Opera 9 with Widgets and BitTorrent Now Available 385
ZarK writes "Technical Preview 2 of the upcoming Opera 9.0 browser is now available for download. In addition to the general bugfix and rendering improvements there's also new features, like x-platform type widgets, improved content blocking, bittorrent support, thumbnail preview of tabs and more. Improved functionality also comes in the fact that a good lot of the scripts from userscripts.org will now work, advanced settings have improved in opera:config, and more browser customization is available at the opera community. However, some clear indications that this is still an alpha release is the experimental support for NTLM which breaks the proxy functionality for some users, and the fact that widgets are always on top."
Hmmm...maybe I'll try it. (Score:3, Interesting)
The best. (Score:1, Interesting)
I always had the idea that Operants were people with too much time and money on their hands. But when it went free, I grabbed it right away, and after figuring out some of the frustrating GUI anomalies, I've never looked back. I haven't opened anything else since on my ancient night box, which was running close to crippled with my previous #1, Firefox (memory leaks, I guess, is the rumor).
I give it an A+. (Score:5, Interesting)
The email client is vastly improved, and it feels much quicker than in previous releases. It was quite quick at listing my 1800 MB mailbox, and it's now possible to scroll through the entries at a rapid pace without delay.
The opera:config feature is quite nice, and presented very well. It's far nicer to view than the comparable about:config capabilities of Firefox, yet just as easy to locate and modify preferences.
Overall, this release is an improvement over the last, while still retaining the small size and high responsiveness that Opera is known for. I give it an A+.
Re:A browser with native BitTorrent (Score:5, Interesting)
Now if only websites had a way to offer a BT version of their download files, so that they'll never get Slashdotted again...
I like it.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm...maybe I'll try it. (Score:5, Interesting)
For the most part if your code is up to standards it looks fine in opera. 90% of the time it renders like Mozilla. Opera is not making the designers job harder. It's closer than most to passing the Acid 2 test.
I'm already trying it out. Full of more great stuff, as one expects. They smoothed out a lot of the features they added in Preview 1 and added so much more.
I heard reports of problems with upgrading so I did a clean install and spent the afternoon adding my custom buttons and changing my search options. (I no longer have to use 3rd party tools to change them)
Between custom buttons, panels, and widgets I think Opera can now easily do anything a Firefox extension can do.
Bittorrent and Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
RSS viewing too tedious (Score:3, Interesting)
back/forward (Score:2, Interesting)
With Opera, (pre 9.x, even,) you just click back, and the previous page jumps right up; fully rendered and ready. --With Firefox, you have to wait, and get to listen to the processor throttling up, as if this was Java 1.2 on Win95..
Firef*cks be gone..
Re:Hmmm...maybe I'll try it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Already there (Score:2, Interesting)
Cookie control? (Score:2, Interesting)
Still, competition is good, and this is certainly good competition.
Re:A browser with native BitTorrent (Score:5, Interesting)
You see, I'm working on a website that will never be usable in IE. IE is too primitive, and broken. It can't handle xml mime types, and won't even in IE7. It can't do SVG natively, and I don't feel like wrapping all my many SVG widgets in object tags and writing code for a bad Adobe plugin. And besides, people should just plain be discouraged from ever using IE.
SVG though is important to the website, I suppose I could use something gay like flash or java, but I really wanted this to be a pure site. I thought that it would mean that it was Firefox only. Some friends chided me into trying to make it work with Opera and Konq though...
And I was shocked. Opera 8 gets alot of the non-interactive SVG right. Better yet, the Opera 9 beta gets alot of it right, period. And the places where it's screwed up? Bad syntax on my part, that Firefox ignores but that Opera is (rightfully) bitchy about. I won't start using Opera 9, but there's no reason why others shouldn't. It kicks ass.
(And as for Konq, things are looking good. It did the non-interactive SVG really well, and Konqueror 4 looks like it will do just as well as the other two. Still waiting on Safari, but I think it will soon be pretty good itself)
But for IE, we might never need browser specific hackery at all.
Was released yesterday. (Score:3, Interesting)
2006-02-07 13:35:26 New Opera Preview Out (Index,Software) (rejected)
My biggest complaint with Opera - page zooming... (Score:2, Interesting)
I downloaded the stable Opera 8.5 a few days ago, and I have to say (as a current Firefox on Windows user) that Opera has an awful lot going for it. It's fast and seems a lot less bloated and quirky than Firefox, plus I've been finding a few features I really like.
But the one issue that kind of blows it for me is the page zooming. I happen to be one of the many people who due to eyesight issues often increase the browser's text size. One thing I love about Firefox over IE is that it has an easy hot key to up the text size (Ctrl-+). In Opera, there only seems to "Zoom", which although it has a greater amount of control, has the unfortunate behavior of stretching the graphics in proprotion to the text (FF and IE leave the graphics at their regular size no matter what the text size is). While I can appreciate that idea in theory, in practice most web graphics are simply not designed to scale that way, and the result is that if you want to browse with enlarged text (which I often do), you have to suffer with ugly, pixelated, and often overlapping images. Not to mention that the text itself renders oddly in many zoom levels. And there doesn't seem to be any option to change it.
It's bad enough that I think the vast majority of people who use enlarged text would reject Opera because of it. And that's a shame because Opera has so much else going for it.
Re:Already there (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A browser with native BitTorrent (Score:4, Interesting)
(And personally I wouldn't want to use Bittorrent given a choice, because its so slow - but thats a different story)
Re:A browser with native BitTorrent (Score:3, Interesting)
Over-hyping browser competition (Score:1, Interesting)
Opera doesn't have to be an IE/Mozilla killer. And there seems to be a sizable percentage of Mozilla zealots who can't accept that viable alteratives to their personally preferred software exist, though I don't think this is the majority by far, and feel the need to bash Opera.
How many times have I been flamed for even mentioning Opera over the years just to have some Mozilla zealot try to preach to me about features that Opera already has. (At least now a good portion are now aware that Opera also has tabs.)
Again, this isn't every Mozilla zealot who hates on Opera, but the ones who do are often the loudest (read: obnoxious).