Opera 9.5 Beats Firefox and IE7 As Fastest Browser 510
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.'"
Wasn't that always the case? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Different market (Score:3, Informative)
Opera aims at different market -- small gadgets. This is where the speed is really critical. For IE and FF good enough is enough, since performance on modern desktops is not that critical.
Re:Different market (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera aims at different market -- small gadgets. This is where the speed is really critical. For IE and FF good enough is enough, since performance on modern desktops is not that critical.
Opera aims at different market -- small gadgets. This is where the speed is really critical. For IE and FF good enough is enough, since performance on modern desktops is not that critical.
I have used a Xeon Video workstation lately and poor AVID was acting like it is on 80386 because a stupid "free" antivirus was taking whole CPU cycles trying to "scan" gigabyte level raw videos while it was asked to ignore them.
It is common getting replies as "get more RAM" or "upgrade your CPU" from various browser fans but when I see a browser using 100% CPU , I get alerted about what kind of security issues it may have and why I should be wasting my CPU to it.
Opera's power comes from managing to code and sell full feature browsers which would even run on Nokia 7650 with 2 MB of RAM. Don't let the Desktop versions memory usage fool you, it is mostly RAM Cache, not memory "flood". Instead of flooding memory, they use it for a good reason and release immediately when another app needs it.
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Perhaps because he bought the hardware with something else in mind (graphics/video) andd objects to it being used by a web browser? Even I occasionally have cause to object to Firefox's use of resources, and I really am overpowered (this is a high end machine that I use, basically, for emacs)
The Rule of Economy [faqs.org] is fine when applied se
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They allocate the memory in a way that OS takes the memory when needed. Non blocking way or something. It was discussed when they came with "memory cache" idea back in 6.x days.
I don't know of any OS that provides such a facility. The app could monitor free physical RAM, or could (as you mention about the Mac version) choose to dump cache when hidden/minimized, but I don't believe there is any way to allocate memory such that the OS will simply take it back when needed. All non-locked memory allocations on modern OSes are subject to being paged out to free up memory when other apps need it, but that is very different from saying the OS "takes the memory when needed", because i
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Opera aims at different market -- small gadgets. This is where the speed is really critical. For IE and FF good enough is enough, since performance on modern desktops is not that critical.
I really wouldn't say that. Once you've used a browser that renders pages considerably faster than your old browser, there's no going back. It makes a *big* difference.
With Opera 9.5, I can browse my API docs on the web just as fast as if the data were local. It's incredibly comfortable, and for me definitely worth the switch. (I had been using Firefox for a while before going back to Opera)
Re:Different market (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it does makes difference, but on desktop feature set is much more important and there is no way I'm trading NoScript + CookieSafe + Firebug + Foxmarks + Slashdotter for a slight increase in speed.
Re:Different market (Score:4, Interesting)
+ Adblock + a few other things, and that 'slight increase in speed' might start to look like a supersonic jet outrunning a kid with a wheelbarrow. A wheelbarrow with a lot of nifty stuff on it, sure, but still
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Re:Different market (Score:5, Funny)
I just switched from FF to Opera because of its low market share numbers - which was the same reason I switched from IE to FF when the FF market was about 2%.
Pffft. I'm must more emo than you, I use Lynx which has practucally no market share!
Client-side XSLT support (Score:2)
With the upgrade, Opera added the support, which in my view is more important than some milliseconds.
Now you can push raw XML to browsers along with the stylesheet(s) and let them handle the load of processing.
This introduces a lot of new opportunities, for instance, since XSL is way more powerful than CSS, you may for instance rearrange the whole content of the page ways beyond what CSS positioning tricks allow for, you
Re:Wasn't that always the case? (Score:5, Informative)
How Opera is Supported (Score:4, Informative)
They have deals with search engines, like Google and Yahoo, to get placement as the default engines in the toolbar, in Speed Dial, and in Opera Mini. (I think these days it's Yahoo in all 3.) Same kind of deal that Firefox has with Google, really.
Plus there are the versions for devices [opera.com] (Nintendo DS, etc.), which they still charge for, either directly or through licensing deals with device manufacturers and mobile carriers. So they pull in revenue from that.
This article is a year out of date, but still informative: Opera making big profits from free software [itwire.com.au].
Re:Wasn't that always the case? (Score:5, Informative)
If you're going to complain about something, please try and make it relevant.
Re:Wasn't that always the case? (Score:5, Funny)
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Opera without Pavarotti (Score:5, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciano_Pavarotti [wikipedia.org]
What matters Opera without Pavarotti about?
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Opera uses commercial Qt license of course.
Re:Wasn't that always the case? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I just don't have spiderman senses or Clint Eastwood style reflexes that most web users have, but the wait of less than half a second for a webpage to render doesn't really bother me that much.
I'm not saying this because I'm a Firefox fanboy, or because I don't like Opera, I just don't get why it matters. Even on MySpace it doesn't take so long to render a webpage that it bothers you, and if a webpage takes a long time to load it'll almost certainly be because of your network connection or the server and not rendering time.
Re:Wasn't that always the case? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I wonder........ (Score:4, Funny)
Grade article: incomplete (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not expecting them to try Lynx or anything, but at least test Safari on Windows? The one that also claims to be fast?
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Re:Grade article: incomplete (Score:4, Informative)
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FF is the only one to choke so easily rendering larger pages, you know. Unfortunately.
Even before 9.5, Opera still beat the crap out of Firefox in CPU/RAM usage, but then, so did IE.
I still like Firefox
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At the World Wide Developer Conference this week, Apple announced the availability of Safari 3 for the Windows operating system. Today, we put the Safari 3 beta to the test to see how it compares to Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 on Windows. What we found didn't impress us very much. Although Safari offers slightly faster page loading, the beta is extremely unstable and suffers from interface deficiencies that make its value on the Windows platform questionable at best.
In other words, they may not think it's worth reviewing, at least on a Windows platform, especially since it's not a Windows-native browser. Think of it as being similar to comparing browsers on Ubuntu and including IE 6 under WINE.
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First post thanks to OPERA!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First post thanks to OPERA!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Article is very misleading - JS benchmark only (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, the speed of the browser depends upon the speed of the html parsing engine, available bandwidth, browser settings, speed of the cache and Javascript, just to mention the main variables.
Still, I'm interested how comes Opera's Javascript is so fast compared to the other browsers.
Re:Article is very misleading - JS benchmark only (Score:5, Informative)
Well, they didn't test it against WebKit/Safari/Konq, which blazes through Javascript tests. Firefox's Javascript engine (SpiderMonkey) leaves a lot to be desired, and well, Internet Exploder is just plain terrible at everything. Things will get better for Firefox once Mozilla figures out a way to integrate Tamarin, but this is still a while off.
Re:Article is very misleading - JS benchmark only (Score:5, Informative)
It may blaze through tests, but in real life Konq is considerably slower than Firefox. I have to deal with a number of javascript ladden juggernauts like the ex-PeopleSoft eBusieness suite on a daily basis and konq is visibly much slower than Firefox.
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I haven't got any figures, but subjectively I find konqueror faster than firefox. I don't often use it because so many sites don't render well, but speed wise I would rate it as much faster
It could have something to do with Flash not supported on PowerPC/X11 but here on OS X, I found Konqueror working lot more smoother than Apple Safari thanks to Finkproject(.org) installed KDE 3.5.7
The memory figures especially were impressive.
I tested Digg.com etc which are browser murderers as you may guess.
Re:Article is very misleading - JS benchmark only (Score:5, Informative)
The benchmark is at:
http://pentestmonkey.net/jsbm/index.html [pentestmonkey.net]
And i get the following results on a macbook pro 2.16ghz core2 duo running osx 10.4.10:
Safari (2.0.4):
MD5 Benchmark took 15.136 seconds for 3000 hashes (198 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 10.876 seconds for 2700 hashes (248 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 19.052 seconds for 1900 hashes (100 hashes/second)
Camino (1.5.1):
MD5 Benchmark took 1.78 seconds for 3000 hashes (1685 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 1.271 seconds for 2700 hashes (2124 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 1.931 seconds for 1900 hashes (984 hashes/second)
Firefox (latest nightly build):
MD5 Benchmark took 1.867 seconds for 3000 hashes (1607 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 1.299 seconds for 2700 hashes (2079 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 2.077 seconds for 1900 hashes (915 hashes/second)
Firefox (2.0.5):
MD5 Benchmark took 2.628 seconds for 3000 hashes (1142 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 1.919 seconds for 2700 hashes (1407 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 2.872 seconds for 1900 hashes (662 hashes/second)
Opera 9.23 (current stable):
MD5 Benchmark took 4.561 seconds for 3000 hashes (658 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 3.163 seconds for 2700 hashes (854 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 4.812 seconds for 1900 hashes (395 hashes/second)
Opera 9.50 alpha (build 4404):
MD5 Benchmark took 1.446 seconds for 3000 hashes (2075 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 1.021 seconds for 2700 hashes (2644 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 1.607 seconds for 1900 hashes (1182 hashes/second)
Quite impressive the improvements that have been made in the latest opera... Also, camino wasn't faster than the firefox nightlies last time i tried it (camino 1.0.4)...
I don't have access to msie or konqueror, i would assume konqueror performance would be similar to safari tho.
Re:Article is very misleading - JS benchmark only (Score:5, Funny)
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I downloaded it when I first read this article. Then I went away for an hour and used it oing my normal
daily sstuff.
Holy shit it's fast. Some site, just plain html and lots of graphics are a bit faster then before.
Sites with lots of ms generated js are unbelievably faster. Opera's always impressed me with its speed but I've never seen a speed increase likt this. Kudos.
Re:Article is very misleading - JS benchmark only (Score:5, Informative)
Prerelease builds:
Safari 3 Nightly 177ms
Opera 9.5 Alpha 278ms
Firefox 3 Nightly 823ms
Production builds:
Safari 2 423ms
Opera 9.2 684ms
Firefox 2 880ms
Looks like Safari wins this one.
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Opera 9.5 is QT 4 and I don't think they are at "optimise" stage yet, they want something out and it is really alpha quality. Alpha/beta became really confusing these days, I am writing this on Omniweb "sneaky peek" (Alpha) which I made my main browser a long tim
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Hey, it's great at being terrible at everything (else)! That's something the other guys probably won't ever catch up on.
The WebKit implementation is superior IMO (Score:5, Interesting)
I've written both simple demos [iaincollins.com] and fairly sophisticated JavaScript apps [google.co.uk] (which can do Sim City / Civilization 2.5 isometric views like this [googlegroups.com] - and render them extremely quickly so you that you can pan around the environment as if it was a native title)).
When it comes to looping through a large array of arrays (e.g. the terrain tile detail in one of the above examples), applying style or class attributes to DOM elements, creating or moving DOM elements on a page and dealing with event handlers Safari wins hands down, followed by FireFox, Opera and IE (in all respects). The "Opera is the fastest" claim holds very little weight with me having compared them. What Opera has is a very fast UI that's extremely responsive, which is all a bit smoke and mirrors really. It's not particularly fast at script execution or object manipulation as soon as things get interesting (it lags behind Safari and FireFox certainly, but it's still far ahead of IE), and of course it renders perfectly valid pages very differently from Safari and FireFox (for which is sometimes possible to blame ambiguities in the standards, but that it doesn't follow the lead of Gecko/KHTML/Webkit or IE is a bit annoying - though do I appreciate the complexity involved).
Re:Article is very misleading - JS benchmark only (Score:5, Informative)
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I do like CSS, but it seemingly hasn't covered all bases yet.
Cheers.
Re:Article is very misleading - JS benchmark only (Score:5, Interesting)
Regarding text rendering... What bugs me is that since the first Firefox, every so often, you get a horisontal line which is skewed by one pixel. This happens on both Linux and Windows, on different machines, with different fonts, with all Gecko engines. When this happens between lines, it's not TOO bad -- it just looks odd when there's suddenly a pixel more space between two lines than all the others, but when it happens in the text itself, it's VERY noticable. And if you select the text on that line and unselect it again, the problem goes away. It's like the rendering engine pre-calculates how much vertical space to set aside for the text in order to to increase rendering speed. Then, when drawing the text, the actual result never matches the space, so it duplicates or chops lines at random intervals until it the text fits. I'd rather wait a little longer and avoid this problem.
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This gets more of a nuisance the more pages, tabs and windows you have loading at once.
This program design flaw slows down the browsing experience considerably if you like me, use multiple windows.
Sometimes, I have just xkill'd Opera and restarted it, because that was faster than waiting for it to respond to me clicking the "back" bu
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On the up side, this also means that a lot of exploits simply do not work in Opera.
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I am both a programmer and an academic and consider the web to be an information resource. I do not care about Web 2.0 at all. My primary interests are in BBS/blog/Wiki posts involving people who have or have solved problems and the static display of abstracts and papers of people who have devoted serious thought to problems. Static
Opera faster _with JavaScript_ (Score:5, Insightful)
So Opera is much faster than FF when running JavaScript tests, according to Ars Technica.
Numbers are meaningless without context
I'm fed up with the anti-Opera crap here... (Score:4, Insightful)
At the same time, Opera is also smaller, lighter, more stable, more innovative, better integrated, and comes from a company that behaves ethically towards the rest of the software community (eg, it does not engage in patent warfare to pummel the competition).
Yet because it's not open source (it's been "free as in beer" for quite some time now, but even that's news to some people here) it's practically awarded pariah status by many Firefox zealots who typically use nothing more than ignorance and FUD to put it down.
Seriously, the amount of anti-Opera, pro-Firefox propaganda (for want of a better word) here on Slashdot is ridiculous. Opera is, and always has been, a top-notch product.
In the eyes of this humble observer, it's a far better browser than any other, but regardless of our personal preferences, isn't it time that people gave it due respect? Or is good software engineering only to be appreciated if it comes from the open source community?
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Re:I'm fed up with the anti-Opera crap here... (Score:5, Informative)
I tried Opera.
Good browser it may be, but I don't like it. It's better than IE, but then, so is Lynx.
I like Firefox not so much for its speed (I'll admit Opera is faster), but for the extensions.
And yes, some of the more often used extensions do come off as copies of stuff first introduced in Opera, which makes Opera a bit of the Apple of the browser world.
And JFTR: Opera fanboys (the few that I've encountered) are worse than Linux, Mac and Amiga fanboys combined.
Re:I'm fed up with the anti-Opera crap here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm fed up with the anti-Opera crap here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Since then, I've used Opera for browsing and Firefox for web development. There's just no comparison between the two. And now that one of the other responses to this post has pointed me at this [opera.com], I may not use Firefox for anything other than testing in Firefox.
Of course, I'm one of those sufferers of the Firefox bug that causes it to use ridiculous amounts of memory. I've got a Firefox window open with Gmail (alas, Gmail breaks in Opera for me when composing mail), and it's consuming 180MB. I've got 2 opera windows open with about 15 tabs in one, including a few large Slashdot discussions, and it's consuming 120MB. So for me, there was no question when choosing between the two for everyday use.
--Jeremy
Re:I'm fed up with the anti-Opera crap here... (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole "rigorously security audited" argument is a fallacy, unless you truly believe that Opera is somehow doing something that it shouldn't be doing. And that fallacy is blown out of the water when you realise that there isn't a single demonstrable example of Opera doing something as unethical as "phoning home" with your browsing habits, etc.
Look around. The minute that something like that happens, whether it's Microsoft, Real, Sony or whoever, it's exposed almost immediately. Why, then, do people maintain this "ooh, they could be doing something naughty" line about Opera, when the company has gone out of its way to be a positive member of the software community? It's FUD, pure and simple.
Look elsewhere on this story. You have people claiming that it's not "free as in beer". That's ignorance. You have people claiming it's not as fast as Firefox. That's ignorance again. You have people claiming that it might
be useful if only it would perform well on machines that are only equipped with 256MB. That's... well, do you want to guess what that is? Go on, guess. You have people bleating "big deal, speed doesn't matter". Yet these are the same people who bleat about how Firefox is better than MSIE because it's faster and less bloated.
It's all FUD and ignorance, FUD and ignorace. What happened to fair judgement and common sense?
Opera is a great product from a great company. Pure and simple.
Re:Opera faster _with JavaScript_ (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention that Opera 9.x is one of the only stable browsers with tentative support for HTML 5.
I get a kick out of FF fans on this site. FF is by no means bad, but Opera clearly has areas where it consistently outshines the open-source browser. Before, people used to say "I don't like ads in my browser" as an excuse for not using it. Then when it became free, it was "I use lots of GreaseMonkey scripts", despite the fact that you can use most GM scripts in Opera too.
Opera leads the way for most browsing achievements, and they show no signs of stopping. I've been using it since version 6, and though I give FF a whirl every
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I'm not attempting to spin the article at all (hence "Opera is probably a bit faster than Firefox in page rendering as well"), I'm trying to de-spin the summary which just takes the fact of "Ars Technica does JavaScript tes
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Those numbers mean nothing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now my question is, how significant is ~500 ms for these tests? All I care about is how long it takes to load a typical webpage I surf, and for me, Firefox seems almost instantaneous for most pages. "Smacks silly" my be an overstatement.
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Forget the units, use the ratio.
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In addition to that - something I just thought of - I would much rather that the Javascript engine be VERY secure and reliable, rather than fast.
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Resource-conservation, not speed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Resource-conservation, not speed (Score:5, Interesting)
It works quite well, and a lot better than most browsers on portable devices.
Thank you, Opera !
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The only time i have had problems with memory in Firefox is when ive been running many java and flash applications in various tabs but thats something the browser cant solve in any way since its all in the plugins.
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Opera faster, really? (Score:4, Funny)
I guess I am just getting too old for these newfangled Web 2.0 stuff.
Re:Opera faster, really? (Score:4, Funny)
To hell with optimizations and fancy-schmancy new standard support, can you read forums and visit YouTube? Ship it!
Re:Opera faster, really? (Score:4, Funny)
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Wait.... someone actually *reads* the articles on
The sad part of the whole browsing experience (Score:4, Insightful)
This despite the fact that the computer speeds have increased and the connection speeds even more.
The bigest fault lies ofcourse with maers of those silly pages with 100 different elements that have to be loaded and displayed separately, but also both IE and Firefox have become more and more bloated with functionality making them slower and bigger memory hogs.
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So how about the browser that really matters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So how about the browser that really matters? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm still miffed that they not only left out Lynx, but also accessing webpages using a telnet client.
and? (Score:2, Interesting)
But, if they were to GPL it.....
rhY
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With apologies to Old Ben, I for one would rather give up a little speed for stability, portability, and adblock, foxmarks, and the very real benefits of using an open source product.
But, if they were to GPL it.....
rhY
They won't GPL it, their users, customers (a lot!) and fans are happy with a limited but professional developer community and your slashdot message won't change it.
Opera ALPHA (yes, not even beta) showing blank page:40 MB RAM
Firefox final, stable: 65,2 MB
That Opera figure contains IMAP client, IRC client, News client, full feature RSS and even Bittorrent.
Why change a working thing?
Also Firefox being GPL really doesn't matter to me anymore, they should explain WHY they dropped official support from that IM
and yet still no fundamental authentication.. (Score:5, Informative)
Faster? I could care less. (Score:3, Insightful)
Should I care? With today's machines the only performance issue I ever encounter is my connection. Frankly, if someone wants to sell me on a new browser then speed isn't the way to do it. Provide some convienence or functionality I can't live without. You are probably going to have to work hard at it and it will have to be something most of us haven't thought of. Sorry, but browsers are not rocket science and in this day they really aren't viable commercial products - you just have to have one and its expected your OS provider will have one for you.
More conclusive tests (Score:3, Interesting)
And remember, this is an *alpha* release.
I use Firefox(XP) at home, Opera(Redhat) at work (Score:3, Interesting)
Like when you are looking at a page and you see something to search for, highlight and right click search for....
In Firefox you automatically get a new tab with the search, which is what I want. Opera overwrites the page you were reading with the search. Other features work similarly. You can hold down alt or something and get what you want.
Similarly with bookmarks. Firefox I middle click a bookmark in my bookmark bar and I get a new tab. Opera, nothing happens, if I left click it over-writes my current page. Seeing a pattern
Search in page. Firefox much better implementation with obvious highlighting.
Speed isn't enough to win me back.
So why use Opera at work. It is stable. Firefox crashes all the time on my Redhat corporate install. Perhaps something wrong with the Redhat because I have tried out IT supplied Firefox and my own DL copy with the same results.
A lot was stolen from Opera, it is time for Opera to steal back with some of the better interface elements of firefox.
everytime I hear about Opera's amazing speed... (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
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What next, security?
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=290711&cid=20
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Re:its all about the addons (Score:5, Interesting)
Right-click --> Block content
F12 --> Enable plug-ins
F12 --> Enable JavaScript
If you need to do any of these on a per-site basis: F12 --> Edit site preferences. Additionally you can also switch off:
You can change these settings for one site or all sites. Now is that enough for you, or do Opera need to call this functionality 'adblock plus', 'flashblock' and 'noscript' and supply it in addon form? :-)
Re:its all about the addons (Score:5, Informative)
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There is a UserJS somewhere (userjs.org?) to introduce Flashblock-like functionality.
Opera 9.x natively supports per-site JS and plugins blocking, and CSS as well. But OK, there is no status bar icon.
You don
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This is fantastic for privacy. I have FF to accept all cookies, but delete all except the ones I specify to keep when the browser is closed. This way all web sites work (some don't if you disable cookies) but all tracking cookies and other crap gets deleted at the end of every session.
Re:its all about the addons (Score:4, Insightful)
Maintain away, including setting site specific cookies to delete upon exit.
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Now, they are used as something to attack browser without any base. I wonder when will someone claim that he/she is not using Opera because it doesn't have "
Typing this from Omniweb/OS X which invented popup blocking, site specific preferences, live bookmarks bac
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Re:Benchmarks be damned (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does it have the equivalents of these extension (Score:4, Informative)
That sums it up: http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/2006/07/04/top-150-
Out of 113 most popular Fx extensions: 38 are built-in, 38 are not possible, rest can be added by tweaking/hacking/configuring something.