a bit of PHP (or Javascript, or whatever logic you want to use), you can make transparent PNGs work just fine with IE and Mozilla.

      For example:

      • <? if ($is_ie) { ?>

      • <img src="blank.gif" style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Al phaImageLoader(src='imagewithalpha.png', sizingMethod='image')">
        <? } else { ?>
        <img src="imagewithalpha.png">
        <? } ?>

      Yes, it sure is awkward, and for the love of me I can't figure out why they just don't support the alpha channel with a standard <img> tag, but at least it can be done.

      Jason.

      • Yeah, I've seen that solution before. It's just so bizarre and platform specific that I won't even try to remember it.

        That basically requires scripting to correctly display w an image. Yuck.

    • IE5+ *do* support PNG transparency, but for some very stupid reason, you need to use IE-specific CSS code for it. MS have conveniently invented the CSS "filter" property for this (it can do other "hot" and "cool" stuff too like apply drop shadows, motion blur, etc). It requires DirectX to function too, but since that's standard since a looong time ago, I don't see why they use DirectX for the standard support.

      This page shows how to implement it:

      http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavi or . tml

      Beware. Very MS-specific.
    • Apparently IE on Mac gets it right, which just adds to the bizarreness of the whole thing.

      Don't forget that the IE Mac and IE PC codebases split a long time ago. A seperate team at MS develops Mac software. In fact, they were so good, a lot of the pretty stuff added to IE 5.5 for the Mac was backported into IE6 for the PC.

    • Apparently IE on Mac gets it right, which just adds to the bizarreness of the whole thing.

      Yes, IE5 on Mac gets it right but for some stupid reason you need to actually enable this feature in the browser's Preferences.

      Go into the Preferences and click on the section File Helpers. Then scroll down the list of file formats until you get to Portable Network Graphic (PNG). Click Edit or whatever, and then when the details on PNG come up change whatever it is set for to View with Browser. Otherwise PNGs don't come up in IE, even though it does work.

  • Opera was Mozilla A Long Time Ago (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Onionesque ( 455220 ) <spammie@pobox.com> on Monday June 03, 2002 @08:46AM (#3630085) Homepage
    At work I use a Win32 box, and I use Opera exclusively. It has been stable, well-featured, and fast-fast-fast for years. I pray that they'll put enough work into their experimental OSX port to make it usable.

    I haven't quite understood the mania over Mozilla, which still doesn't begin to compete with Opera for stability and speed. Mozilla is unusably sluggish on every platform I have tried (Win32, OS X, OS 9).
    • Mozilla is unusably sluggish on every platform I have tried (Win32, OS X, OS 9).

      Try the new release candidate (or any release candidate). As fast as IE, and better features (popup killing, tabbed browsing).

      • I use the mozilla rc3 version. It is nice, but much slower than IE in some things. Particularly opening new windows is slow (I use the quickloader of course). However, popup killing is cool and so is tabbed browsing and bookmark groups.

        Other than opening new windows, it is pretty fast. Especially the HTML rendering component has a nice performance. It needs good performance because the entire GUI runs on top of it!
        • I don't use windows, but I don't open new windows....I DEPEND on tabbed browsing..I'm completely lost if I don't have it
        • I use Opera on tha administrative web interface of our E-mail server because of the keyboard shortcuts and that when you hit the back button, you are instantly BACK. I've tried Mozilla on this server, but it renders a large (x rows)*(2 columns) table with text boxes in each cell VERY slowly....1/2 minute or more and all other browsers I've tried [Opera, Netscape 4.x, Explorer] all seem to render it lightning quick.

          I do use Mozilla for all my other browsing though, just because I really like the feel of it and tabbed browsing. Opera is good too for regular browsing, but it just doesn't feel right [crashed a few too many times when I first started trying it I guess]. Basically, I'm using Mozilla because I want it to succeed.

    • Although Moizlla has caught up recently you are right that Opera has been way ahead for most of the race. Even now, aside from a few features (Mozilla has smarter popup control, for example) I still agree that Opera seems more stable and it is a very lightweight browser. It just doesn't get as much recognition here because it's Closed Source.

  • Advertisment? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by W2k ( 540424 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @08:48AM (#3630095) Journal
    I was expecting to see "This article sponsored by Opera Software" at the end of that posting. Has Slashdot started taking cash for posting articles that are little more than advertisments for a particular product? Or in this case, a link to a review which is as far from "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" as can be?

    In either case, I read the review, and it beautifully disproves Opera Software's claim of making "the world's fastest web browser", with load times varying between 50% and 300% of IE's on the pages that were tested. Opera also displays ads unless you register it (for $39!) -- why bother when it doesn't offer any major advantages over another non-MS browser like Mozilla?

    It should also be noted that Opera has had some Microsoft-esque security holes [theregister.co.uk] in the past ...

    • Re:Advertisment? (Score:3, Informative)

      by discogravy ( 455376 )
      I'm a rabidly happy opera user, and while the /. article does sound a bit like an advertisement, I can honestly say it wouldn't surprise me at all if it were coming form a very happy user (like myself).

      Tabbed (or windowed) browsing, a search box (deafulted to google, but you can change that,) in every window, skinnable, a hotlinks/bookmarks folder with stuff that's actually usefull and gestures; in addition to that you can magnify or resize the entire page...not just pictures or text, but the entire page (sometimes it looks like ass, true, but it comes in usefull when you're tired of looking at really small letters...can't tell you the amount of times I've set /. to 140% and sat a few feet further away from the old 19" monitor.

      Opera has definitely made my browsing a much better experience. I happily shelled out 40$ today (even though I've been using the free version for like four months or so, I have been too broke to consider paying real $$ for software that is *quite* functional even with the ads....and a note about that: none of the ads were annoying blinking neon sex ads, either. In fact, if i recall correctly the last ad i saw before I payed up was an ad for User Friendly [userfriendly.org].

      I can see how a user of Moz (and I have all 3 browsers on my machine, and I use all 3 regularly (although I really only use IE for windows update and on the rare occasions in which Opera does not render a page well. So far, this [brainwashed.com] is the only page i've come across that doesn't render well.

      Give it a try [opera.com] for a week before you knock it, it's way better than IE and at least as good as Moz (although I like it tons more than Mozilla, personally.)

      • Don't read the news? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by xrayspx ( 13127 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @10:03AM (#3630538) Homepage
        Go to CNN.com with Opera 6/Linux. It's a shame.

        I use Opera 90% of the time under Linux, it's great, fast, looks great most of the time. However one major feature that it lacks is a "delete URL" button, like the X> that Konq has. When you're cutting and pasting a URL in, you can't then highlight the current URL and delete, because then you have to go back and RESELECT what you wanted to paste. It's a pain. Much easier to select, hit X>, mid-click.

    • Re:Advertisment? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Moox ( 553090 )

      "why bother when it doesn't offer any major advantages over another non-MS browser like Mozilla?"

      Ok, I really like Mozilla too, because it's open source, it's free, it has many neat features, it runs on many platforms, it displays nearly as much websites as IE and and and ....

      But I was happier than seldomly before when I recognized today that Opera also runs on my new FreeBSD box. I used only Mozilla/Galeon for some days now exclusively, and starting Opera today was like switching from a supertanker to a speedboat.

      Mozilla can have *whateverneverbeforeseenfeature* it is, compared to IE in Windows or to Opera in FreeBSD/other Unix just unusable due to it's unbearable sluggishness.

      Mozilla for my Online-Banking site, Opera for everything else.

    • Of course there will be trade-offs--there are so many HTML pages out there that it isn't surprising that there is some feature that IE renders faster than Opera.

      One (bizarre) area I've found where IE is massively slow, Mozilla is somewhat sluggish, and Opera is blazing fast is when you need to paste a LARGE amount of text into a TEXTAREA. (I mean like 1MB or more) AFAICT, IE is completely CPU-bound here; maybe it has something to do with the implementation of textareas in Windows? Also, Netscape 4 truncates these to 30,000 characters.

  • Opera Memories (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SynKKnyS ( 534257 )
    I remember Opera (Win32) being able to fit the installer on a disk and running on a 386 with only 8 MB of ram. Quite a feat. I used to enjoy its zippy speed on my 200 mhz Pentium class computer compared to the hulky behemoths Navigator and Internet Explorer. However, when Navigator started to lose out and IE hit version 5 and became quite a bit faster (along with the fact that it was intergrated into the OS heh) I stopped using Opera. It is nice to see that it still is small in foot print (although no longer fits on a floppy and no longer runs on a 386 with 8 MB of ram) and is still faster than the larger competition in most cases. I think this article has done it, I am gonna download the new Opera and give it a try. :)

  • "Wild child" a compliment?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Creosote ( 33182 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @08:52AM (#3630118) Homepage
    Sorry, Kiniski, but when I hear "wild child" I think Truffaut (as in his film "l'Enfant sauvage"). So if Opera is the wild child of browsers, it would be incapable of parsing or rendering HTML, would periodically generate frenzied outbursts of sound and signals, and would occasionally defecate on the desktop.But with years of patient training, it might become a functional browser.

  • Choice words for a choice browser (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Flakeloaf ( 321975 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @08:53AM (#3630128) Homepage
    We're forced to use Mozilla at work 'cause IE has more holes than a Peter North fan club. On a Win32 platform it's unstable with many instances running (I suspect they're all the same process), crashes for no apparent reason, takes forever to load and is fugly.

    I can't blame it for crashing when it tries to load certain sites, since many people are obviously using Bill's Malformed HTML to generate IE-friendly (read "IE-Only) web pages.

    Even with the kind of vulnerabilities [theregister.co.uk] that made me want to dump IE in the first place and flaky Javascript support, I'd still use Opera if I could.

    Unfortunately, MS is the VHS to everyone else's Beta. Inferior technology, bloody annoying to use, but way better market permeation. Bleh.

  • of course it's not your browser of choice, but.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheLocustNMI ( 159898 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @08:54AM (#3630129) Homepage
    for upwards of 80% of the Earth it is, and frankly, it's getting bigger. I work for a web-development company, and the last couple of projects that we have designed and developed have revolved around IE, and IE only -- why is this, you say? Well, because of certain things that MS has built into IE, and IE's overall "acceptance" by commercial customers. Granted, most of these projects are intranet applications, but it makes no difference! To the consumer, more and different browsers are a "good thing", but to web-development companies, and the folks who write applications for a broad number of people, one browser is a "good thing". Integration with MS services (like that god-awful MS-only authentication thing), better embedded plugin support, and the fact that many dotNET web-apps *may* have a hard time running correctly in Moz and Operea all contribute to smaller-mindshare browsers low acceptance ratings.

    Now, before i denegrate my ENTIRE character, let me say that I am a staunch anything-other-than-IE-and-mostly-Mozilla supporter. I use Mozilla 95% of the time (and mostly IE when i have to A) fill out my timecard on our IE-only intranet at work -or- B) pay my Capital One card :) ).

    So, what can we do to help? Advocacy. Get folks using Moz or Opera -- your mom, your brother, your sister, your dog, whatever. Brief them on how Moz came to be -- it's free as in speech, ma! Or, we could just wait for MS to cock-up IE... :)

  • True, it's fast most of the time but it does seem to have severe problems with link in the /. articles. The just take forever to load...

  • Unfortunately... (Score:2, Redundant)

    by jgerman ( 106518 )
    and to my constant shame, IE is MY browser of choice. For the most part it is simply the best (god I feel sick), I prefer Opera for the features, but for rendering web pages, IE is it. Maybe if I got off of my ass and started looking into anti-aliasing for X I might feel different. As far as Opera is concerned, I really like it, and have had few problems other than rendering quality, though now that I think about it, Opera under Windows may blow IE away.
    • I almost asked how you managed to use IE with anti-aliasing under X -- then I read on to discover that you're actually comparing the underlying systems and not browsers.
    • I hear you... sadly.

      I used NS 4.x (whatever the last version prior to 4.5 bloat was - I don't recall now) for years. I finally got fed up with the slow rendering, poor rendering, and crashes. So I switched to Opera 5. It was great - fast, worked well, and life was good.

      Then I started hitting a bunch of random websites that simply wouldn't work with Opera 5. Sometimes changing it to ID as Netscape worked. Sometimes ID'ing as IE worked. Increasingly it just wouldn't work, period -- usually it was the javascript engine crapping out. And while I will heartily agree that it was probably because the page in question was non-standard, it didn't make an ounce of difference - that page had information I needed and it wasn't rendering under Opera.

      So to my everlasting shame I switched to IE. I try to keep it up to date and patched, but I still don't like that it's inherently bug prone.

      And I have to admit one other dirty fact - I rather like it. Yes, I miss tabbed browsing from Opera (which took me a bit to get used to, but I do prefer it). I really miss gestures. But I like the auto-completion features (despite an abiding fear that they're not wonderfully secure...), I like knowing that pretty much every page will render as it was designed to (excepting PNG stuff... blearg), and it's fast. Opera was fast too, but I still remember the horrors of NS 4.x.

      Yes, once I get my Mandrake box up and running I'll be checking out Mozilla at home -- yes, different platform and whatnot, but I'm more willing to screw with my Linux box than I am a Windows box. Linux is easier to reinstall, and less likely to start getting flaky from DLL hell.

      I should also check out Opera 6, since I hear it's mostly fixed the JS issues. C.F. above - my Windows box is stable, and I like it that way.

  • What is Opera's competitive edge? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Orangedog_on_crack ( 544931 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @08:57AM (#3630155)
    If any "alternative" browser is going to succeed it has to have some kind of edge over IE. This is only MY opinion, but unless Opera, Mozilla and the like are going to be a serious contender for the MS desktop, it will have to offer some more than just being faster. MS has a BIG advantage....IE is free (even though there is the "making a deal with the Devil factor involved with IE).

    I don't know too much about Opera, but are there any other "features" that it offers that IE doesn't, or at least doesn't do as well as Opera? I like competition in any market, but if it doesn't have anything substantially additional with it that IE doesn't, then I can see it gaining much market share, especially since one has to pay for the ad-free version? Maybe someone here can shed some light in this.

    • Features (Score:4, Insightful)

      by eddy ( 18759 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @09:14AM (#3630248) Homepage Journal

      Yes, I use Opera because of the features. I like the MDI. I cannot live without the ability to go back/forward using only the mousebuttons ("gestures"). I can press ctrl+g to quickly apply my own stylesheet to the page, as can I disable image-loading with a click. I can use the zoom-control to get up close when I need to (which happens), I can press F12 and quickly enable and disable javascript/plugins/popups. I can press CTRL+J to get a window with all the links on a page. I can enable automatic periodical refresh, I maximize frames with the click of a button. When exploring large link-collections I can use the special 'create linked window' to browse efficiently without having to open/close lot's of windows.

      I'm sure mozilla can do much of this, but IE? IE is - as far as I'm concerend - a joke as far as features go.

      Opera is all about the small things which makes my browsing fun and efficient. That said, I have a long list of things I wished it could do, some of them from IE (I want a page 'properties' function)

    • Opera/Win32 vs. IE:

      Gestures, disabling pop-ups, custom searches, opening new pages inside Opera instead of on the desktop, easy download management including pausing and resuming, restarting browsing where you left off, improved stability.

      Even the adverts don't annoy me.

      The only advantages IE has over Opera is that some sites are written solely for IE, and that Opera's ftp client sucks (but who uses ftp in browsers anyway?).

      I don't know about Mozilla, but IE really does suck compared to Opera.
      • easy download management including pausing and resuming

        Opera's ftp client sucks (but who uses ftp in browsers anyway?).

        Er, so which one is it? Good or bad?

        I'd bet that most people use ftp via web client now, unless you have needs for things like automatic FTPing on a scheduled basis or often do FTPing (since browsers are usually stateless and don't keep the control connection open - problematic with ftp sites that are hard to login to).

    • Re:What is Opera's competitive edge? (Score:4, Informative)

      by jeddak ( 12628 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @09:35AM (#3630365)

      To this customer, Opera beats IE in that it provides:

      • stability
      • speed
      • nice interface (even w banner ads!) - and lovely TABS TABS TABS
      • configurability - the Preferences window is very detailed
      • cross-platform experience - I run it on Windows, Linux, and MacOS X.

    • Couple of advantages (Score:5, Informative)

      by ChrisWong ( 17493 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @11:31AM (#3631223) Homepage
      There are a couple of Opera features that make it hard for me to switch to any other browser:

      • Firstly, it pioneered mouse gestures: I'm so used to navigating with the mouse (for example, back/forward through history) that it's annoying to use a browser without this feature.

      • Secondly, no browser on the planet seems to whip out pages from cache anywhere as fast as Opera. They just seem to snap onto the screen, (again) making browsing through history a breeze.

      • Finally my favorite: the little author/user mode toggle button. I can't stand the font/color choices on many pages, but a single click of the mouse instantly makes a web page readable in Opera. Not relevant to the IE/Opera debate, but this is a great feature for Linux users as TT fonts often come up too tiny on many web sites.

  • Opera vs. K-Meleon on older MSW computers (Score:4, Informative)

    by afflatus_com ( 121694 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @09:03AM (#3630192) Homepage

    I run an quite old laptop that came with Windows OS. I picked up the free K-Meleon (which despite the name, isn't for KDE):

    K-Meleon on SourceForge [sourceforge.net]

    Stripped of bloat, Mozilla's rendering engine runs fast and light on a P133Mhz laptop with 16MB.
    A sample screenshot is here:
    Screenshot of UI and context menu [sourceforge.net]

    For comparison to Opera, I found: Opera 5 to be faster than K-Meleon, but with Opera 6, they were batting close to even.
    K-Meleon images don't dither very well if set to 256 colours (often the case with older computers) because of a palette shift. Opera dithers them nicely
    K-Meleon renders HTML better than Opera 6 (though Opera 6 does do a better job of difficult CSS than Opera 5).
    Opera is a full suite of apps, with alot more features vs. K-Meleon, whereas K-Meleon is a browser and browser alone.
    K-Meleon does let all the toolbars (URL, menu, URL bar) be placed in a single row to maximize screen real estate on a laptop.
    K-Meleon doesn't have Opera-style tabs yet, which is about the one feature missed the most.
    K-Meleon is Free.

  • Funny, IE isn't my browser of choice ...
    • Welcome to the minority...

  • Security and Privacy. The ability to prevent unwanted pop-up, pop-under, and browser hijacking. Microsoft will not go against advertisers. You can download and install addons to rid yourself of unwanted adds, but when that happens in bulk MS will release a brower update incompatable with that addon.

  • What Opera doesn't do... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 03, 2002 @09:21AM (#3630298)
    DHTML. It has huge dom issues. It's not a bug, it's simply an non-implemented feature. Check out the Dynamic Threading on kuro5hin.org in Opera. It doesn't work, not because of bad coding, but because Opera simply doesn't support all the stuff necessry to make it work.

    Opera also has some strange negative text-indent behaviors (you have to double it!), and a few other odd quirks (but every browser has those.) It's definately better than IE in most things (24 bit PNG transparency rules!), but my browser is Mozilla. (Oh, and Mozilla is also free.)

  • Opera vs Crazy Browser (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @09:26AM (#3630316)
    This is probably the wrong place to post it, but IE is my browser of choice. I don't like Opera's inability to render PRE tags to the right size and iffy javascript handling and I unfortunately don't have 20 hours to sit around to download Mozilla at 2k/sec on my modem.

    However, I have found Crazy Browser [crazybrowser.com] which is a replacement for IE using the IE rendering engine.

    In fact thats what I'm using now and for a 690k download, it's lovely. Full support for websites (even those with iffy HTML), tabbed interface, Windows XP theme support, popup filter and a really nifty feature which indicates when pages have changed in your links list.

    It's also free (as in beer). Having access to the source doesn't bother me (and 90% of the population) in the slightest since I wouldn't understand a word of it or really look at it.

    I appreciate that this is a geek site and therefore most people won't touch IE with a barge pole but if you do like IE (and I do) but want tabbed browsing then check it out.

    As far as I'm concerned, it does everything that I'd use in Opera, so therefore I don't really see the point in paying for Opera. Granted they've done a fine job - but it's just not for me.

  • This slashdot community is to Linux-centric to even want to see that other people like using IE.

    How about:

    IE has NEVER crashed for me and I can browse anywhere? And this is not an isolated incident?

    I have had several versions of Opera, Konquerer, Netscape, Mozilla. Thay all have crashed on me, and they all have trouble with sites.

    So moderate me down on this one too. I don't care, I have karma to burn, baby!

    Me.
  • With Opera Unicode allows users to read pages from literally any language, except Sandscript. Then again, last time I checked I heard that language is dead!

    Is the reviewer referring to sanskrit here or is there actually a dead language called sandscript?

    • "Is the reviewer referring to sanskrit here or is there actually a dead language called sandscript? "

      It's the primary written language of Jawas. Unfortunately, it all but disappeared after the Empire instituted the death penalty for anybody that didn't speak 20th century Earth English.

  • Mouse gestures... Annoying?! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by levik ( 52444 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @09:59AM (#3630514) Homepage
    The comment on the reviewer's part about the mouse gestures being annoying pretty much invalidated the whole review for me. I am using Opera full time, and find genstures indispensible to the extent that when forced to use IE/K-Meleon due to Opera's rendering issues, I constantly find myself trying to "go back" by right-dragging the mouse to the left.

    That somebody who took it upon themself to review the product did not wish to take the time to familiarize themself with one of its biggest features speaks to a certain lack of proffessinalism... That aside though, I don't see how the gestures can be considered a "con". Even with them turned on, I find it difficult to perform one accidentally (I myself only use the back and forth navigation and never run into a problem of triggering another gesture accidentally). Finally, since there's an option to turn them off, I really fail to see how, iven if they are "annoying", their inclusion can be held against the browser.

    I think that it's by providing these features that Opera can succeed in the marketplace alongside of IE. One great feature would be trying to predict the next link you will click and pre-loading that page. (Like for multi-page articles).

  • Hate to say this, because I used to love Opera as much as anyone could love such an underdog. Opera, however, as far as I can tell, engages in the deplorable practice of spamming. I used an untouched address to send them a bug report. Within days I was receiving 6-10 spam mails per day - and this was a business address, which had never received spam before and was not used for any other online activity save for legitimate email receiving. It's died down since I started reporting them all to Spamcop, but it still surprised the hell out of me. I sent Opera another note protesting the whole thing and asking for an explanation, but I haven't yet heard back from them. If anyone knows contrary, please post - I'd love to stop thinking they'd do such things and go back to supporting them.

  • The funny thing here is... (Score:4, Informative)

    by gamorck ( 151734 ) <jaylittl e A T ... l i ttle DOT com> on Monday June 03, 2002 @10:40AM (#3630820) Homepage
    That all these people seem to feel Opera is so teribbly secure - yet not a one of them know about this major security hole discovered last week:

    http://www.securiteam.com/windowsntfocus/5YP0O20 75 S.html

    Being that this consitutes a majorly braindead security hole (allowing the value attribute on a file field to be filled in by the webmaster?!?!?!) I think its safe to say that all browsers in existence are lacking on the security front.

    J

  • Whatta Maroon (Score:3, Funny)

    by FuzzyBad-Mofo ( 184327 ) <fuzzybad@gmaCURIEil.com minus physicist> on Monday June 03, 2002 @11:40AM (#3631305)

    One of the biggest areas where Opera seems to fail is with a lot of newly developed websites that didn't take Opera into consideration since IE seems to continue to dominate the browser market with authority.

    Oh, obviously it's the browser's fault when it fails to render broken pages correctly. Sheesh!

  • List of other browsers (200+) (Score:3, Informative)

    by gnasby ( 264673 ) on Monday June 03, 2002 @12:14PM (#3631557) Homepage

    For a list of alternative browsers (over 200 in fact) have a look at: www.browserlist.browser.org [browser.org].

    This list is a bit old (it hasn't been updated since June 2000), but it gives you a good idea of what sort of stuff is out there.

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