> Now, why all those people suddenly have to adapt to the way of browsers totally dominating different region of the world?

Because Opera cares enough about customizability to allow you to create your own shortcuts. In that light, the inability to remap ctrl-click is a bug (a limitation in the remapping system), not a philosophical discussion about whether Opera should adapt to others needs or not.

Also, (not being sarcastic or trying to be funny) dear Opera users: please learn to take constructive criticism. When someone tells you about a feature request, try to understand what's being asked for instead of using the standard responses of "why does anyone need that", "you can use $far_more_cumbersome_alternative instead" or "buy the right kind of hardware" or (even better!) "opera had it first, why should opera change, everyone should change to match opera". Don't make up excuses for the dev team. If you frequent the Opera user forums, ask them why the limitation exists in the first place -- it may be easy to fix.

I realize minority computer groups quickly adopt a bunker mentality (see also: Amiga, Be and pre-1997 Apple) but really, the attitude doesn't help. Opera is a good browser and can grow market share, but not if its community ignores what potential new converts are saying.

(FWIW, I've used Opera off and on since 2000. But it still bugs the hell out of me that using Opera is a little bit different from using my other regulars -- Firefox, Chrome and Safari. In terms of user experience, it's a papercut. This is especially ironic because Opera is so customizable.)

Does not work (Opera 10.5, Windows XP)

And what's this obsession with the middle mouse button anyway? Wake-up call: most PCs don't have a real 3rd mouse button. Certainly most laptops don't. The fact that the mouse-wheel can be used as one might appeal to the gamer/geek demographic, but it's really not as comfortable as a, you know, real button (explained here).

I use FF/Chrome/Safari regularly. I'd love to use Opera more. But I can't because of a limitation in their keyboard customization system. And it's hilarious to see Opera fans defend Opera by saying "they don't see" why a particular industry-standard shortcut is important.

When the top 4 browsers in terms of market share all use ctrl click, Opera can either play ball or be the browser that has the dorky 'different' shortcuts. With the latter strategy, I see its market share going down, not up.

Every Tom, Dick, and Harry browser that comes along? IE8/Firefox/Chrome/Safari, which are #1-4 in the marketplace, have very similar keyboard shortcuts. You'd think Opera would at least study its competition. Alternatively it could continue enjoying its niche as #5.

Ctrl-click allows you to open a number of pages in the background, quickly. Give it a try in Chrome/Firefox/IE8/Safari, on a link-rich page like news.google.com. Opera is alone in making it shift-ctrl-click. And no, this isn't something you can edit the .ini for -- at least, I've not been able to find a way so far. I'd be very grateful if you could point out a solution.

Netscape/Mozilla is older than IE, but Firefox still changed over to IE-ish shortcuts on Windows in order to be a more comfortable transition.

Also, I'm not asking Opera to shaft their loyal users. Opera is very customizable. There's no reason why they couldn't create a Firefox-ish shorcut set and let users choose that as an option. In fact, right now my biggest gripe is that their customization doesn't allow you to redefine ctrl-click consistently.

> Preferences, Advanced, Shortcuts?

Please, show me how to open a new tab in the background with ctrl-click, like Firefox/Chrome/Safari/IE8. I have tried and it's been a bit difficult so far.

> What's wrong with the middle mouse button?

Laptops don't have a middle mouse button unless you buy an add-on.

> Opera used Shift for that purpose before other browsers even had tabs

Do you mean shift-click? That opens a new tab and gives it focus. I'm looking for opening a new tab in the background, which is currently bound to ctrl-shift-click. And of course the biggest oddity is that you can not change this binding easily.

I tried several of the Chrome Experiments on Opera 10.5, and everything ran very smoothly. Good going Opera.

Now if only they'd add an option to make the keyboard/mouse options more like Firefox/Chrome, I could use this as my default browser. It still bugs me that it's very, very hard to make a customizable browser like Opera open new tabs with a ctrl-click like every other browser.

My understanding that BT (or rather its subsidiary OpenReach) is the only one allowed to muck about digging ditches and inserting wires/cabinets on the street for phone/xDSL/FTTx lines. (Can't say about cable, although I've heard BT has dug for Virgin in some places -- perhaps under contract as you say).

What OFCOM (Office of Communications -- not OFTCOM) does mandate is *access* to the last mile. So all providers in the UK (say Virgin (yes, they do provide DSL), Tiscali, etc should be able to use the last mile exactly as BT does.

They do this in two ways -- either by bolting their own infrastructure into exchanges (called LLU or Local loop unbundling) and just depending on BT for the last-mile connectivity. This is the free-est you can be of BT in the UK if you use xDSL/FTTx, unless you live in Hull. The other alternatives are IPStream and Datastream. In both of these your supplier buys broadband capacity wholesale from BT, and resells it to you (but with differing levels of involvement from BT).

In fact, these days BT retail is supposed to buy capacity from BT wholesale in exactly the same way as other providers, to avoid a commercial advantage.

> allow competitive and fair access to the last mile and termination space in exchanges

*Access* alone to the last mile isn't enough for what we're talking about. Suppose I want to provide TownX with 100Mbps fiber. BT (or OpenReach) currently has no plans to deploy fiber in TownX. Thanks to BT's current legal monopoly, neither can I. This is what BT's announcement about opening up ducts etc could change.

There are lots of places as little as 2 miles from the town center that have piss-poor broadband because of the way telephone exchanges are located. Fiber to the Home/Fiber to the Cabinet is the obvious solution, but British Telecom have a monopoly on last-mile wiring in the UK*, and have very little incentive to deliver high-speed broadband to homes. And let's not even talk about exchange capacity, or their traffic-shaping practices. So yeah, if Google or anyone else is going to get involved, more power to them. Britain's positively stick-in-the-mud compared to Scandinavia, Korea and Japan**, and it'll take a lot of doin' to bring it into the 21st century.

*except for Hull and some cabled areas (and I think Virgin's cable ducts were dug by BT)

**though to be fair, most of the high-speed internet in these places is to be found only in densely populated urban areas. Anyone know what broadband in lightly populated small towns/villages is like in Scandinavia/Korea/Japan?

PS. There's a great site for UK Slashdot readers -- Broadband Notspots UK, it's worth a visit if you're checking out what a particular place is like broadband-wise.

Here's a taste of the changes between Tiger and Leopard/Snow Leopard. Even though Leopard->Snow Leopard was (relatively) incremental stabilization and refinement, remember that Leopard was a *big* upgrade.

Adding 10.4 support back to mozilla-central would mean switching back to ATSUI from Core Text, switching back to gcc-4.0 from gcc-4.2, and doing a bit of porting work for code that has been added to the tree since we dropped support for 10.4. Other areas where 10.4 support consumes our time, makes our code more complex or error-prone, and/or limits our capabilities include complex text input (IME), out-of-process plugins, printing, native menus, and Core Animation. Furthermore, Apple's upcoming JavaPlugin2 will not support Mac OS X 10.4.

True. But there's a difference between running it and running it *well*. Mobile phone manufacturers have been promoting the fact that their phones have web browsers and mail clients since, oh, 2003 at least. But they did a shitty job of implementing these (which gave the iPhone its big break). It's the same with Flash -- see the other reply from a N900 owner.

What's amusing about this thread is the number of Flash fanboys breathlessly proclaiming that Flash needs the latest and greatest hardware to run, and then simultaneously bitching to Apple for not including Flash in their memory, CPU and power-constrained mobile devices.

I wonder if they realize the irony.

Exactly. They can progress all they want and assume that everyone runs super-powerful quad-cores with 4GB RAM*. But -- most mobile devices are not that powerful. Certainly not the iPhone. And that's a very good argument for keeping Flash off such devices.

(Note that Apple isn't the only one -- Firefox on Maemo disables Flash too, IIRC.)

*More than 4GB won't help because we're still waiting on a cross-platform 64 bit flavor of Flash, thanks very much.