"Fastest Browser On Earth" Cuts Crud

gabec writes "The guys at Opera have been rewriting their rendering engine over the past 18 months, tossing out legacy code and making the browser more DOM compliant with the intention of making the self-proclaimed "fastest browser on earth" even faster. They claim to have succeeded, according to this article on ZDNet.. Fun stuff.. ;)"

Re:I've fallen in love with Opera, but...

[simetra]

F12, down-arrow to desired option, enter. Repeat if desired.

I agree though, it's annoying to have to enable/disable that manually for pages where you want your popup.

Re:I've fallen in love with Opera, but...

[a hollow voice]

It's not quite as good as a single hotkey, but Opera 6.x (for Windows, at least) has a popup menu associated with the F12 key that allows you to enable/disable popups, change your reported user agent, enable/disable javascript/plugins/cookies/animated gifs/etc.

I'm all for the changes you mentioned to the popup window blocking though.

Dillo

[mlinksva]

It needs work, but Dillo [cipsga.org.br] is the fastest graphical browser I've ever used. As fast if not faster than a text-only browser like lynx, links or w3m. Galeon feels incredibly slow next to Dillo, and Galeon usually feels pretty fast to me.

Marketing spin...

[billnapier]

From reading the article, I get the feeling that the real reason for the rewrite is not to get better speed, that would just be a side effect. It sounds like it had to be rewritten because they were running up to limitations in what they could do by just extending their current engine. These things happen from time to time with larger projects.

Re:This is a bit silly

[FattMattP]

I think we're better off improving the features ... than to try to squeak out another .01seconds to render the pictures on a screen.

If you had bothered to read the article you would have seen that getting the browser to be faster was a by-product of rewriting the engine. A quote to enlighten you:

"There were some things that were difficult to do with the old engine, particularly with changing elements in pages," said Opera Software co-founder and CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner. "We felt we needed a rewritten engine to have something that works with all the DOM that is coming out."

Re:I've fallen in love with Opera, but...

[manly_15]

However, one thing in Opera's favour is that they are very reasonable in their pricing. Right now they have a 50% off promotion [opera.com], and if you are a student you get further 50% off. How many other companies offer such large student discounts? I find this very competive, and worthwhile for a browser that I can use on a P100 with 32mb of RAM without a hitch.

Re:I've fallen in love with Opera, but...

[yog]

even simpler than that!
F12 r --> disables popups
F12 w --> enables popups
It's an instinctive subsecond keystroke for me now.

Re:I've fallen in love with Opera, but...

[Fweeky]

F12 and R will turn them off, F12 A will turn them back on.

Down arrow indeed.. tsk :)

Turning off plugins also comes highly recommended for killing Flash banners (F12 p, toggle), and disabling gif anims (F12 g, toggle) makes the rest much less irritating.

http://voi.aagh.net/code/anti-banner.css [aagh.net] kills most of the rest.

You'd be surprised.

[FreeLinux]

Microsoft.

That's right M$. They have academic licensing programs that, provided your school has subscribed, allow students to by M$ products for next to nothing. Windows XP for $15 is a damn big student discount.

Did I just plug Microsoft? Jesus Christ!

opera rocks..

[Anonymous Coward]

here are 3 essential opera features I cannot be without:

- mouse gestures! these things get addictive..
I can navigate without using keyboard/GUI.. only downside is I keep trying to pull them off in file explorer, and that doesn't work obviously.. I'm convinced mouse gestures will be implemented in a future version of windows (hope so anyway)

- zoom.. zoom images and text down or up as you please.. can't imagine a wired world without it hehe.

- pop-up killer! YEAH!

Mozilla has the pop-up killer.. great.. and perhaps it has zoom too? don't know.. but it will at least need a zoom and mouse gestures before I consider turning over to the lizard..
but mozilla is too bloated for my taste anyway i suppose.. one another great thing about opera is that it doesn't feel as bloated as IE/mozilla.

Re:The truth

[GigsVT]

By the way, if you get the student discout, it's half price to buy opera, sans banner ads. And, unless i'm mistaken, that purchase lasts a lifetime.

It's less than half price last I checked, and you only get one major version upgrade before needing to repurchase. I bought Opera 4, and I had to buy again when 6 came out.

Re:I've fallen in love with Opera, but...

[yog]

Er... try hitting ctrl-G
switches to user style sheet
This is possibly the best feature in Opera.
Renders nearly unreadable pages readable, e.g. gray text on black, microscopic type size, lack of word wrapping. ctrl-G fixes it all.

Moz and IE don't have this feature as far as I can tell.

Re:The truth

[lpontiac]

I've designed pages with popups.....I admit, popup advertising is annoying, but having the larger version of an image appear in a popup when I click on a button....or poll results, or a movie clip, or ....etc,etc,etc is a interface feature I like and employ.

If you want to block all popups, you can do it in IE by killing Javascript, or you have have a proxy kill the Javascript which does the popping up. What makes the "kill popup" feature in Mozilla so invaluable is that it only blocks "unsolicited" popups - it will let Javascript pop up a window in response to a click, but not otherwise. So you kill the ads, but pages still work as designed.

Mouse Gestures for Mozilla.....

[WD]

You can add Gesture capability to Mozilla. Just get This. [mozdev.org]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:This is a bit silly

[13Echo]

Opera upgrades are always free to the next full version number. This means that if you paid for 5.x, then you can upgrade to 6.x for free. Paying for 6.x gives you 7.x for free, and so on. Upgrades are also reasonably inexpensive. I see it as renewing your license for a few bucks every two years. It is worth it to me, for such a great peice of software.

fastest browser on the planet

[ignorant_newbie]

Idarubicin wrote:
> And it really is the fastest (of IE, Moz, and
> Opera) browser on earth.

if small footprint is your main concern, ie you're less concerned about fancy sidebars, etc, you would do well to look into some of the alternate frontends for mozilla's engine. i've been playing with dillo recently, and while it doesn't do much more than display web pages, it does this a lot faster than mozilla on the same machine.

ofc, this might require an adjustment to the os you're using...

if you like ie6

[arnonym]

if you like ie6 but are missing features like tabbed browsing, a fully configurable pop-up blocker etc., try the crazybrowser (what a stupid name). it's basically an third-party upgrade for the ie. it's free too!

http://www.crazybrowser.com [crazybrowser.com]

i used to surf with opera, but since 6 it got unstable when viewing more than 7 tabs.

I'm Your "Idiot web developer" - Monte Hurd here..

[Anonymous Coward]

Your concern is 100% valid. My comment was taken slighly out of context in the CNET article. I believe in standards and we test against Opera and Mozilla on a continual basis and I'm no MS fan. Let me repeat, I believe in standards 100%.

I was trying to make the point that now that Microsoft has achieved browser market dominance (with proprietary extensions included), strict adherence to standards is EXACTLY what Microsoft hopes non-MS browser developers will pursue as doing so necessarily creates incompatibility with IE. This in turn leaves users with the impression that non-MS browsers are broken or not as advanced when they fail to render pages in the manner IE has led them to expect.

I don't like Microsoft's tactics at all. Period. But unfortunately, at this point in the game, a browser's market penetration is more a measure of end-user acceptance than it is one of developer acceptance. The point I was trying to get across was that non-MS browser developers should co-opt Microsoft's proprietary extensions strategy and use it against them! By supporting all of the MS extras end users wouldn't perceive non-MS browsers as lacking. As a developer I can appreciate the fact that this would take some work. It's not a perfect solution, but the sad fact is Microsoft isn't going to change it's ways and no amount of name calling will change that. ;-)

Just trying to think of ways non-MS browsers could turn the MS tide. Does this make any sense?

-Monte Hurd
Systems Architect
Starphire Technologies

Re:The truth

[hkmwbz]

"Mozilla does not attempt to cater to the IE crap-nuances. Opera does. They actually write code that basically says 'click here to emulate IE f0rk-ups.'"

Actually, the browser identification settings is purely there to access sites that block browsers based on what they report themselves as. It is not an attempt to emulate MSIE. In fact, Opera often seems to be more strict than Mozilla. Mozilla accepts CSS colors without #, while Opera does not. This is just one of many examples.

Monte Hurd Here... (aka the anti-christ it seems)

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone take a deep breathe. Now exhale. I am not the great satan here guys... ;-)

Let me clarify...

My comment was taken slighly out of context in the CNET article. I believe in standards and we test against Opera and Mozilla on a continual basis and I'm no MS fan. Let me repeat, I believe in standards 100%.

I was trying to make the point that now that Microsoft has achieved browser market dominance (with proprietary extensions included), strict adherence to standards is EXACTLY what Microsoft hopes non-MS browser developers will pursue as doing so necessarily creates incompatibility with IE. This in turn leaves users with the impression that non-MS browsers are broken or not as advanced when they fail to render pages in the manner IE has led them to expect.

I don't like Microsoft's tactics at all. Period. But unfortunately, at this point in the game, a browser's market penetration is more a measure of end-user acceptance than it is one of developer acceptance. The point I was trying to get across was that non-MS browser developers should co-opt Microsoft's proprietary extensions strategy and use it against them! By supporting all of the MS extras end users wouldn't perceive non-MS browsers as lacking. As a developer I can appreciate the fact that this would take some work. It's not a perfect solution, but the sad fact is Microsoft isn't going to change it's ways and no amount of name calling will change that. ;-)

Just trying to think of ways non-MS browsers could turn the MS tide. Does this make any sense?

-Monte Hurd
Systems Architect
Starphire Technologies

Re:Fastest Bowser on Earth

[numark]

Actually, the free basic version of Opera doesn't have standard Cydoor technology in it. As evidenced in this mailing list message [opera.com], Opera did work with Cydoor, but only for the purpose of designing a totally new system for delivering ads. Cydoor never coded any of the advertisement software in the browser. Opera has a pretty extensive description [opera.com] of what their advertising software does. It explicity states that there is no spyware, and even gives, in great detail, how the system works. I use Opera daily, and I've never seen any evidence of spyware, so I doubt highly that there is any need to worry.

Opera is cross platform and embeddable

[Nailer]

Hello, they're producing a non-embeddable, platform-specific web browser.

Hello. You'll find Opera in more embedded devices than Mozilla will, because its smaller, uses less resources, and uses the existing OSs toolkit rather than requiring its own. Its also almost as cross platform - there's Linux, Windows, MacOS, Solaris, and QNX Opera plus quite a few more.

If you're talking about Mozilla `producing a platform' (ie, XUL) then that's not a feature most users and I imagine embedded developers want or need.