Opera Goes To 11, With Extensions and Tab Stacks 296
surveyork writes "Opera Software released Opera browser 11 for desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc). The main features are support for extensions similar to Chrome and Tab Stacks, Opera's version of tab management. The extension catalog is still small, with roughly 200 extensions, but steadily growing. The browser is very fast — Chrome-fast — and lightweight, with a new installer which is 30% smaller than the one in the previous version. Other enhancements include visual mouse gestures and better address field. There's no hardware acceleration yet, but it could be coming in a further dot release and benefit XP users as well as Mac, Linux and Windows 7/Vista users."
All look the same to me... (Score:2, Insightful)
I tried Opera last time. It looks quite a bit like FF 4. Which itself is looking somewhat similar to Chrome.
Meh, at this point in time, it hardly matters which browser you use - so long as its not IE6... So browser wars can stop now ;)
But at least all this competition is putting a lot of push into better browsers.
Re:I can't be the only one who thought of this... (Score:3, Insightful)
How is Opera "Chrome Fast"? Shouldn't it be Chrome that is almost opera fast?
Based on both age and lots of tests...
The stack concept is an interesting alternative to Firefox's panorama. I find the former convenient with a small amount of tabs.
Liking it so far (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been using Opera 11 for a few days now and I'm enjoying it. It feels faster than version 10. I think it's more stable too, based on my testing so far.
Opera folks amaze me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Programmers at Opera have proven to me that they are a force to be reckoned with. If the Firefox team had just 3/4 of the ambition of Opera folks, Firefox would be quite advanced. Credit goes to them. The [frequent] releases they make are a testimony to their skill.
Opera Graphic Acceleration (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it does have the ability to use hardware acceleration for graphics in both opengl and direct3d, it just has not been implimented in general release versions of opera yet. See this discussion for more details [opera.com] and a post by an Opera developer [opera.com]. Currently, as the links mention, Opera's rendering engine is pure software, but it seems to keep up well enough with the browsers that have opted for hardware acceleration so far. I'm guessing they wont implement it until they can make sure it works on Windows/OSX/Linux/Unix, since they try to keep uniform support most of the time on all major Operating Systems.
I've been a long time Opera user, switching from Mozilla (pre firefox) to Opera when it became free (as in beer). However, I do get irritated by their efforts to keep up with Chrome's speed while screwing over long time users (they cant win that fight in the long run anyways, Google has way too much money). Numerous bug reports on long time stable features and major regressions happen every time they release a major update for Opera and take months or years to fix. From Opera 10.5 to pre 11, tool tips would cover up other applications even if Opera was located in the background. If you happen to have a mouse with arrow buttons for back and forward, the forward arrow button has been broke as far as using the "fast forward" feature since 10.5. At one point, during the version 11 betas, the arrow buttons were broke period (though it was a development release so one cannot really complain about that). With Opera 11, their famous mouse gestures are also partially broken with their implementation of a graphical interface for showing what gestures do what when you hold down the right mouse button. One of the more useful gestures was "right" + "left" + "right" (closes the current window). Now, with the changes they have made, this gesture only works half the time, but they have said they will fix it, but it's tied into the UI they implemented, so it will probably be a while.
They do generally listen to their users. They decided to force chrome like urls on their users during the Opera 11 development (removing "http://" and any of the args after *.com such as ?id=12345) claiming it would make users less likely to click fraudulent links. However, if you're a developer, seeing the arguments is a must and not seeing "http://" or "https://" or "ftp://" is just kind of silly, since sometimes you like to know what protocol you are using instead of guessing through some abstract replacement graphic. Since opera has never been a browser to appeal to novice internet users, dumbing it down seems kind of counter intuitive.
Opera is still my primary browser (except for development--I prefer Firefox/Firebug for that over Opera Dragonfly, but it seems every new version they release, I dread what long time feature they will break next. They haven't frustrated me enough to want to modify the Chromium source code to natively have all the features of Opera, but I wouldn't hold my breath on it for Opera 12.
Re:All look the same to me... (Score:2, Insightful)