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Opera Browser for Linux/X11 Nears Beta 146

Posted by CmdrTaco from the its-coming dept.
Samawi writes "Opera Software has issued this interview with cofounder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner. Highlights include screenshots, a new text only browser to compete with Lynx support for Free BSD and other variants of UNIX/X11 (using cross-platform features of Qt). I can't wait to retire good 'ol buggy and bloated Netscape:-) " Its a bit thin on the details, but its nice to know that its coming.
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Opera Browser for Linux/X11 Nears Beta More

Opera Browser for Linux/X11 Nears Beta

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  • I saw the whining over at Linux Today when they ran the interview.

    1) Opera should be open source

    Opera is a software company. They make their money by selling their software. Not service, not documentation, not brand name, they sell the software. If you think they could switch to being a service oriented company, please get real. Any browser that needs a lot of customer support is not worth using.

    2) Opera should be free (beer)

    Yes, I'm afraid Opera is going to have a thin time of it with Linux users unless Mozilla is seriously delayed or dysfunctional, simply because it will be free. Add to this the number of us that would use an open source product -- even if slightly inferior -- and it looks like a hard road for them.

    3) I don't want to buy a commercial browser

    This doesn't mean it's wrong for you not to buy it because it's not free. If you feel that strongly about it, it's entirely your choice. Mozilla will be here one day.

    4) I hope they lose the sucky MDI interface

    MDI is a culture thing. Microsoft practically shovels developers into the MDI model, recommending it in their "design standards" and making it the default AppWizard in VC++ (last time I bought the damn thing anyway -- quite a while ago.) I don't like it either, but I expect thats what Opera will be at first anyway. Let them concentrate on the system issues of porting for now.

    5) I already bought it for Windows, why should I have to pay for it again for Linux?

    I really think this is fair, Opera needs to recover the development costs of the Linux version whether you have already bought it for another system or not. IIRC, they are at least offering a discount for those that have bought another OS version.

    I think Opera makes a quality product, and I wish them well. I hope people will be kinder to them than I expect them to be. Open source is good != Commercial software is bad.

    Jim




  • Because Lynx doesn't preserve placement information, and so you end up having to wade through a bunch of crap that was meant to be in the sidebar to get to the text you're looking for.
  • First, the trivial:
    now, I haven't seen Opera, but...I've used both Chamelean and Hummingbird's X emulation (at a couple of jobs, including the one I'm at now), and *both* of them have an option in the X setup that specifies all-in-one-window, or seperate windows. Doesn't Opera have this? Anybody know?

    Now, the important point:
    Text browsers are Good. I normally run Netscrape, with auto-image loading turned off. Last year, I b'lieve it was, I saw a study, done at Yahoo, or some equally huge site, and they found that 80%, I believe it was, of *all* the netsurfers passing through had their auto-image loading turned off.

    *sigh*

    Given that, the only explanation I have is that marketing types, or folks with less of a clue than Steph (from UserFriendly), since something like half to two-thirds of the web sight I run across, including places like DEC and M$ (of course), have NO ALTERNATE LABELS, and so, all you see is a bunch of freakin' boxes, and you have to load images, just to see which one says, "continue", or whatever (so you don't get dragged to some other idiotic sight which proceeds to eat your system with 55 browsers).

    So, if Opera's going to have a text-mode version, tables, and other stuff are just fine...but can it take a jpg or gif of the word "next", and translate it to text? If not, what *can* we do about these morons?

    mark
  • I'm sorry, but I beg to differ on this. Yes, I know its probably not entirely IE5's fault that whenever it crashes it causes me to hard reboot, it probably has more to do with those blue screens I get once every few weeks telling me that 'my windows configuration is invalid', advising me to reinstall. Either way, I dont like having a browser pause on a webpage and stop my system. IMO, a browser simply shouldnt be tied that deeply into the OS.

    Nick

  • Hasn't it been hit home enough times by the open source community that there are better ways of making your money than selling software? For that matter, is Opera making money? Starving university students (like me) would never pay over CDN$50 for any shareware — haven't enough arguments for smaller shareware fees been written long ago?

    Besides, it doesn't matter if you make money as long as Wall Street thinks you might someday.

  • I've been using Opera as my main browser on Windows systems for a few months, and I paid the $30 or $35 registration fee to help support the effort.

    Early versions of Opera were weak and very skimpy on features like JavaScript and plug-in support, but the current version is great. It is smaller than Navigator and Internet Explorer and much faster to load and render pages. It supports JavaScript, CSS 1 and Netscape plug-ins.

    Another thing I like about Opera is that it holds closer to standard HTML than the other browsers. It is less forgiving of bad HTML, so it's useful to have around when you're trying to create standard HTML that would pass the W3C HTML Validator [w3.org].

    Opera also has a button on the browser you can click to render a page in "easy-to-read" format, which helps when the designer has gone nuts with graphical backgrounds and text.

    There are a couple of rendering things I don't like about Opera, such as the way it displays lists. For the most part, though, it handles pages as well or better than the other browsers.

    Most tech journalists still describe the browser war as being Microsoft vs. Netscape/AOL. Some sites like BrowserWatch are reporting that up to 10 percent of its visitors are using Opera, so we may be reaching a point where it should be taken more seriously as a competitor.

    To download a 30-day version, visit Opera Software [operasoftware.com].

  • Emphasis on "some". Personally, I love MDI. Especially Opera's implementation of it.

    ('Course, I'm also using a slightly hacked version of Windows 98, so consider the source... :) )

    Nice thing about MDI from the user perspective is that it's a big memory saver - for example, in Opera you can have about twenty browser windows open at once with little or no performance degradation - impossible if you have a totally new window all the time, or at least it is in Windoze. :)

    I suppose it's more of an advantage to us Windoze users then the rest of you folks, but I still like it. Nice way to keep all my browser windows/IRC windows/email windows nicely organized and in a central location, WITHOUT screwing with virtual desktops (which I hate, but that's another story :) ).


    "I don't believe that there is one, single, perfect spiritual way and, in realizing that, obviously you become a lot more open."
  • Opera has the best keyboard support of any moreorless mainstream Windoze program I've ever seen. I use those functions all the time. I don't think there's any Opera functions you _can't_ access with the keyboard in a fast/efficient/timely manner...

    Research before you post please :)



    "I don't believe that there is one, single, perfect spiritual way and, in realizing that, obviously you become a lot more open."
  • No, they're not the same code. Opera for Win 3.1 is 16 bit, the Win 95 version is 32 bit.
  • I did send in a short snippet when they released some news about some of the ports, and also when the BeOS-beta was released, but it never made the headlines I guess.
  • Excuse the ignorance but how can this happen since DOS is a 16-bit OS. (I use the term OS loosely)

  • Fast but it stills sucks (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ok, Opera is damn fast but this MDI system really sucks.
  • Just curious if there are any decent lynx ports for Windows or any specifically written text browswers for Windows and if anybody uses them?

    Josh
  • and the screenshot is even in PNG format. how ironic, considering today's earlier articles.

  • MDI (Score:2)

    by SrmL ( 18247 )
    MDI on X11 is very uncommon and I don't like it. I wonder why they didn't change this, AFAIK the MacOS version will not have a MDI.
  • I fail to see the irony.
    --

  • Thanks (Score:2)

    by Booker ( 6173 )
    Thanks. I don't know what the previous poster's attack was based on - I didn't say much about how, or if, I contribute. Truth be told, I can't contribute much to Mozilla or Abiword except perhaps a bug report. I contribute in ways that I can, such as being a rabid Linux evangelist. :-) It's also made me want to become a better programmer so that I *can* contribute in that particular way.

    But, I agree - there's nothing wrong with simply using free software. In fact, I think it's one of the best ways to support it. Ultimately, that's why it exists - to be used, right?
  • I do not have a Windows partition nowadays,
    but one thing I miss from Windows is MDI.
    It has many advantages:
    1. You can have special window decorations
    for child windows.
    2. You can auto-arrange relevant windows in
    a variety of ways.
    3. This should be faster, at least as far
    as Z-ordering goes.
    4. If you ever used framebuffer with
    split view, you love MDI and don't even
    know it.
  • Still running Netscape, Comunicator 4.51 now and it's as unstable or worse than most other Netscape browsers. It's hard to convince people that Linux is stable when your browser keeps barfing its guts out.

    Have tried several QT and GTK Mozilla releases. It's still a work in progress. No alternative there, yet.

    Used Opera on a friend's Windos box. Looks good. I need an alternative browser on Linux, a viable one. I hope this one is it.

    Oh, And I'll pay the 35 bucks for a decent browser. Free buys me shit right now. Some things are worth paying for, n'est ce pas?

    -M
  • 32-bit DOS extenders. If I recall correctly (it's been *years*, so hop in if I'm wrong -- I'm sure someone will ;) DJGPP ships with one. DOOM and its successors all the way through Quake used some other DOS extender, too. Neat stuff, but a bit weird at the same time :)
  • Opera's text browser PNG is showing either tables or stylesheet formatting!

    Well, that's nothing unusual. Have a look at the w3m browser which also comes with tables (hp is at http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w3m/eng/ )

  • There's what you call the console window on the right. There's the big window underneath everything that looks like a file browser on its left side, and has the grey you speak of at the top. At least one part of the window has www.news.com.

    But between those two is a third window which is probably Opera help or something.

    And possibly a fourth window between the Opera Help window and the www.news.com -- Says XSL etc. You can only see the bottom, but that part also looks like an independent window.

    --

  • Some Opera insights (Opera a tad overated) (Score:3)

    by cbarry ( 70212 ) on Sunday August 29, 1999 @11:37AM (#1718445)

    Being a web developer that rigorously adheres to standards and closely monitors and occasionally participates in W3C activity, and being knowledgable of browsers in general, I thought I'd take some time to give you all the skinny on this.

    Despite Opera's [opera.com] reputation as "the standards compliant browser", it implements far less of current W3C standards than Netscape or in particular IE. Specifically, CSS-positioning (part of CSS2) appears to be completely non-existant.

    Since Opera only implements a fraction of the Netscape/IE functionality, and until recently was completely unportable (Windows only), it's not too surprising that it is much smaller and faster.

    Anyways, I'll list some of the pros and cons of Opera and some features/misfeatures it shares with its competition (Netscape/IE).

    [Oh, one last thing before the list. MDI and SDI have been mentioned. For those of you who don't know what they are, basically:

    SDI -- Single document interface. A limitation applying to an application program that only shows a single window giving a view of one document at a time.

    MDI -- Multiple document interface. The ability of an application program to show windows giving views of more than one document at a time.]

    Some pros:

    • Excellent support for keyboard navigation. No need to use lynx and give up graphics just because you hate the mouse. (Of course, the Open Source Mozilla [mozilla.org] will ultimately allow the same.)
    • Fast and small. Despite its lack of features, for most of your browsing you will appreciate the speed.

    That's really all of the pros. While only two items are listed, both of them are extremely important and make for a much different feel compared to the bigger fish. Anyways, the cons:

    • Non-free. You must pay $30-$35 dollars to use this software after 30 days of evaluation. You may not obtain its source code either [neither with IE nor NS[1-4]].
    • Right now, still pretty much Windows-only. IE also runs on Macs, Solaris and HP-UX. Netscape 4.x runs on almost everything under the sun. Mozilla runs under even more platforms.
    • Despite "standards compliant browser" reputation, it implements far less of current W3C technical recommendations [w3.org] than Netscape or IE.
    • Still has crashing bugs just like Netscape and IE. In particular, with JavaScript enabled there are plenty of sites that bring down the newest versions. (Not nearly as bad as NS4.61 on my Debian box though, which likes to crash 1/10th of the time I close a window. (Wasn't always this bad.))

    Anyways, my current favorite browser is IE5 though I almost never get to use it because I'm stuck in Linux with WindowMaker so that I actually have a productive and stable environment. IE5 really does implement most of the current standards and is quite fast (being seemingly hooked into the lowest guts of Windows), though Mozilla will be the true 100% compliant browser and smaller and faster to boot. I hate most of Microsoft's products, but a few things like their browser and Powerpoint (which Linus admits liking) are really okay.

    So,

    • Use IE5 now if you can. Netscape 4.61 or Opera if you can't.
    • Make a 100% switch to Mozilla the day it is released. The current M9 release is actually somewhat stable and usable, and it's really cool to watch the CSS on your pages come to life under that browser.
    • Don't switch back to IE or Opera until they implement the standards as good as Mozilla.

    That's enough writing for now,
    Christopher

  • Netscape is still slow and annoying, but I fear the HTML standard is such a mess it'll be hard for any browser to handle it all properly. Maybe something better will come along and replace the web. One can only hope.

    Opera is nice for Windows. It displays fast, lets you know exactly what the time is being spent on (such as x/y images remaining) and customizable icons, for starters. Definately one of my favorites.

    But having a "many little browsers in one big window" (the acronym-free definition) layout is annoying on X. My window manager handles them quite nicely, thank you, I don't need the "Opera Window Manager" cluttering up half my screen.

    GZilla is another nice alternative. While far from feature-complete, I consider it better than Mozilla even in its infant stage and the final product should be quite nice. Maybe Mozilla will turn out nice, but the initial releases just don't seem to be emphasizing getting out a workable browser first and adding features later. At least GZilla is small and incomplete, as opposed to big and just as incomplete.

    Enough ranting. At least the Opera curses-style looks quite promising. I'd kill for a text-only browser with good tables/frames support. The web is supposed to be for everybody from dumb terminals to fancy workstations - if only more browsers and web designers realized that.

  • >So? From the screenshot, it DOES do tables, which lynx has failed to >address (in any MEANINGFUL way) for years.

    That's because nobody who uses and works on lynx cares enough about tables to bother with it. Quite frankly tables doesn't make my top 10 list either.
  • You need to know some tricks to use the Mac OS's method well. The most useful is that if you hold down the option key while switching apps, the one you are switching from hides itself. I regularly run 10 or more apps in Mac OS (with multiple windows open in each) like this with no problems on a 17" screen. If things in the background are hidden you don't even know they're there, but choose them from a menu and all their windows just show up and pop to the front.

    MDI is one of the major reasons I don't like Windows. BeOS and Linux do better, but if you do away with MDI it makes sense to put the menubar at the top of the screen rather than in the window, which Linux and BeOS (generally) do not do, though KDE supports it. Having the menubar at the top of the screen has the added advantage of making it easier to hit; just head for the top of the screen and then position horizontally. Much faster than hitting a 16 pixel high target.

    --
  • I don't see why they're implementing MDI in Linux. I've heard the BeOS version doesn't have it (I've never seen a BeOS app that did), and I'm almost positive the Mac OS version won't have it (Mac OS won't even let you do it, you'd have to write your own windowing system), so why are they forcing it on Linux users?

    Oh well. Doesn't matter to me as I'm sure they'll never release PPC binaries! Arg! I hate that.

    --
  • Just exactly what is your argument? That Qt isn't free? WRONG. It's 100% free for developing Free Software. So what if you can't use the free version to develop proprietary software. You can't do that under the GPL anyway. But you are free to develop commerical open-source and free applications. Or maybe you're pissed that Qt costs so much for commercial development. Think again. Price out some **real** commercial tools, not just motif/JBuilder/VC++. If it was overpriced no one would buy it and Troll would go out of business. But guess what, they're not out of business, so people are buying it. If it makes you feel any better, just think of all the money they're losing by not catering to the AC market.
  • I don't know if Netscape wants to do what's "morally right" about Linux and open source, but let's not forget that Netscape is now part of AOL. AOL, like most other companies, has not been a champion of open standards or source or software morality or anything else when it goes against business strategy--witness what they did after MS attacked them on the IM front.

    Furthermore, Netscape does suck. It crashes on me fairly frequently in both Linux and Windows. But I don't like Opera at all because of MDI. I tend to have seven or eight browser windows open at once--I'm always afraid that I'll forget to check a link, and it gives me something to do while a page is loading--so MDI is incredibly inconvenient.
  • I'd rather GPL'ed software so I probably won't switch from lynx unless I switch to Opera from Netscape and their text browser is included. I'd much prefer an Xlib based GPL'ed browser. Are there any in the works? (Mozilla is not GPL) The w3c has a library ((L)GPL) for the guts of the `net communication; so with a proper renderer, the project is 'done'. Any takers?

    I was trying to write a web browser (in GTK) awhile back, and it's *hard*. And the easy part is the network communication stuff... I wrote a multithreaded little program going which allows you to download web pages (up to 10 at once, and this limit is hard-coded and easy to change) and then displays the HTML code. But the hard part is the renderer... I just ended up giving up because I don't have the time to devote to something huge like that.

    Matt


    "Software is like sex- the best is for free"
  • MDI is _not_ memory saver - it's just another method of presenting documents (instead of toplevel windows) and memory consumption of these methods shouldn't differ!
    It's stupidity of programs that eats tons of MB, not idea of toplevel windows.
  • Opera was initially a windows-only browser. I think it started to get somewhat popular just about the time Microsoft made IE free and Netscape followed suit. At that point, open source wasn't nearly as popular as it was now. What distinguised Opera then was that 1. It wasn't coming from some behemoth company that tied in a bunch of marketing shit, 2. You had to (read: supposed to) pay money for it, 3. It was a hell of a lot faster (which was very important for the low end Pentiums).

    Probably 99% of Windows users don't care if a product is open source. And probably 80% don't care that Microsoft and Netscape are giving them their browser only because they want them to buy other products. Opera really came at a bad time, because they wanted $35 and everyone else was giving away a browser for free. A few nerds appreciated it because of its efficiency and some of them bought it, I suppose.

    Now Opera is trying to port to everything under the sun. But simply because they're going to have a Linux version doesn't necessarily mean that they adhere to the open source ideals that the Linux community has. They're a small company and a browser is a big project. Big companies can do a big project and not make people pay for it. Small companies can't. If it weren't for Netscape, we wouldn't even have Mozilla.

    Opera is basically a Windows shareware company. It seems that this is becoming less and less popular (though that may only be my view, as I've moved to using Linux almost exclusively), but it's the only way Opera can make a browser. The open source fanatics are pulling for Mozilla, but some less fanatical nerds who've converted from Windows to Linux recently remember when Opera saved them from the bloat of Netscape and IE and think it's worth the $35 when their only alternatives are the crash-prone Netscape and the still unfinished Mozilla.

    If Opera becomes more stable and usable than Netscape before Mozilla does, I'll be happy to pay the $35 to use a non open source browser. I like the philosophy of open source, but for practical purposes you can't expect a company to give such a valuable product away out of the goodness of their hearts. What really bugs me is Windows shareware hackers who expect you to pay $30 for their Visual C++ re-hack of Space Invaders and keep their source closed.
  • Having paid for an Opera license on Windows, I was one who pledged support for the original Project Magic and am willing to pay 50% more for a Linux license.

  • With 2.2 fbcon I'd prefer real (graphical) browser (without X) rather than text-only version. What do you need fbcon for? SVGATextMode offers lots of hi-res modes to make use of your big monitor (and text-only Opera).
  • MDI is great. You anti-mdi lamers can go ahead and spend 40 minutes moving all your Gimp windows one at a time from one desktop to the other, but us in the real world like to get things done fast! Long live MDI!
  • Christopher complains about Opera that it
    Well, how many lines of code would it take to achieve compliance? 1 million? more? I'm a "lines-of-code" minimalist: the fewer lines of source code I rely on day-to-day, the more reliable and modifiable my software environment will tend to be. You havent explained *why* w3c's reccommendations outweigh the cost in LOC of their implementation.

  • The Top Ten Reasons I Like Opera (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1) Has a "Toggle Image Loading" button on the progress bar.

    2) Has a "Toggle My Document Colors" button on the progress bar. Ugly colors and busy backgrounds become instantly readable with one click.

    3) Has a timer that starts when you click on a link, and shows you how long the page is taking to load. Also shows total number of images in the page, number of kilobytes loaded so far, and even divides the kilobytes recieved by the time elapsed to give you a number. Good for those "dang this page just keeps loading and loading" pages. Lets you know that no, you're not crazy, the guy did put up 523k of graphics and banners and web rings on his home page.

    4) Nifty special download window lets you do all your downloads on one window, instead of having separate windows for each download. Once the file is finished downloading, just double-click on the filename to "open" the file with its associated application (Windows-only feature?)

    5) Good keyboard support. I use 'z' and 'x' instead of ALT-ARROWKEY. 'a' and 'q' move from link to link just like lynx. Matter of fact, Opera with images turned off is very lynx-like, in my OPINION.

    6) It doesn't try to be an all-in-one solution for all your internet needs. There is mail and news functionality built in, probably due to customers asking for it, but the only time I tried the news support I ran screaming back to tin. I never used browser email clients so I can't comment on that one.

    7) Good multiple window support, I can open up tons of windows and cascade them for easy readability without messing up my desktop. Also helps with those annoying "pop-up" windows that Geocities.com uses.

    8) OPERA.EXE 1,282,048 bytes

    9) When using the trial ("free") version, it gives you 30 days of use. Not a 30 day timer from when you installed the program, but 30 seperate days of use.

    10) Those crazy Scandinavians...what will they think of next?

  • More code is good if it implements useful features. If you didn't believe this deep down then you would be using cp/m and Wordstar, and you would have no way to post on slashdot.
  • Well, this is a Linux-only BBS (or whatever you call it). There are some good BeOS news sites out there though, you just have to look a bit.
  • Okay, ya got me. I don't use Lynx. But why not just make Lynx better? This is OSS we're talking about here.
  • If you look at the screenshots of the text browser, it's not a Lynx clone. Looks more like a console browser for victims of the evil David Siegel school of web design. The notable difference (from what little we can see) is that it renders tables as tables, not just table cells sequentially down a page. I'm hoping it also could cohabit with your GUI Opera on the same machine: sharing bookmarks, preferences (where they can be shared), and the like. Opera's just about the only thing I miss from Window$ these days. Can't wait for the X11 beta.
  • Well, despite what M$ will tell you Win95/98 sits ontop of a 16 bit dos, and it is 32 bit. So its possible. Remember those dos games that came with DOS/4GW I believe that also allowed apps to be 32 bit. Though I could be Wrong!
  • 1. You can have special window decorations for child windows.
    You mean you can't do that without MDI? A problem in windows?
    2. You can auto-arrange relevant windows in a variety of ways.
    Just as doable without MDI
    3. This should be faster, at least as far as Z-ordering goes.
    No, it is necessarily slower, as you introduce an extra window (the one containing the others). One extra window means more work for the windowing system.
    4. If you ever used framebuffer with split view, you love MDI and don't even know it.
    Huh?

    All those features of MDI (except 4 that I didn't understand) is just as available without it too.
    So - no need. The problem with MDI is how I have to choose between clipped child windows or obscuring an area of the screen not used for that app (but perhaps used by some other).
    Both is really bad. I don't need a 'mother' window obscuring other things for me. If you get confused from seeing other stuff, maximize the window you work in. Fortunately, X has the means to make that mother window invisible - even if the programmers didn't intend it that way. :-)
  • Despite Opera's reputation as "the standards compliant browser", it implements far less of current W3C standards than Netscape or in particular IE. Specifically, CSS-positioning (part of CSS2) appears to be completely non-existant.
    instead of having partial & buggy support for the current W3C standards they have good support for an earlier version of HTML, and CSS level 1. what do you prefer, Netscape & Microsoft's sucky support for both CSS level 1 & 2 combined with partial support for HTML? I'd rather have Opera over that any day, so I actually know what I can and cannot do (see Opera's Developer's Corner [opera.com] for details).
  • MacOS, Amiga and NeXTstep/OpenStep/GNUstep/MacOSX don't need layered windows, as MDI is just a dirty work-around for the misplacement of the menu-bar. M$ introduced MDI in Windows 2.0 when they realized they needed a shared menu for multiple document windows and need to be able to display a menu when there are no document windows.

    Argh, I don't know how people can actually like MDI, it's just like running MacOS where every other application is always hidden. *sigh*

    Oh and btw, in the design specifications of Windows95, M$ wanted to go full SDI (just look at the Windows Explorer) and even stated that in the documentation for Visual C++ 4.

  • WindowMaker supports this feature as well: if I right-click in the minimize button of one of my NetScape windows, every NetScape window hides under the NetScape application icon.

    GNUstep has the same feature, and is window manager independent. Select "Hide" from the application menu and all windows of that application hide in their application icon.

  • It looks from the screenshot that they are doing the Linux version the same way they did the MS-Windows version, with many windows inside a larger one. I'd much prefer to have the windows be seperate entities, as that allows for a larger browsing space, while still leaving room for other applications. It also makes it harder to switch between other apps and a specific browser window.

    The benefits are that you can have many browsing windows open without cluttering up, for instance, the taskbar in KDE, or simply without running numerous processes, which can be difficult to switch between. It also allows for such features as tiling and cascading only the Opera windows.

    I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to have multiple windows, especially with the multihomepages of Opera. I could open Opera and get a browser with slashdot, one with links to the comics I read, and one with google. Or somesuch.

    What do you think?
    ---
  • http://www.opera.com/graphics/linux.png

    Look again.
    I see multiple windows, not an all inclusive window.

    The green you see is the desktop I believe

  • I will! (Score:3)

    by Booker ( 6173 ) on Sunday August 29, 1999 @08:21AM (#1718497) Homepage
    Well, maybe I won't whine. They're free to release their software under any license they wish (assuming they follow rules on GPL-derived software, etc...). But I, for one, am much less likely to use it if it's not Free.

    When WordPerfect for Linux first came out, I thought "whoohooo!" and went out and downloaded the whole mess. Same with StarOffice. But I fire it up, and I see some problems, some things I don't like, and maybe it crashes on me. I think "hm... wonder how long 'til THAT gets fixed..." And you know what? I haven't used either one in a very long time. However, I use AbiWord [abisource.com] almost daily. Sure, it doesn't yet have as many features, but it's off to a good start, it's not bloated, it's done right - in short, it's Free Software and it's lookin' good. And I feel comfortable using it.

    I won't whine about Opera's license, some people will be happy to pay for it, and more power to them. I personally will not bother with it, and I'll keep rooting for Mozilla. Someday my Lizard will come.... :)


  • Opera coming out with a text-based browser than can compete with Lynx? Don't count on it. The current Lynx has a 32-bit DOS port that can run under MSDOS 6.2 on a 386. I rather doubt Opera's text-based browser will be pulling this off anytime soon.
  • KDE makes MDI easy, and there's some MDI kde apps, like kvirc, so they had the ability and a precedent to cite. But the majority of kde apps are non-MDI and prefer it that way. I do hope that they include the ability to run in SDI mode or at least detach windows out of MDI.

    What would be heaven would be to create MDI master windows on the fly based on rules. Imagine a "window group", like desktops, only in individual windows. Each window you open stays in the window group, so if it's an SDI window, it opens a new SDI window, if it's MDI, it opens in that MDI window. I'd love to keep all my slashdot windows accessable with one click on the taskbar.
  • The window on the right is a console window with the text browser they created in the process open. If you look in the upper right of the Opera window, you can see the grey where there is no browser window, but there is Opera.

    Multiple windows, yes, but in a Starofficeish style. They are all within one larger window.
    ---
  • Probably because no one submitted it, or it didn't strike CmdrTaco's fancy. Why do *you* think?

    I agree I would have liked to see the BeOs announcement, I didn't know about Opera on BeOs until I followed the link from this story to Opera's webpage. Hmmm, good thing this story was posted.

    Besides, there is no really stable and powerful browser for Linux yet, this is as newsworthy as Mozilla announcements. A lot of people, including Burlington Coat Factory, want to see a good browser soon. It's important in terms of not letting IE dominate browser standards.

    Jim


  • geez they really don't know how to make windows binaries :) are you just supposed to rename the .1 file to a .exe and run it.. thats what I did and it said it couldn't find a .dll .. which I guess is positive meaning.. well it ran.
  • Actually it's because implementing table support in Lynx would be really hard, because it requires a re-entrant parser. Unfortunately, having been written long before tables were around, Lynx's parser uses lots of global variables; to make the parser re-entrant, you'd have to put all these globals in a structure, and change the signatures of lots of functions to pass such structures around. No one has yet stepped up to the plate to do this because it would be so much work.
  • Well, if a free software crashes 3 times in a hour, I would say it sucks no matter how free it is. Opera is a software company who is trying to make a living out of writing good softwares. What's the matter with you free software zealots? Is it just that you are too cheap to pay for that $35 registration fee to support the company?? Get a job, and stop spending $$$ on beers. Alcohol kills your brain, as if it is not bad enough already.

  • It's always struck me as odd that Opera isn't open source. I mean they're trying to pass themselves off as an 'alternative' to the gorillas (coincidentally rhymes with 'mozilla'?), which seems like the standard stance of Linux and many other open source programs.

    It seems like GPLing Opera back when their CSS support was non-existant would have helped them catch up. Then again, the only people I know who use Opera strike me as being the type who only like playing with computers if it will result in improvement. But how could the Linux community ever get cosy with a browser that's so non-free it costs money!

    For that matter it almost seems quaint that a company would try and sell a browser. Maybe if you had a clear superiority over the competition -- but with a market share so low it's off the charts [statmarket.com]? Opera, what are you smoking? Open source the Linux browser if not the Windows!

  • I paid for Opera for Windows and will happily pay for it for Linux if it performs as well.
  • irony: incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result

    This is only ironic in the "Alanis Morissette" (read: incorrect) sense of the word. In light of the earlier article, one would expect them to use PNG, not GIF, which is what they did.

  • NO!, Opera MDI interface under windows is the best way to gather info in the web.
  • the OPERA text mode tables don't look any different
    than the one in w3m. Look at www.freshmeat.net.
    This has been doing it for a long time.
  • Actually mozilla has very little code from netscape left at this point. They've totally rewritten the rendering code, the network code, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Mozilla is essentially a completely new browser. I still like netscape x.x over ie 4. Maybe it's because I've been using netscape since the time when you could fit it on a single floppy, or maybe it's just cuz i hate microsoft, but netscape just feels better. That and it works in Linux.
  • Let's hope that someone from Opera is reading this:

    MDI is BAD! It is a kludge at best. If Opera is MDI based, I will not consider using it - Konqueror should be sufficient for casual browsing. At least give us an option to turn it off...

    How about a poll....???? Rob?
  • "Multiple Document Interface" -- you know, where the app has one master window and all its document windows are stuck inside that window. It's widely regarded as a bad idea and annoys the hell out of some people.
    --
  • Oh come on. Don't be so pesymistic. I would rather use Opera even with MDI than Netscape.

  • Re:MDI (Score:1)

    by Kyobu ( 12511 )
    Enlightenment DR 0.16 will have "window groups" like those you suggest.
  • The benefits are that you can have many browsing windows open without cluttering up, for instance, the taskbar in KDE, or simply without running numerous processes, which can be difficult to switch between.

    The best way to do this is using an application-centric rather than window-centric GUI model a la Mac OS. In Windows, (and most other GUI's) you can have many copies of the same program open in different windows. Under the Mac OS, all of a given application's windows are handled by the same process. You *can't* spawn multiple copies of the same app unless you make multiple copies on disk. And all of an application's windows are in the same "layer" on the desktop. They are all brought to the front when you select one of them.

    The advantage of this is that you get all the advantages you name above, without the confusing, obnoxious, and kludgy downsides that come with a window-in-window approach.

    For example, the Mac OS finder creates a new window for every folder. This would be an annoyance, except that I can go to the application menu and select "hide finder" and all the finder's windows disappear. I don't have to minimize them one by one. I can do the same thing with other apps. If I have five web browser windows open, I click on one of them and select "hide Netscape" and they all disappear.

    The Mac OS also has window shade behavior, so that you can collapse individual windows as well as hiding entire apps.

    Yet another reason to get a Mac. :)
  • What are you talking about? Opera is totally unstable. At least on Windows 3.11. It crashes so often that I can't even consider it usable. Maybe Win9x is different, but it's the same code...
  • Maybe because it came out before the Linux version?? Anyway, Opera for Be kicks ass!
  • Opera's text browser PNG is showing either tables or stylesheet formatting! This is a very good thing. Are lynx developers working on this?

    And just a general note...
    I'd rather GPL'ed software so I probably won't switch from lynx unless I switch to Opera from Netscape and their text browser is included. I'd much prefer an Xlib based GPL'ed browser. Are there any in the works? (Mozilla is not GPL) The w3c has a library ((L)GPL) for the guts of the `net communication; so with a proper renderer, the project is 'done'. Any takers?
  • Wouldn't a task-/window-list using an expandable/collapsible tree or a menu-with-submenues widget be nice?
  • Actually I think the lynx way would work a lot better w/ text to speech. Let's say you have a side bar on the left and then content on the right. What would probally happen w/ a synth is that it would read a line from the sidebar, then from the content, then from the sidebar, then from the content, and so on. I know lynx works fine for text to speech because I used to have a friend who was completely blind (well he could make out shadows and bright lights at a distance of about 1 foot but that was it) and he used lynx all the time for web stuff.

  • I think some of what you're seeing here is simply that Opera supports HTML 3.2, not HTML 4.0. I find this a frustrating choice on their part at times, but most of the time it isn't an issue. It does let out Dynamic HTML, though, and there are occasionally pages that I hit that simply don't render in Opera.

    Opera 4.0 will theoretically support HTML 4.0 and CSS Level 2. We'll see.

    As an unrelated note, Opera ports are in progress to a fair number of platforms. It's quite possible that the reason it took so long for them to start porting has less to do with code portability than it does with the nature of commercial software (particularly something as Quixotic as a commercial web browser)--you do ports when you (a) believe there's a market there and (b) have the resources to do so. They've addressed point (b) by contracting with other development companies.

    Because of that (the subcontracting), people should probably nag the Opera Unix developers if they don't like MDI. The BeOS version of Opera uses standalone windows like other browsers do (and it still implements Opera's cascade and tile buttons, just in case someone wants to claim you need MDI to have that functionality).

  • 1. As far as I understand, all window
    decorations are up to X/window manager,
    whereas with MDI they would be up to
    the app itself - a big difference.
    You keep thinking of MDI as having many
    windows inside one big one - think the way
    Java allows you - sub windows can really
    be subclassed from a panel class and be
    directly controlled by the app, not X.
    2. Without doing a lot of custom setting up,
    how do I - oh say - auto cascade all my
    Netscape windows, or auto tile all my xterms?
    I do not want Netscapes tiled, just xterms,
    and vice versa.
    3. see 1
    4. Duh
  • Not everyone is a coder. Some people just want to use free software. Once you start down the road of forcing people to contribute it is no longer free software in the real sense. So, if people wish to contribute with bug reports/code thats cool. If they just want to use the software, thats cool too.

  • Lynx (Score:1)

    by Kyobu ( 12511 )
    Uh... why would anyone pay money for a text browser? Opera's thing is that they charge for browsers. So obviously their text browser is going to cost money too. So why would you pay money when Lynx is great, plus free (beer and speech)?
  • This will mean that the web will return to being a resource of information - not commercial banner-ad ridden media-blitzed MTV-styled hyphonated nonsense:).


    I think it will be great. With the 2.2 fbcon, and a console browser that supports modern features, X might be worth dumping. I am sick of clicking on things like a blasted robot. I have a decent big monitor - so I want all my apps to be fullscreen anyway (who the hell thought "windowing" was a good idea?)

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