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A Preview of Opera 9.5

Posted by Zonk on Mon Sep 03, 2007 08:36 AM
from the shiny-new-browser dept.
Software The Internet
jrowl writes "Opera 9.5 Alpha is scheduled to be released tomorrow, and CyberNet has a review of the browser's new features based on preview code. Some of the most prominent new options include a full history search, bookmark and Speed Dial syncing, and an 'Open with' menu option to pull up a website in another browser that's installed on your PC. 'This is one of those things that I had said Opera needs to work on the most. By this point, most Firefox users have grown accustomed to keeping their bookmarks synchronized with an online service. Now Opera users will have the same pleasure! All you need is a free My Opera account, and you'll be able to privately synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial sites, and Personal Bar with their server. You'll then be able to access that data whether you're at work, home, or anywhere! To setup synchronization just select the "Synchronize with My Opera" option from the File Menu.' There's also a video to go along with the text."
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Submission: Opera 9.5 - Bookmark Syncing and History Search by Anonymous Coward
[+] Opera 9.5 Beats Firefox and IE7 As Fastest Browser 510 comments
Abhinav Peddada writes "Ars Technica takes Opera 9.5, the latest from Opera's stable, for a test run and finds some interesting results, including it being a 'solid improvement to an already very strong browser.' On the performance front, Ars Technica reports 'Opera 9.5 scored slightly higher (281ms) than the previous released version, 9.23 (546ms). And Opera 9.x, let it be known, smacks silly the likes of Firefox and Internet Explorer, which tend to have results in the 900-1500ms range on this test machine (a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM). Opera was 50 percent faster on average than Firefox, and 100 percent faster than IE7 on Windows Vista, for instance.'"
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A Preview of Opera 9.5 50 Comments More /

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  • Firefox bookmark sync??? (Score:3, Informative)

    by MMC Monster (602931) on Monday September 03 2007, @08:52AM (#20451347)
    To the best of my knowledge, Firefox does not have automatic syncing of bookmarks with a central server. There are definitely add-ons that allow it (such as foxmarks and the google toolbar (I think)). From this point of view, I think Opera has one up on Firefox by including it in the default installation (unless you don't believe in adding features to a browser that not everyone will use, of course).

    Please note: I am not an Opera user. I use Firefox (with foxmarks).
    • will the opera sync allow you to do so on your own private server?   I've a plugin for firefox to allow for that.
      Trust no one
      • Did you type that on a typewriter and sent your message via a courier to Slashdot? :-)
      • The only plugin I saw that allowed that required that it be an FTP server. I'd just as soon be able to encrypt my login credentials, thankyouverymuch. Maybe it's changed since then.

        Anyway, you're trusting Opera, already. You're trusting them with your web browsing, and with your login details (for sites where you log in) and with your CC information (when you buy something online through Opera.) I don't see what the issue is.

    • To the best of my knowledge, Firefox does not have automatic syncing of bookmarks with a central server. There are definitely add-ons that allow it (such as foxmarks and the google toolbar (I think)).

      I knew there was a reason why, when the summary implied that "everyone who uses Firefox is syncing their bookmarks," I had never heard of such a thing. From the Foxmarks Web site: [foxmarks.com]

      Foxmarks is a startup that goes beyond the Web 2.0 hype. The company is poised to turn search upside down by harnessing the coll

  • There have been bookmark synchronization extensions for Opera already...

    The synchronization still doesn't compare to Google browser sync.

    Until I have a browser that's multiplatform, allows online synchronization of passwords, cookies and bookmarks (no manual FTPing files about, file shares -- don't work too well since I may have more than one computer's browser open), ability to import Firefox's passwords, cookies, bookmarks -- there is no alternative to Firefox for me.

    I suppose at the very worst I could go
    • Doesn't it worry you to have all your passwords and stuff being synced for you by a third party? Couldn't they look at them if they really wanted to?

  • Can't wait (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mark Gillespie (866733) on Monday September 03 2007, @09:35AM (#20451699)
    Been eagerly awaiting Kestrel for months now. I already think Opera is miles ahead of any other browser around, these latest changes put it further ahead.

    I tried Firefox for a while, but it was extremenly frustrating, security vunrabilities what seemed like every few days, and more bloat and memory useage that I wanted.

    I tried Opera, and after an initial learning period, came to love it. The fact I can use Opera on my destkop, my mobile, my PS3, my Wii is a bonus. The fact I will soon be able to have synced bookmarks between all of these devices is awesome.
    • Yeah, I've been an Opera user for years (since 3.6* at least) and finally, with the 9.2 releases, think I'm ready to make it my default browser. There are still a couple of Firefox extensions that I wish would make it to Opera (like Flashblock and ForecastFox) but I still find myself using it 50+% of the time, mostly because of the speeddial feature.
      • Opera does ship with content blockers - right-click somewhere on a web page and hit the "block content" option. Click on the banner ads, edit them to block your own wildcards. Before that you could add a filter.ini file definition to your opera6rc.ini but that was a bit of a PITA to use.

        They can't ship by default with an ad blocker else I imagine they'd get reamed by online ad companies for "stealing" or some such cobblers.

          • Opera has better ad blocking that any other browser I have seen (Including Firefox).

            Then you're an idiot. Opera has URL blocking, not ad blocking. Every browser can do the ad-blocking that Opera can do, wildcards included. Firefox's options are far more numerous; even the basic adblock plus extension has list subscriptions, list import/export, regular expression filtering, object tag blocking, iframe blocking, etc. None of which Opera does. And that's without even getting into NoScript, FlashBlock, NukeAnything and dozens of other extensions.

  • Synchronize both Opera and Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Fëanáro (130986) on Monday September 03 2007, @09:38AM (#20451727)
    What i would like to see is a way to synchronize both Opera and Firefox Bookmarks with each other seamlessly.

    All solutions I have seen so far seemed to result in either overwritten or duplicated bookmarks.
    Synchronizing passwords would be nice too.

    This forced me to choose one browser for almost all my surfing, which ended up being opera, but I figure others may choose differently, so this would benefit Opera too.
    • I don't know if it would work for you, but you could try using Google's Bookmarks.

      With Firefox and Google Toolbar, you've got the star button.
      And in Opera, though a toolbar might be better, it looks like you can use a javascript bookmarklet [blogspot.com]. Only problem is quickly accessing them again in Opera.
    • I sometimes use a little program called BookmarkBridge(http://bookmarkbridge.sourceforge. n et/index.html). By itself it can only sync between browsers on one computer. I find it pretty useful (because I use IE, FF, and Opera on my laptop), but YMMV. It can sync between Opera, FF, IE, and I *think* that I read that it works with Konqueror. That could be my imagination though. It can run on Linux and Windows.

      I use it on my Windows laptop. It has a GUI, but it can also be run from the command line. I

  • All well and good... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrNemesis (587188) on Monday September 03 2007, @09:43AM (#20451763) Homepage Journal
    ...although there's a few features that haven't been mentioned here but were part of the developer announcement, including:

    Faster tab switching in UNIX (this is one of my biggest irritations about opera at the moment - tab switchng under windows is nearly instantaneous, under X there's a perceptible delay)
    QT4 builds
    64bit builds

    I imagine alot of this comes from the new rendering engine which is probably 64bit clean. It would have been nice to be able to configure bookmark syncing to use something other than an external web host (it's blocked for me at work), for example using FTP or WebDAV, or even just an external shared folder.

    Opera still doesn't work well with my company's filters, all of which require NTLM auth. Opera still doesn't seem to manage this successfully and asks for for a password every time I open a page, unless I pass through a local NTM proxy (NTLMAPS).

    That said, it's still my favourite browser under Linux and Windows.

    • Re:All well and good... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by QCompson (675963) on Monday September 03 2007, @11:00AM (#20452415)
      Faster tab switching in UNIX (this is one of my biggest irritations about opera at the moment - tab switchng under windows is nearly instantaneous, under X there's a perceptible delay)

      I experience the same tab-switching slowdown from windows to linux on firefox. Might this be a wider issue with X?
    • I've used Opera since 3.something (when it required some 3rd party patch to display Polish characters properly) and I've always loved it. Until half a year ago or so when it suddenly started to work really slow (and slower as the session got longer). I gave up after couple days of trying to do everything with no success. I think it must have been something with QT (I'm on Ubuntu). Switched to Firefox and still, after that half a year, I really miss it.

      FF is decent, but it's all about those little things
      • Luckily I haven't had any of the slowdown problems you mention (Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu, dynamic linked version). Been using it since v5 on windows (my first ever non-IE web browser) and v6 on Linux.

        I know what you mean about FF though - I want to like it, but I just find the Opera UI so much easier and faster to use, and the speed difference (real or apparent) adds up after a while. Mouse gestures under FF are still shit compared to Opera IMHO - they're far too laggy and are often mis-detected for me, an

        • What extension do you use to replicate the remember-scroll-position-on-reload function, or is this something you don't have?

          that's something I don't have. haven't looked for it though, so there's a chance some dev felt like doing it.

          but at the moment there aren't a huge amount of FF functions/extensions that I miss that I can't replicate under Opera

          I use two kinds of extensions - ones that add "general" functionality (either modify FF's behavior to my liking, like Tab Mix Plus [mozilla.org] or add some little feature, like MeasureIt [mozilla.org]) and ones that are specific to a site, like Slashdotter [mozilla.org] (javascript-based collapsing of threads is its coolest feature) or AdSense Notifier [mozilla.org]. Some of these, especially from the latter group, will never be introduced by Ope

  • Benchmarks (Score:5, Informative)

    by David_Bloom (578245) <slashdot@3lesson.org> on Monday September 03 2007, @09:46AM (#20451789) Homepage
    http://www.apple.com/safari/ [apple.com]

    According to Apple's "objective" benchmarks, Safari and Opera are tied for everything except HTML load performance, which doesn't count because Safari cheated [howtocreate.co.uk].

    It will be interesting to see how the 9.5 performance improvements affect this :-)
  • Aside from the welcome tweak to the "remember password?" dialog, I'm satisfied with the browser as-is. I'm more excited about the rendering engine upgrades, like the improved CSS support.

    Have they also improved SVG & XSLT support? Specifically, cross-document <use/> and the "document()" selector? ...And when will we get the 3d Canvas?

    • when will we get the 3d Canvas?

      I would hope it'll go through some standardisation process before they try adding it to an official release; and that process hasn't happened at all yet, so it would be quite a while. (Opera experimented with a <video> feature some months ago, then submitted a proposal to the WHATWG, and it changed quite substantially when put into the specification - hopefully they'll use the same process for other new features.)

      At least they've improved their 2d canvas support for Op

  • Does Opera 9.5 have a UI for this function yet?
      • In Opera already, tools > delete private data > tick only "clear history of file transfers" , click "Delete" > Done.

        That is not what I asked. Reread the subject of this message, paying particular attention to the words "on exit" at the end.

  • By this point, most Firefox users have grown accustomed to keeping their bookmarks synchronized with an online service

    Oh really? I've been using it since it was Phoenix and didn't know it could do this. Nor have I ever read about anyone doing this, nor talked with any of my many Firefox-using friends who mentioned it.

  • but does it support SPNEGO? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by XaXXon (202882) <xaxxon@gmail. c o m> on Monday September 03 2007, @01:10PM (#20453781) Homepage
    Because everything else does and at my work we're about to make opera users very sad.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPNEGO [wikipedia.org]

  • Long time (Score:3, Funny)

    by Joebert (946227) on Monday September 03 2007, @01:32PM (#20454133) Homepage

    I did three tests for each browser and averaged out the time it took for each to completely load our site. Here are the results with the slowest browsers first:
    Internet Explorer 7: 18 seconds
    Firefox 2: 15 seconds
    Opera 9.23: 12 seconds
    Firefox 3 Nightly: 11 seconds Opera 9.5 Alpha: 8 seconds
    Wow, that seems like a long time for a webpage to load, actually.
  • Sure, Opera is fast ..

    But speed doesnt matter when it fails to display so many web pages properly.

    Call me back when Opera is as compatible with websites as Firefox or IE.

    • A slight correction: Those websites are compatible only with certain browsers, not the other way around. *Especially* if someone went through the trouble of making a complex website work in both IE and FF, you know that they're designing for browser-specific features and bugs. Just because they ignore Opera doesn't mean Opera doesn't display pages properly (not that it doesn't have rendering bugs either).
      • Actually, yes it does mean exactly that ... if Opera is less compliant with the webstandards. Are they?

        I've never had to go out of my way to make a website that works with both FF and IE, generally if a website passes html and css validation they just work ... but not necessarily in Opera.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by toriver (11308)
      When people then are asked to identify the "so many web pages" they invariably come up with some shitty Active/X reliant application. And no, Opera will not support that.

      However: If I see a site that does not work in Opera and an equivalent site that does, I conclude the author of the first site has a problem - not Opera. Saying that Opera should have even more error correction than today is like the doctor in the classic joke:

      - Doctor, it hurst when I do this!
      - Then don't do it!

      HTML was designed to present
  • is a good idea. Do we know their servers can keep up with the load of every Opera user syncing their bookmarks?

    Being able to sync with any service would be better. Is that available?

    I frequently consider dumping Firefox for Opera, as I'm getting really tired of random Firefox bugs and performance problems with heavy JavaScript sites. Today I tried to upload some images to ImageShack - first, Firefox wouldn't do the login properly, then after an image or two it insisted on trying to open the PHP page instead

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03 2007, @08:47AM (#20451301)
      Richard Stallman, is that you?

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by r_jensen11 (598210) on Monday September 03 2007, @09:19AM (#20451547)
      How are they greedy if they don't charge for their desktop browser, especially if that's the only browser of theirs that you use? If somebody is trying to integrate their program in with their system and make a profit off of it (e.g. Wii), then it makes sense to me that Opera should get a small profit. They don't have to, but I seriously question how doing so is Evil(TM)

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RobbieGee (827696) on Monday September 03 2007, @05:13PM (#20456723)
      I realize the parent is just a troll, but I want to point out that Opera is definately not evil! I have been working for Opera since may, and I have found the culture within the company is amazing! The environment is great and the people working there are very friendly.

      On friday August 10th, I became very ill. I was rushed to a hospital and was given treatment. After two days and a lot of tests, the doctors found that my heart is not working as it should. It seems that I have had this condition for quite a while, at least for several years.

      Long story short, I'm still in the hospital and tomorrow I'm operating in an ICD, a heart starter. All the time while I've been here, Anne (personell manager), have visited me regularily. When I was tired of the regular hospital food, they've brought me something else to eat. They got me flowers and twice they brought lots of colorful "get well" balloons, which really shines up the boring hostpital-white-walls. I've had plenty of visits from other colleguaes as well so there is no need for anyone to feel alone here. Even if you are coming from far away to work here, Opera will definately take care of you.

      The hospital here doesn't provide internet access for patients, but Opera (or actually the CEO, Jon) lent me a NetCom subscription for wireless 3G-ultra. This is what I'm using to post this comment, and it works great :-) Right here I actually get somewhere around 1Mb connection, wireless! Now I can talk to my brother who is studying in Australia for free.

      Oh and I'm living in Norway, so I have no monetary problems while being treated. I also get full pay while in the hospital, so I have absolutely no worries about money. All I have to do, is to relax and get enough sleep.

      Speaking of sleep... It's midnight and I have to get up tomorrow and have an operation.

      Thanks to everyone at Opera! "I'll be back" 8-)
        • Nothing in the openness of closedness of the code preventes anyone from changing the results of Folding@Home... that would be security through obscurity,something we know does not work (or you should now after being in slashdot since... forever AC).

          The proper way to prevent such things is via cyptographic techniques sucha as encryption and/or digital signatures, which I know not a lot about but am sure a fellow slashdotter eager to demonstrate their knowledge will extend upon.

    • Sync your bookmarks with an online service? Sounds rather privacy invasive to me...
      You don't have to do it if you don't want to.

    • Re:Syncing bookmarks with an online service (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ash-Fox (726320) on Monday September 03 2007, @09:20AM (#20451557) Homepage

      Sync your bookmarks with an online service? Sounds rather privacy invasive to me...
      What I like about Google Browser Sync [google.com] is that it will let you encrypt your personal data so Google can't even read it directly if they wanted to [google.com] -- That said, they could in theory brute-force the password you provide for encrypting/decrypting the content. But this is better than what's being done in the majority of other services.

        • But if you don't trust Google to keep your bookmarks secure, how can you trust their program to do a proper encryption?
          I've looked at the source of the extension, and it looks like it's using AES encryption [wikipedia.org]. AES is recognized as "proper encryption".
        • >But if you don't trust Google to keep your bookmarks secure, how can you trust their program to do a proper encryption? Maybe they have a backdoor there that will allow them to access your "encrypted" bookmarks. There is no such thing as trusting them somewhat.

          That's not true: you're using OS XXX, but you know that this OS has flaws so you patch it.

          Without encryption, to send sensitive data to a provider, you must bet that he is able to keep his servers secure for outside and inside threats forever, wit
      • Yeah but if civilisation falls to the machines and he's sat in nuked out wasteland googling for ways to bring those metal bastards down at least he knows his web browser is working for him and not for the damn robots.
      • It's kind of like preferring Wikipedia to that 2 year old Encyclopedia Brittanica on the shelf. There are valid reasons to prefer Wikipedia even if you never edit it.

        That said, I like Opera. It doesn't feel right for my default browser, but it is good. They've made a couple of small improvements that I've suggested on their blogs. I hope the small Norwegian company continues to do well, with phone browsers and all their other products.
    • Updating block lists? That level of ad-phobia is insane. Anyway, in Opera you use wildcards in the block URLs instead, "http://ads.*" catches a wide swath of ad services.

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