A Preview of Opera 9.5

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."

Firefox bookmark sync???

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).

Better synchronization required.

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 through my passwords and enter them manually in Opera, but I have so many.

Can't wait

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.

Synchronize both Opera and Firefox

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.

All well and good...

...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...

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?

Benchmarks

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 :-)

Kestrel

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?

Software as near-art

Light, fast, loads quickly, rarely crashes, has some innovative features that the vaunted Apple "interface gurus" could learn from. What's not to like about Opera? I'd like to see it market itself more aggressively.

Clear download list on exit

Does Opera 9.5 have a UI for this function yet?

Bookmarks

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

Really ? Do you have any figures to back that up ?

If we're going to pull 'facts' out of our collective ass, I'll state that most Firefox users probably don't even realise you can do such a thing.

While Leaks are not being repaired in Firefox...

...And Mozilla is forgetting the very nice Thunderbird.

Synchronized Bookmarks?

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?

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]

Netscape had synchronized bookmarks in 1998!

Netscape Communicator 4.5-4.8 had roaming profiles which sync'ed your bookmarks with a LDAP server and your address book, cookies too. This feature kept me using Netscape long after it was really dead, for some reason people seem to have forgotten about this great feature. http://www.acns.colostate.edu/aspx/www.acns/bulls/ nsroaming_whatsroaming.html [colostate.edu] http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/1411/LWD990901netsca pe/ [itworld.com] http://www.geocities.com/petru2/netscape_roaming.h tml [geocities.com]

Long time

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.

RSS Syncro?

Can RSS feeds be synced with myopera.com?

New Opera, just as incompatible.

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.

I'm not convinced that syncing with My Opera

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 of returning the updated page to me. I don't know if this was strictly a problem with Firefox or a problem with the ImageShack server, but a reboot eliminated the problem. It would seem Firefox simply got confused about the JavaScript involved somehow.

I do appreciate some of the extensions to Firefox such as DownThemAll and ImageHost Grabber. But they really need to concentrate more on making it rock solid rather than adding features. Opera has had its problems, too - I've had issues with downloads failing if I'm browsing in Firefox at the same time - probably some sort of timeout issue.

the best thing that could happen to Opera

The best thing that could happen to Opera would be an open source or Free software version. The lack of an open source Opera is exactly what keeps Opera so low in the browser popularity charts. Kudos to Opera for creating a great desktop and mobile browser, and I have to admit that I am amazed at the quality of their software given the fact that they chose the closed source model, but I think their days in business are numbered unless they learn how to make a profit while letting the code be free, preferably under the GPL. It *is* possible to give away the source and still manage to run a profitable business.

Thanks Opera, you're already the best.

Opera is already the best browser there is, been using it since the old 3.x days. It has consistently proved itself to be more elegant, faster, more stable, much much less buggy or crash prone and much smaller and slicker than its alternatives, and I even use it on my sony ericsson phone. Great going opera.

Kestrel is finally out!

You can grab it here:
http://snapshot.opera.com/ [opera.com]

Faster?

I've been using Opera for about two years, and since the 9.x it became unbearably slow. I now use firefox or IE instead. Other people have reported the same behaviour and believe it has to do with some nasty interaction with Symantec's AV.

Re:Who cares?

Richard Stallman, is that you?

Re:I want is a way to tell it which torrent progra

tools > preferences > advanced > downloads > untick "hide files opened with opera", find "torrent", edit to your hearts content. Same for any other MIME type.

Re:Who cares?

The scary thing is that I think you're serious.

Re:I want is a way to tell it which torrent progra

Tools > Preferences, click the Advanced tab, uncheck "hide file types opened with opera", search the list for "applicaion/x-bittorrent", click edit and select "open with default application".

They really should make it much easier to change this, the opera client is horrible for those of us who are already familiar with other clients. It was probably designed for those people who don't really know what to do with a .torrent file.

Re:Syncing bookmarks with an online service

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:No Source No Sale

I would be shocked if you could prove that you have ever modified the source of Konquerer, much less contributed to the code base. More likely you are just another guy screaming the have the source code without the ability to personally do anything with it. I know, you never actually do scan code of open source products, but you could if you wanted too.

Re:Who cares?

I agree.

You're not going to get very far being anonymous, though. Create a proper login and use it.

Meanwhile, we have to get writing to our elected representatives stressing the importance of Source Code Access and how it benefits everyone ..... and we have to make it look like a proper movement. And we have to convince ordinary people of why it's important. "Eat this nice cake, but don't ask what ingredients are in it because that's none of your business!"

Re:Opera vs. firefox

Opera is such a solid piece of work, I use nothing else nowadays. Although my main reason for this is that Opera has automatic tiling; all my tabs appear next to each other. Also resizing webpages works flawlessly, text and images are always enlarged properly. Both are mighty handy when you surf on a 30" screen.

Re:Who cares?

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:Syncing bookmarks with an online service

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.

Re:Opera not OSS

Errm, 9.5 Kestrel comes in 64bit builds for *nix systems (no Win/Mac 64..)

Re:Who cares?

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-)

Re:Who cares?

I'm okay :-) Hopefully they will let me out tomorrow or friday. I've been here for 4 weeks, so it feels like getting out of prison.

Re:No ADBlockPlus? No thanks

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.

Re:No Source No Sale

Is this source code delicious? Because otherwise there's no reason for the average user to request it.