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The Internet

"Fastest Browser On Earth" Cuts Crud 697

Posted by Hemos from the better-faster-go-faster-go dept.
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.. ;)"
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"Fastest Browser On Earth" Cuts Crud More

"Fastest Browser On Earth" Cuts Crud

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  • I've fallen in love with Opera, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Marx_Mrvelous ( 532372 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:01PM (#4112482) Homepage
    They need a few things, IMHO. The frist is a hotkey to enable/disable popus (which they may have, I haven't looked very deeply). The second is a mozilla-like "kill all popups I don't request" option. They kill *all* popups, which interferes with my webmail programs, surveys, etc.
    • Agree with both of your points, but, well, the way it is is preferable to no pop-up protection at all. I just enable them on demand.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • No they don't - they kill popups created in a certain way. If you have a target="_new" then it should work fine. Popups a-la javascript created new windows is what's being disabled, which makes sense because that's where you get the stuff that's created without user request. If your webmail scripts are doing it that way, they may want to consider doing it otherwise.

      still, a hotkey would be nice for those rare occassions :)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • 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.
      • It's free if you don't mind the built-in banner ad.
        I paid for the Linux version because I mind the banner ad and, at the time, it was the best browser I could find for linux.

        Mozilla is catching up, but I still find it big and sluggish by comparison. I love the convenience of Opera's keyboard shortcuts, and its tabbed browser windows are much more elegant and natural to use than Mozilla's.

        • Re:I've fallen in love with Opera, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:29PM (#4112772) Homepage Journal
          "It's free if you don't mind the built-in banner ad."

          For a while they were showing comics in that space. That was seriously cool.

          That's an interesting way to do banner ads: They provided interesting content up there to grab my attention. Then, I start looking up there frequently to see if there's something of interest as opposed to focusing it out. That's ingenious! It's kinda like how TV works.

          If websites had figured that out ages ago, I betcha anything that we'd not only have a market for 'banner based content', but there'd also be a more successful ad model.

  • This is a bit silly (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:02PM (#4112494) Homepage Journal
    First of all, this is bait for trolls to speak about IE and flaming OS zealots to scream about mozilla

    Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.
    I think we're better off improving the features (like removing pop-up adds, etc...) than to try to squeak out another .01seconds to render the pictures on a screen.

    • Re:This is a bit silly (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:13PM (#4112609) Journal
      Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.

      True enough for the mythical 'average user' whose desktop machine is less than two years old. As a university student who is working on a four-year-old PII-300 at home, and a PI-133 with 64 MB of RAM at work (age unknown), every last cycle is precious. Particularly since I'm usually multitasking.

      The footprint--in memory, in terms of clock cycles eaten, on my tiny hard drive--of my browser actually a very important consideration for me, and probably for others. The F12 for quick menus (to kill popups, mostly), the clean file transfer monitoring box, and the tabbed browsing (fewer windows on my task bar) are worth their weight in gold.

      Opera has also been quick to respond to bugs and make critical fixes--something that some companies are loathe to do. (Ahem. Microsoft. Certificates. Ahem.)

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

      • 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...
    • 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."
    • When you want instant responsiveness .3 seconds does make a difference. Nearly half a second is a long time if you have to keep waiting after every time you click something. Opera has more features than IE and is faster than Mozilla :P
    • Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.

      Unless, of course, you are running on a non-M$ platform.
      • Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.

        You're must be joking. Here's a test for you using this very page: Change the filter to show all messages and wait for the page to load, then hit the 'Back' button, then the 'Forward' button. Opera does this instantly but IE will reload everything again, taking ages.

        You probably face this situation all the time - search from Google, try the links, press 'Back' to go back to Google. Opera may not render pages noticeably quicker than IE but it's much faster to use in other ways.

    • I've an IBM Thinkpad 760xd that I use, that's in great shape and that I really like. It's a P166 with 104MB memory, so speed and memory footprint DO matter.

      Oh, I see. I should just sell my car or my leg or something and buy a new laptop so that I can manage my accounts, check my e-mail, etc. Or better yet, I should throw it in the dumpster out back and just go to the library and wait in line to use their PCs to do my Web stuff.

      Oh wait, the public library is running on P133's... D'oh!
    • That's a little critical; Hell, opera ran better on my p233mmx than mozilla runs on my Duron 800. Yeah, it's not that necessary for /Opera/ to improve speed, but IE and Mozilla sure could use some improvements.

      Besides that, opera's only two downsides right now are less-than-perfect DOM support, which they claim is being fixed in O7, and jscript not always working right.

      Opera has support to remove popup ads (Well, you can either disable popups or not or open them in the background). Their cookie rules editor is excellent, being able to masquerade as any other browser is nice for sites that say "We only allow IE" just so they don't have to listen to bug reports for other browsers, and the ability to choose between Showing images, not showing images, and only showing images already in the cache on a Per-Page basis is excellent. (Especially when trying to view an image-heavy page in the process of being /.ed- get the text first, and only load the images that look good to you)

      So, with all that /Already/ working, if you can throw some speed enhancements in while fixing the DOM support, why not?

    • Not Really (Score:4, Insightful)

      by spacefrog ( 313816 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:52PM (#4113012)
      Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.

      Rendering speed, yes. All three of them render pages in a heartbeat on virtually any hardware.

      UI speed is something else entireley. On a 300Mhz K6 with 160MB RAM running FreeBSD 4.0, I can out-type Mozilla by a fair margin. This may not be the most modern hardware, but that is just plain ridiculous. It makes the app unuseable, which is a real shame. Galeon runs like a champ, as does Netscape 4.

      Even on my dual 1Ghz P3 running W2k, the Mozilla UI is awfully sluggish. This is ridiculous.

      On my 85 Mhz Sparcstation, IE5 is a bit slow but at least I can't out-type it.
    • Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.


      That's only partially correct. On a newer computer, the difference is probably not noticable. (After all, who's going to notice the difference between 5 milliseconds and 10 milliseconds?) But on older computers (mine is now three years old, although it has had some incremental upgrades) the speed difference becomes much more noticable. The difference between 5 seconds and 10 seconds is quite noticable to me, the user.

      The biggest advantage Opera has (in my opinion) is that it has a little button that turns images on or off. Quickly enabling or disabling images makes browsing on a dial-up connection much less painful. There is also a button to enable or disable the document's stylesheet, which makes viewing poorly designed website much easier on the eyes. (I believe similar options have now been added to Mozilla, but I find them not quite as well implemented as in Opera.) The one thing I wish Opera would do would be to do the "smart popups" like Mozilla does. (Opera just lets you disable or enable all popups.)
    • I disagree. As more of the web content moves to an XML/<insert stylesheet of choice> model, then the issue of how fast your browser can render becomes much more important. I remember noticing a surprising difference in speed the first few times I went to a site that used CSS (cascading style sheets). More and more of the content that a browser receives isn't plain HTML anymore. It's got Java and Javascript (sometimes so much Javascript it's scary), and stylesheets, and Flash and animated images. Browser speed is definitely still an issue.

      Got an idea? Be nice to it, it's a long way from home.
    • Are you kidding me! Its a HUGE difference. I've gotta ask, have you even tried Opera 6? I gave mozilla 1.0 a shot because they offer tab browsing, mouse gestures, and popupkillers - btw everything that opera has had for a long time. I switched back to opera which is way more responsive using mouse gestures. Mozilla is slow with its mouse gestures, meaning you have to wait for a page to completly load before you can gesture to go back a page - LAME!

      Not only does Opera render noticeabley faster it caches pages really well, I'm talking split seconds, where Mozilla and IE seem to always completely reload even if you have the cache enabled.
  • But ultimately, Hurd concluded, Opera and other Microsoft competitors would do better to support the technologies that the market-leading Internet Explorer browser made available, rather than focusing on industry standards.

    Let the flaming begin...

  • But it's not free!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Webmoth ( 75878 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:05PM (#4112523) Homepage
    OK, so it's not free. Sometimes, it's worth a few bucks for software that works, works well, and works fast. This is one of the few.

    Support Opera. Support well-written code. Pay for it!

    I can't say the same thing for software coming from Redmond.
    • Opera is the best around. I bought a license for my copy at work (windows) and a license for home (linux). Mouse gestures rule.
    • "Support Opera. Support well-written code. Pay for it!"

      I feel like Opera could de-throne IE down the road. Of course that is a little day-dreamy of me, but the Opera team seems to understand how to make the browser useful and interesting. MS seems to have lost their steam when it comes to that. It's a pity, really: They have a potentially interesting ad model there.

      They were putting comics into their ad-supported version for a while. I found that instead of filtering out the ad-bar, I was keeping an eye on it to see if a new comic arrived. It got me thinking that they should do that more. They should provide interesting content in that bar (maybe the funnies from a newspaper?) interspersed occasionally with an ad or two. It'd be kinda like TV up there!

      If they can get the content flowing through that ad bar, I feel very strongly that people will pay more attention to the ads, thus increasing the value of that space.

      If that happens, Opera becomes entertaining even when Slashdot is not. Heh.
  • surfing pr0n in an Xterm. w3m forever!!
  • ...that Opera is the fastest browser doesn't actually make it faster (although some religious types might believe differently).

  • Is rendering speed the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:06PM (#4112536)
    The guys at Opera have been rewriting their rendering engine over the past 18 months

    Was rendering speed ever a problem, in either Opera or IE? Back when I used a double-digit MHz processor maybe, but even on a Pentium II 333 I don't give page rendering speed a second thought.

    "World's fastest browser" smacks a whole lot of the "Pentium IV makes the internet faster" nonsense. The bottleneck, even on a slow processor, is the network connection.

  • Dillo (Score:4, Informative)

    by mlinksva ( 1755 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:07PM (#4112539) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • wince... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by natefaerber ( 143261 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:11PM (#4112580)
    But ultimately, Hurd concluded, Opera and other Microsoft competitors would do better to support the technologies that the market-leading Internet Explorer browser made available, rather than focusing on industry standards.

    "What these other browser makers should do is stop complaining about what Microsoft is doing and start supporting what Microsoft is supporting," Hurd said. "People out there aren't reading these specs; they're using IE."

    This would be a huge mistake for any competitor. Why would you want to jump into line with MS? You would have no opportunity lead. You would just play catch up and never be able to offer the customer a superior product.

    Follow the standards and anyone can lead the market if they implement them better. They will also avoid being blindsided by new MS "standards".
    • I just want to be able to do as much as possible, as easy as possible when making a webpage. I'm a TA at our local college. The universities official policy is to use Netscape as the main browser because of its integrated mail system (which doesn't screw up as much as outlook does).

      However, a lot of instructors who use the web heavily (as in the course I teach, for example), require the use of IE. Why? Because it works more. Its more forgiving of browser errors; it has more built-in features; certificate setup is easier.

      Me? I installed Win4lin so that I could continue to use MS. If someone else makes a browser that I can run js animations in just as fast, and that will work as easily with (private) certificates, and has as advanced a parser, I'll switch. And if I am browsing for mere text, I'll use galeon.

      But when page displaying must be top-notch, I'll use IE. If everything that MS did was done in another way on another browser that I liked equally (or even other cool things that I liked using), I'd switch. I'd REALLY like to have a reason to cut out microsoft. But they still have the best, IMHO.

      Think about this: the reason that people should do things the way Microsoft is doing them is not because Microsoft is doing it, but because Microsoft has implemented some good ideas. Personally, I think they should leave the OS and application businesses to people who know what they're doing, and just make and sell their browser.

    • Re:wince... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @01:06PM (#4113140) Homepage Journal
      Why would you want to jump into line with MS? You would have no opportunity lead. You would just play catch up and never be able to offer the customer a superior product.

      Is is stupid for web designers to design for IE only? Yes. Is it lazy? yes. Is it shortsighted and wrong? Yes.

      When people stop being stupid, lazy, shortsighted and wrong headed, then you can start ignoring what Microsoft does and just stick to making a better product. Like it or not, Microsoft's desktop monopoloy and browser integration have hobbled browser innovation, although thankfully not eliminated it utterly.

  • Marketing spin... (Score:5, Informative)

    by billnapier ( 33763 ) <napier&pobox,com> on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:12PM (#4112597) Homepage
    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.

  • Kick In The teeth (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SomeOtherGuy ( 179082 )
    "But ultimately, Hurd concluded, Opera and other Microsoft competitors would do better to support the technologies that the market-leading Internet Explorer browser made available, rather than focusing on industry standards."

    Wow does not that quote stick out like a sore thumb from the company that prided themselves on following the published standards? To me that is a scary way of looking at things.
  • One thing that's particularly annoying about Opera 6 is patchy CSS2 support. Which is quite surprising, considering they basically wrote the spec.

    CSS2 and DOM are hard problems - IE's rendering engine needed a huge amount of work to get it halfway right in IE6. A lot of Opera's size and speed advantage comes from cutting corners.

    (Statement of bias: I'm involved in Mozilla.)

  • For quite a while I used Opera 6, and I loved it. It was fast, and its tabbed browsing was fantastic. The mouse gestures were an unbelievable leap in the speed of web browsing. But I started to get a little ticked off that it blocked all popups, because I liked getting them when I clicked a little javascript button. In order to get these little windows, I had to dig through the extensive preferences menu and temporarily turn on popup windows. It soon began to get tiresome.

    Then Mozilla 1.0 came out. I downloaded it, and I've been using it ever since. Mozilla could use some of the things that Opera has, like mouse gestures, but it is more stable (Opera had the habit of crashing when I had more than a dozen windows open) and at least as fast. That's right, Mozilla's rendering engine is at least as fast as Opera's "fastest on earth." Not only that, but it rendered many pages more accurately. With the release of 1.0, Mozilla is a very mature offering, and it makes Opera seem a little less professional, despite the hefty price tag.

    Unless the new engine is considerably faster than Gecko, I for one will be sticking to Mozilla. Good luck to the Opera guys though.

  • About Opera (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Roadmaster ( 96317 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:21PM (#4112681) Homepage Journal
    "Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.
    I think we're better off improving the features (like removing pop-up adds, etc...) than to try to squeak out another .01seconds to render the pictures on a screen."

    Featuritis is what brought us bloated, slow browsers such as IE and Mozilla, while I'm an avid Mozilla user, it's comparatively slow and resource-intensive.

    Opera has ALWAYS strived for performance , correct HTML, and truly useful features. Opera pioneered the MDI browser concept, as well as accessibility features such as full keyboard browsing, configurable page zoom and many others.

    Best of all, they've ALWAYS done this without adding bloat to the browser. It's always been lean and mean, ever since the 1.x versions (I helped with some language translations so I know about this firsthand).

    Keep in mind that many places still have aging 486 or P5 systems with little ram or hard disk to spare. On systems where Mozilla or IE won't even download due to lack of disk space, Opera installs and runs completely flawlessly, and absolutely flies when compared to the two leading browsers.

  • It isn't in the rendering engine, but in the way the program manages it's windows. Whenever I'm on somebody elses computer using IE or Mozilla and I type ctrl-n I have to wait for a second or two before the window appears and I can type/paste the URL. It's especially noticable on older computers and laptops. Opera does not have this slow down, which means I can open windows instantly and get on with browsing.

    I don't use the other browsers at all so, as far as speed is concerned, that's where I notice it most.

    _khl

  • I used Opera on Linux and it was OK. But when
    I've installed it on MacOS X I was suprised how
    crappy it is. Apparently they do not put much
    effort in MacOS X version.

  • Mozilla, IE, Opera... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vex24 ( 126288 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:28PM (#4112761) Homepage
    It's pretty amazing how much better the products get when even a small amount of competition is allowed to happen... I wonder what computing would be like if all software had such an opportunity.

  • Idiot web developer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by legLess ( 127550 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @12:37PM (#4112856) Journal
    From the article [com.com]:
    "But ultimately, [Monte] Hurd [with Starphire Technologies] concluded, Opera and other Microsoft competitors would do better to support the technologies that the market-leading Internet Explorer browser made available, rather than focusing on industry standards.

    "What these other browser makers should do is stop complaining about what Microsoft is doing and start supporting what Microsoft is supporting," Hurd said. "People out there aren't reading these specs; they're using IE."
    Translation: "I'm too stupid to be part of the solution; I'd rather be part of the problem."

    They talk to one web developer and this is the schmuck they get? My lord, is it any wonder the web is such a mess when professionals who should know better spout tripe like that? For the first time ever web developers can actually markup their documents to the specs and have a reasonable expectation that they'll display correctly in all the leading browsers.

    Look, dammit, specs are good because they don't change with every minor revision of the program. Do you really want a web that Microsoft can lead around by the nose? News flash - IE has bugs. Should developers make their markup bug-compatible with IE, then change all their sites every time Microsoft releases a new version or bug fix?

    Besides, he's contradicting himself. He complains that Opera doesn't support all of the DOM - why not instead complain that Opera doesn't support VBScript? That's a Microsoft "standard."
    • Have you tried writing advanced web code for multiple browsers?

      Here's the basic process:
      1) Figure out what you want to do.
      2) Learn how to do it by visiting "guru" sites about coding in general.
      3) Test it in all the browsers
      4) Debug. Eventually, it'll work well under IE (before it works under other browsers).
      5) Keep trying on the other browsers. In the mean time, tell everyone your page supports IE.

      A good example of such in action would be javascript I wrote for a class I teach:
      http://mentor.cc.purdue.edu/~wphillip/engr 106/

      It works okay in other browsers, but not quite so well as in IE.

      Also, check out the compatibility problems with dynapi2. I believe that IE is the only browser they've got everything to work under.

      By the way, IE is the most DOM compliant browser (comparing it to NS, Mozilla, Opera, and Links). So don't spread the FUD.

      • Re:Idiot web developer (Score:5, Insightful)

        by legLess ( 127550 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @02:21PM (#4113738) Journal
        Quoth fireboy1919:
        Have you tried writing advanced web code for multiple browsers?
        Yes, actually. I've been doing it for a living for 6 years. I'm as aware as anyone of the browser quirks and incompatibilities. I know that you can't just code to standards and upload. But my point is still true - now, more than ever before, a 100% standards-compliant web page has more chance of appearing and working correctly in every modern browser.

        We'll never have 100% compliance across all browsers, and we'll always have to test browsers before we ship markup. But marking up to standards is The Right Way, and thanks to browser makers following standards I'm spending less and less time hacking workarounds and more time designing and producing.

        I do capability-sniffing in some code, and I hate it - but that's progress over browser-sniffing. I developed an intranet many years back and flat-out told the company, "You have to use IE4+ or it won't work." With a standard desktop, the company and I agreed this was ok because it saved a lot of development and debugging. Today I could create the same functionality faster and have it work cross-browser.

        The nature of this beast (browser development and upgrades) is that it's slow, but there is noticeable progress in the right direction. Can't ask for more than that in the real world.
  • Some moments of light in this article, then not...

    "This is a fuller implementation," Tetzchner said. "We could have improved support with the old engine, but it would have been more difficult. This is a more future-proof solution."

    OK - that's a smart thing, imo - realizing that the legacy code is a dead-end and doing something about it.

    "But ultimately, Hurd concluded, Opera and other Microsoft competitors would do better to support the technologies that the market-leading Internet Explorer browser made available, rather than focusing on industry standards."

    "What these other browser makers should do is stop complaining about what Microsoft is doing and start supporting what Microsoft is supporting," Hurd said. "People out there aren't reading these specs; they're using IE."

    Uh-oh - now they're dead. Here's a news flash; every company that ever tried to to "follow" MS's lead ends up getting served up in the MS cafeteria as stew. They will forever be behind, in the dark and ultimately out of business if this is their plan.
  • I've seen it a dozen times...

    As someone who has moz/opera/ie/netscape4 (ugh hate admitting that) on the same box, opera DOES load the fastest.....in terms of from when i double click it to when i can open a page.

    followed by ie, followed by ns, followed (in a year) by moz.

    i prefer browsing with moz, but the mouse gestures are far too kludgy. (sorry optimoz, you dont cut it)

    so i use opera for the most part...and IE when i must. (and sometimes...even with moz...i must...damn frontpage)

    • Re:footprint/loading (Score:3, Interesting)

      by swordgeek ( 112599 )
      Hmmm, curious. I've not played with Opera for a while, but I'll assume it _is_ the fastest, since I've heard that so many times. (and very little opposition to that statement)

      But of the ones I've used, I find the speed goes:

      Mozilla IE NS6 NS4

      NS4 is _dog_ slow for anything other than simple HTML pages, and usually looks like hell. IE is admittedly pretty close to Mozilla. I hate the interface, the anti-standard stance, and the company, but it's fairly fast.

      Any version of NS6 I've seen has been such a disaster considering that it's based on Mozilla, that I've quit telling people it exists.

  • if you like ie6 (Score:4, Informative)

    by arnonym ( 582577 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @01:07PM (#4113156)

    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.

  • This is going to sound like a troll, but (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by Darren Winsper ( 136155 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @01:56PM (#4113543)
    "Our old engine wasn't that bad," Tetzchner said.

    Sorry, it is. OK, so it has decent CSS support (Well, CSS1 anyway). However, its DOM support is at least as bad Netscape4's CSS support is. DOM today is what CSS was back in 1998, somewhat used, but not to the extent that it could be, mainly because of legacy browsers.

    Also, they compare rewriting the rendering engine to writing Mozilla. Hello, they're producing a non-embeddable, platform-specific web browser. Mozilla.org produced a platform. Take a look at Komodo if you don't believe me. Sorry, but it's apples and oranges.

    And this "fastest browser on earth" crap is getting annoying. Anybody can create a fast browser, but both Mozilla and IE can do far more than Opera can, and I can't help but wonder how DOM compliant this new Opera will be. Will it be up to Mozilla's or even IE's capabilities? I doubt it to be honest.
    • 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.

  • Monte Hurd Here... (aka the anti-christ it seems) (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21, 2002 @02:32PM (#4113817)
    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

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