Opera 10 Benchmarked and Evaluated 277
CNETNate writes "Dial-up connections and flaky Wi-Fi are made significantly more tolerable with Opera 10, it seems. After yesterdays news that Opera 10's first beta had landed, some testing was in order. One major new feature is Opera Turbo — server-side compression — which shrinks pages before sending them down your browser. With a 100Mbps connection throttled to a laughable 50Kbps, Opera 10 proved itself to outperform every other desktop browser on the planet, and there are graphs to prove it. Javascript benchmarks put the new browser in fourth place overall, after Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox, but it indeed passes the Acid3 test with a perfect score. If you ever use a laptop on public Wi-Fi, to not have Opera 10 installed could be a big mistake"
How to get turbo browsing with free software (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when my net connection was a 56kb/s modem, I used to make an ssh connection (with compression) to a machine at university, and then tunnel through that to the university's http proxy server. That gave a handy speed increase compared to making http requests directly over the modem link. You could also try the RabbIT [sourceforge.net] compressing web proxy. All this relies on having a server somewhere with a fast net connection that you can run programs on - and this is the service that Opera Software are really providing.
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Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>That gave a handy speed increase compared to making http requests directly over the modem link
That's not quite the same. The summary read: "Opera Turbo shrinks pages before sending them." If it operates like my Netscape Web Accelerator, it squashes everything. Text is shrunk to about 5% original size, images to around 10% original size, and Java and other executables shrunk to 20%. This approach makes my 50k dialup have an apparent speed equal to my 750k DSL connection!
The only drawback is that the images, when compressed, look like crap but if you're only interesting in browsing the internet for information, not the pron, then that's okay and acceptable.
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P.S.
I wonder if Opera's Turbo could be used with hi-speed connections? If my 50k connection is sped-up to 750k, then maybe it could squeeze text/image/executable for my DSL too and make it load as fast as a ,000k connection. Hmmm. I don't mind seeing images get squashed, smeared, or otherwise distorted.
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[,000k] --> [11,000k]
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Re:How to get turbo browsing with free software (Score:5, Informative)
At those speeds, delivering internet pages is more latency bound than transfer speed bound. You always have to wait [your ping to the page] + [time it takes to transfer data to you]. With broadband, the first is usually larger than the last, so you won't get any speedup. Certainly not if you add an extra step to the mix, opera's server. Then you have [your ping to the opera server] + [opera's ping to the page] + [time it takes to transfer data to you through opera].
In short, Opera Turbo will only work when the time it takes to transfer data is way larger than the ping.
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It depends on what it means by 'shrinks'. If it's just gzip compression, then yes you do get that by tunnelling over an ssh proxy. If you want to recompress images as well, use RabbIT. Anything more than that (intelligent summarizing of text? rewriting bloated Javascript?) is an AI-complete problem.
I also found that cutting the overhead of TCP handshakes, DNS lookups etc. by just sending requests to a proxy server over an already-existing ssh tunnel noticeably reduces the delay between clicking on a link
Phenomenal browser (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Phenomenal browser (Score:5, Insightful)
[T]he other major browsers [are] all pretty good nowadays.
Largely because they've copied features originally introduced in Opera.
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Opera isn't really ahead of the curve anymore, but for a long time it was the only browser that could handle my browsing habits.
Re:Phenomenal browser (Score:5, Insightful)
The searching can slow things down a bit, so it's best on an excessively-built machine. On my desktop I took the extra step of putting the cache in a tmpfs partition (kinda like this [verot.net]) and set it to remember the max of 50000 pages, and it runs as smoothly as a baby's bottom (sorry, that simile turned out grosser than I intended).
Re:Phenomenal browser (Score:4, Insightful)
t has an integrated email/RSS client, content (ad) blocker, user scripting, an IRC client, a Bittorrent client, a real widget engine, browser synchronization (via Opera Link), mouse gestures, voice recognition and face gestures built in.
Outside of ad blocking, none of this sounds essential, much less useful to me. It does sound a lot like bloat. But then I'm of the anti-jack-of-all-trades school. The Opera torrent client, for example, isn't as fast or useful as stand alone options, so why would I use it, when I can just have my torrent client pop open when needed? It does a better job, and doesn't use any resources whatsoever until I actually NEED it. Same thing with mail clients, IRC clients, and RSS readers (though I can see a use for integrated RSS, though I just use Google Reader).
I prefer the Firefox model. Out of the proverbial box it's only good for one thing, and one thing only; browsing the web. But its extensible to do whatever I want, or I can just keep it how it is. With Firefox I could add any of those features, if I had a need for them. Or not.
That said, I find browser fan-boys to be much sillier (not in the good way) than OS fan boys, or *nix editor fan boys. Its odd how fanatical Opera folk can be every time there is an article on it her. They seem worse than the other fan boys since they are completely incapable, it seems, of finding ANY fault whatsoever with Opera. They also talk about Opera like its the Jesus Christ of the browser kingdom.
I like Opera, I'd use it over Chrome, and obviously over IE. I can't quantify why I prefer it over Chrome though. I use Firefox though, I've been using Firefox since Phoenix point-something-alpha, so I'm used to it. That's the main reason I prefer it, to be honest, I've grown accustomed to its way of doing things. I've also become addicted to extensions, and adblock+ has become my killer app, once Opera or Chrome becomes as good at blocking as that one extension (with easylist), I'll probably hop over. Well maybe not to Chrome, its GUI kind of sucks. Though it will be a hard transition, because Firefox and IE are the only browsers that hold to OS specific GUI conventions on Windows, at least (it sucks on OS X still, though not as bad as it used to). Opera is nasty since its arrogant, and insists on doing things its own way, and having its own look, which annoys me.
I never had a problem with the infamous (and somewhat mythic) Firefox memory hole (except for a few point releases on OS X). Yes, Firefox is heavier, but I don't notice it with my appearently obscene amounts of ram. I say appearently, since judging from the conversations of memory use, everyone on Slashdot only has 512k still. Yes, Chrome/Opera handles Java better and might be a bit more zippy, but were still taking about a few hundred ms of difference (especially with the firefox 3.5 beta), so I honestly don't even notice it. Opera, due to the way it visually loads pages actually seems slower to me, for some reason.
This all is my subjective opinion. You can disagree, and thats fine, but ultimately it doesn't matter. People use what fits them, and because its what their used to, thats fine as well. Its just a bloody browser, they all do the same thing, and roughly just as well.
But then again people who pick the underdog are generally more fully emotionally engaged in their choices.
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So opera forced other browsers to keep up, and those browsers forced opera to improve too...
No competition = stagnation = IE6...
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[T]he other major browsers [are] all pretty good nowadays.
Largely because they've copied features originally introduced in Opera.
One of my complaints about Opera is that the reverse does not seem to be true often enough. Firefox eventually copies most of the useful features of Opera. Opera never gets around to copying the useful features of other browsers. E.g. it still doesn't allow me to resize text fields.
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There's a userjs for that.
Re:Phenomenal browser (Score:5, Informative)
i've been using opera for quite a while, and i agree that it is an awesome browser.
the main problem however is that it's got bad compatibility with lots of sites. not really their problem, just that many sites don't bother to make sure everything works with opera.
besides obvious things like online banking, and microsoft junk, i've since a few weeks been having problems on facebook. lots of things suddenly stopped working, and it's seriously annoying....
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besides obvious things like online banking, and microsoft junk,
Microsoft, probably more than anyone else, has actually gotten their act together with regard to Opera. It used to be that they were actually delivering Opera a separate stylesheet to manually move everything off the page and mess up the margins, but now I can even use the MSDN articles just fine with Opera. I certainly don't miss an opportunity to rub my Opera user agent string all over their logs.
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it may not occur to you, but there's plenty more than just correct rendering.
on facebook lots of interactive things suddenly stopped working, online banking scripts don't work, etc....
and i have seen sites that don't render perfectly, like the website of a pharmaceutical company my sister works at. when she asked to the people maintaining the site why it didn't render correctly on opera, they said opera's share was too small to be bothered with to make it work perfectly.
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It definitely feels faster than the other major browsers, though they're all pretty good nowadays.
It uses native widgets. You hear me, Chrome and Firefox?!
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You mean like the native widgets Firefox supports as of version 3?
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Opera widgets == Firefox extensions. :)
Refer to Qt as a toolkit and not as a widget set to lessen the confusion
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Opera uses Qt practically only for functionalities like file selector in Linux version. It really uses its own UI toolkit.
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I totally agree with this - in fact I started using Opera at version 5 and even paid for it. The BIG feature that made it brilliant above the competition in the year 2000 was the fact that with a single key press image downloads could be turned off, which really really helped when using the Caribbean dial up connection I had to use at the time.
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at home i'm using crappy gprs connection (no edge, no thing), which isn't even running at full plain gprs speed. :)
web is only somewhat usable with opera.
i have default set to use cached images only. if i come to an image i'd like to see, i can either right click and load it, or enable images temporarily (there's no need to refresh the page, opera just downloads the images). then i switch back to cached mode, and downloaded images are nicely used from that point on whenever i visit the same page
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Give the Opera 10 Turbo mode a try. This is basically exactly what it's been made for. I tested it on my 2mbps connection, but it (at least in the alpha) showed the exact savings in traffic it made. On average, I'd say you could expect 50-60%* less data transferred for a given page, though of course this depends on the content.
*This is very rough and IIRC, of course
Re:Phenomenal browser (Score:5, Informative)
...It definitely feels faster than the other major browsers...
Especially since it remains fully responsive with much bigger number of open tabs than other browsers. So...you just open interesting pages in new tabs by middleclick where they load without locking the UI (Opera is quite multithreaded AFAIK) and wait, ready, for you (yeah, in that light I'm not that interested in Opera Turbo feature...perhaps when I'll be on 3G)
Plus it has several properly implemented ways of navigating said large number of tabs tabs (you don't have scroll tabbar or "window" menu, sidebar has treeview, and..."hold down RMB and, without releasing, move scrollwheel"), and also full keyboard navigation.
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Opera is quite multithreaded AFAIK
And so is Chrome, Firefox and IE7 and 8.
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Chrome and IE8 are multiprocess, don't know about IE7.
Firefox OTOH...does practically everything in one thread.
Squid + Gzip (Score:5, Informative)
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They're definitely doing more, for example image recompression (perhaps using better at low quality setting format than jpeg, like jpeg2000, for example?)
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Well, if they're using different, better, image compression format like jpeg2000 than perhaps more blurry, but not more blocky ;p
But essentially - yeah.
Remember that you can always turn off Turbo feature with one click if you don't see enough details...
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No need to turn-off Turbo. If there's a pixelated bikini babe you want to see more clearly, you can simply right-click on the image, select "reload", and it will download without compression so you see curves instead of square boobies. ;-)
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"Bikini"? Now I'm confused.
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This is nothing new; it sounds like the same thing the "download accelerators" have been doing for years. My ISP has been offering Propel [propel.com] for almost 5 years. The only difference is that now a browser vendor gets to collect stats about your web use.
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Yeah, from one of their pages [opera.com] it is basically a proxy server with added compression (not just GZip since a lot of servers can deflate content anyway).
Since it isn't part of the Opera browser but is actually an Opera-run server, I wonder how long it'll take for someone to write a Firefox extension that piggy-backs on to those servers and gets the speed increase itself? :D
I don't browse the web (Score:5, Funny)
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Stay browsy, my friends.
Now test HTTPS performance (Score:2)
How well does Opera Turbo work with sites that use secure connections?
Re:Now test HTTPS performance (Score:5, Informative)
They say in their specs they do NOT compress https at all.
Those are encrypted pages you're requesting, which jumbles up the data. Jumbled data does NOT compress well at all. Plus, they're 'secure.' You don't want someone else handling your secure files.
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Well that didn't stop them from intercepting HTTPS with Opera Mini. Yes, they actually do something akin to a MITM attack -- your phone will connect to their server via HTTPS, and their server connects to the remote site via HTTPS. Seems kinda... well... sketchy to me.
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Thing opera geeks read /.? (Score:2)
http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/ [opera.com]
Eh, maybe.
Turbo browsing? (Score:2, Insightful)
I love Opera and have been using it since version 3 or something :)
But about the "new" Turbo thingy... isn't this basically the kind of thing that those dial-up "accelerators" did? Like compressing pictures and stuff? Because when I activate Turbo on Opera, the quality on image files degrades quite a bit, so I don't know if this actually much diferent from those "accelerators" of old age :)
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It basicly is the same thing, just that the accelerating and recompressing proxy is hosted by Opera and works even if your ISP doesn't offer similar service.
Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW (Score:4, Interesting)
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For some reason I thought Opera was a pay browser (or had ads or something making it not free-as-in-beer).
It used to be that way years ago. You could either pay or watch ads. I think that was changed somewhere around version 8.x or so, though.
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Camino still works on OS X 10.3.9. I've got the wife's old iBook and it's the best browser I can find. Not quite as good as Firefox, but most of the way there, plus it doesn't look ugly and out of place on not just one but all desktops!
Re:Opera is free-as-in-beer, BTW (Score:5, Insightful)
There is one thing that bugs me about this article though. They say Firefox is more customizable. The main reason I couldn't get used to Firefox (this was back in v1&2, dunno about 3) was because I couldn't customize the UI to look like what I was accustomed to without using poor quality addons. As far as I can tell Opera has always been more customizable "out of the box" than Firefox.
Firefox just has too many useful addons (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, so much of my web browsing today depends on a number of Firefox add-ons that simply JFW for a variety of things. Opera could be the greatest browser on the planet, but without AdBlock Plus (no, a manually configured host-filtering hack is not equivalent) or GreaseMonkey, or any other FF extensions I occasionally find use for (FxIF, del.icio.us, TwitterFox, , I simply can't adopt it seriously.
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I agree. If Opera had equivalents of Tab Mix Plus, Firebug, Liveheaders, Flashblock, and Adblock... I would switch.
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I guess I spoke too soon on the GreaseMonkey bit:
How To : Greasemonkey in Opera [opera.com]
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If Opera had equivalents of [...] Flashblock, and Adblock... I would switch.
You may want to check out http://www.adsweep.org/ [adsweep.org] and http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46673 [userscripts.org].
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Adblock - built in (check this post http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1256745&cid=28208737 [slashdot.org] )
Firebug - built in.
Flashblock - built in.
Tab Mix Plus - sorta built in, similarly to the above, only more (of course other browsers won't copy functionalities from Opera in the same way as they are implemented in Opera) - it has sligthly different ways of navigating tabs, also no need for scrolling in menu listing tabs (no matter how many), also treeview in sidebar, and..."hold down RMB and move scrollwhee
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Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons (Score:5, Insightful)
Mehhh...in every thread about Opera those misconceptions.
Adblock - http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/ [fanboy.co.nz] that's basically the same list that Adblock addon uses. It certainly blocks everything just as well. And the functionality itself is built in, no messing around with plugins. According to my buddy who moved from FF to Opera, style file works slightly better at hiding empty spots. And, if something isn't blocked, you have a nice way of blocking this and similar elements through Opera UI.
GreaseMonkey - you do understand Opera pioneered also this functionality, right? Check UserJS (it is capable of running many GreaseMonkey scripts btw)
FxIF - built in. Didn't it ever occured to you to just right click on the frakking image and bring up properties?
del.icio.us, Twitter - something wrong with bookmarklets placed within one click, on navigation bar?
I guess the main problem of Opera is that people assume, because of beeing used to other apps, that there's now way it can pack so much in so little executable, so properly/speedy implemented.
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Actually, the main problem with Opera is compatibility with sites I use. It may or may not be Opera's fault, but it still means I have to open FFX or (shudder) IE to use them. If I have to open either of them to use one site, I almost would rather just use one of those.
People don't know about the add-ons/widgets and other features of Opera because they are called different things and people also assume they are FFX only. That's their fault, technically, but as you know, its not the consumer's job to chan
Re:Firefox just has too many useful addons (Score:4, Informative)
The reason why some sites don't work well in Opera is that webdevs at your place still think in terms of browser monopoly, "we can just target IE", only they exchanged it for browser duopoly "we can just target IE and Gecko". I think it will improve though, with Webkit on the rise, which is similarly standards-compliant and nonstandards-intolerant to Opera. Yeah, a bit chicken and egg problem.
Once your part of the web becomes browser-agnostic, Opera will work great. Like it is here to a large degree; current stats:
- Gecko 46.8%
- IE 42.8%
- Opera 8.4%
- Webkit 2%
Even better in one neighbouring country, IMHO:
- IE 41%
- Opera 31.9%
- Gecko 24.5%
- Webkit 2.6%
And not because of much larger Opera usage; as you can see, they seem to go towards roughly equal usage share of all major engines (with Webkit/Chrome (no Macs here...) having also relatively more rapid uptake), of which I would be glad the most. Everybody could use the engine/browser they simply like more.
BTW, content-wise, my part of the web is rather poor so I usually browse through "IE & Gecko" dominated part...and it's already good IMHO (though that might have something to do with the kinds of sites I browse...)
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What about DownThemAll, NoScript, Brief and Vimperator? Maybe Opera can work for most people, but Firefox is still so much more adaptable...
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Ehhh...
A variant of NoScript is built in, likewise for very comprehensive keyboard-only navigation (you can't expect that other browsers/extensions, to which you are used, will copy Opera functionality in exactly the same way)
Feedreader is built in.
DownThemAll is trivial to implement in UserJS; apart from that Opera can list all links on given page.
When will you see the pattern?
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DownThemAll is trivial to implement in UserJS; apart from that Opera can list all links on given page.
More than just list all links on a given page, you can do a search for specific links, including by extension. If you do ".jpg", you can then highlight them all, right click, and save them all to the default folder. Thus, you've downloaded them all.
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And you think "see all links" view in Opera doesn't have filtering by given phrase (say, ".jpg") why, exactly?
Oh yeah, you haven't ever used it in more capacity than naked FF or IE.
(I seem to remember also specifically mentioning UserJS apart from "see all links"; hmmm...must be getting old)
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I believe you've misunderstood. I was SAYING that that's how the Opera view-all-links panel works. Way to misread and attack me. I was giving the next step in what you were talking about. You filter in the panel so you only have the pictures, and then you can download them all. No need for a plug-in or User JS.
Ugh.
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Just NoScript for me, thanks. Give me that on Chrome (or Opera!) and I'll start using them more.
However, I have a feeling NoScript's not going to be liked by Google...
'turbo' (Score:2)
so, the software somehow uses a gas or liquid turbine? I'm confused.
Turbo uses compression servers (Score:2)
The turbo feature works by routing all your non https content via compression servers, which can ofcourse cause slowdowns: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/03/13/opera-10-alpha-now-includes-opera-turbo-compression/ [downloadsquad.com]
This appears to be lossy compression that reduces image quality... Hopefully pretty much all html is compressed at the source these days: http://www.webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/ [webreference.com]
I remember when (Score:2)
I used to have a 33.6k dialup connection (that's all my modem did). What I ended up doing to speed up my web browsing and such was add as many of the damn advertiser websites into my hosts file. The advantages included never having to wait for a flaky doubleclick to respond, thus speeding up the page loading plus the obvious of never seeing the ads. The other trick I used to use was disable the loading of images and with IE I could at least get a placeholder to show where an image was. This really sped thin
Turbo (Score:2)
34.180.255.64.in-addr.arpa. 300 IN CNAME 34.0-24.180.255.64.in-addr.arpa. 34.0-24.180.255.64.in-addr.arpa. 6835 IN PTR r02-02.opera-mini.net.
Why would I want to fill up their cache with my browsing habits?
Re:Does not work with Fortigate web interface (Score:4, Informative)
I don't use Opera myself, but as far as I'm concerned, if Opera passes ACID, the problem is with your firewall's web interface. It's not Opera's fault your software is non compliant.
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Tried the 10 and it still does not.
Well, duh.. it's not like a bug preventing the Web interface on x brand of corporate firewall to display is going to get high priority. Besides if the web interface fails I rather blame the coding of the interface then the browser, to write html that works in all modern browsers is significantly easier than to write a rendering engine that interprets fugly IE6 hacks "correctly"
Re:Turbo looks buggy (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm using it since yesterday, and I had to disable Turbo mode, since all images were looking like crap, flash sometimes didn't work, some sites never finished loading (stopped at for example 18 element of out 25).
But I guess that for dial-up (people still use that? @_@) or crappy Wi-Fi it might be good.
Umm, perhaps you should take a look at what Turbo's intended usage is for.
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I'm using it since yesterday, and I had to disable Turbo mode,
I, too, had to disable Turbo mode. I found that I couldn't play some games with it enabled.
But, damn, 12 Mhz is FAST!
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The purpose is for people like me who spend a lot of evenings stuck in Motels with nothing but a dialup connection (the phone). I don't mind if the images look distorted, since it's DSL-like speed that I want, not beauty.
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If you want to browse anonymously, Opera+Tor gives OperaTor http://archetwist.com/opera/operator [archetwist.com]
You'll be able to experience dial-up nowadays.
OperaTor is super slow, mostly because Tor is slow, and also because ads are frequently bigger than the pages themselves.
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Right-click, noscript, allow slashdot.com -or- allow all. What's so hard about that? :-| Perhaps you didn't have the proper setting which is "allow top level domains by default". I made the same mistake at first but now it's made Noscript much more friendly and unobtrusive.
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I find blocking scripts by origin globally to be sufficent. If I don't want your crappy ad scripts on one page, why would I want it on another? That, combined with Opera's block scripts on the site I'm looknig at, combine nicely.
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Uh, you can just go Preferences --> Advanced --> Content, and uncheck javascript, flash, plugins, etc. That should stop just about everything, no? And then you can re-enable it on a site-by-site preference. Takes about 15 seconds to re-enable a site.
Re:Nobody gives a shit (Score:5, Interesting)
Well with the bandwidth bill they'll have after this little venture, I don't think you'll have to worry about them for too long.
Re:Nobody gives a shit (Score:5, Insightful)
About Opera. Seriously.
Really? That build of FireFox you're using today would be barely recognizable if Opera had never come into being.
Re:Nobody gives a shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely the Mozilla folks picked up on the idea soon after, right? Well, no.. Netscape 6 (Mozilla 0.6) was released 6 years later but did not support tabbed browsing. It was only in 2001 that there was even a hint of a decent browser comming from them that would have tabbed browsing, which they were calling Phoenix (later to be called Firefox)
Great ideas surely can be thought of by multiple people, but it very much seems like even when they don't have to do ANY of the thinking, it takes more than the idea... It also takes the will to implement it, which even the Mozilla boys seem to only do after years and years of the killer feature being right in their face.
Not only does nobody else but Opera seem to be innovative, it doesnt even seem like the others can even recognize a good idea when they see it, requiring years and years of sinking in.
I'm glad that the mozilla boys finally listened to the raves.. I'm sad that I have to include the word "finally" in there.
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About Opera. Seriously.
Nobody except a total moron! Opera has been my browser of choice for many years because it blows all others into the weeds. It's fast, secure, fully customizable and has features (Wand, for one, and a nifty on-board email client) that make it stand head and shoulders above the so-called competition. It's also got serious geek value, as well.
I'm currently migrating to Ubuntu from (Ugh!) Windows, and one of the major factors in my decision was that Opera was available for Linux.
Yes, Chrome is good, as a
Re:Nobody gives a shit (Score:5, Informative)
Opera uses its own UI toolkit. Qt is only used in things like file selector in Linux version.
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"fastest network and UI performance and low resource consumption, and lowest reported vulnerabilities"...
That sounds like Lynx..
Re:Ugly. (Score:5, Insightful)
The browser is eclectic, with too many preferences, too complicated preferences, too many customisation options. Features not everybody needs, or wants.
I'd rather have a browser that provides functionality that I do not (yet) need than a browser that's slimmed down so much it doesn't offer functionality that I do need.
If you don't like Opera -- fine, don't use it.
But please remember that not all people are like you, and some may like, want or even need what you despise.
If we would only write software with features that everybody or at least a majority of people would need, we wouldn't have any progress.
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No, "user" software should be slim and have only basic functions. Extra functionalities should come in form of plugins/extensions, so everyone can choose and install what they want, according to their needs and PC resources.
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Who made you king of software? Users may use whatever available software they choose to. You can fuck off.
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I beg to differ here. The initial install interface should be slim, sure. Have all basic functionality there and easy to use. Then, when you need more, I would just rather turn it on.
Opera is still a smaller download than Firefox (5.4MB for Opera 9.64, 7.1MB for Firefox 3.0). But has all the features of *dozens* of plugins. I personally find it extremely annoying to have to download a several plugins everytime I install the browser on a different machine. With Opera, it's all there.
As far as resources, Oper
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The best feature of all: No AwesomeBar (mod me troll, please)
You stated that users should have a choice about features based on "their needs and PC resources"
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If you don't like Opera -- fine, don't use it.
Which is, of course, what most of people do.
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I'm not an interface elitist or an apple fanboy, but I can't use software that gets on my nerves and Opera and Vista occupy the top two slots for that.
Sounds like an interface elitist to me. Possibly even an Apple fanboy, if you insist on "native widgets" instead of controls that are actually suited to a Web environment (for example, by responding to styling). Users of other platforms conceded the necessity of this long ago; only the Apple zealots hold out against it, and they hurt the Web by doing so.
Re:Ugly. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for clearing that up. If you hadn't I'm sure everyone would have come to the wrong conclusion.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, the rest of the world actually gets work done without using Opera.
Re: (Score:2)
The new automatic spell-check in Opera is nice too, glad they caught up to Firefox in that arena.
Little known fact: It was actually possible to add in a spell check using aspell and downloadable dictionaries.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention so much of the web is still a horrible mess of tag-soup where each browser vendor has had to make up support, and each other vendor has had to guess or reverse engineer what its competitors are doing.
Further to that Opera has
Non-Standard = Ambiguous (Score:3, Insightful)
So, have you got some specs for exactly the way IE and Gecko handle every single case of non-standard code? Including cases where it's clear the code is broken, but it's not clear what the author meant, and multiple interpretations are equally valid?
No? There's no specification? They'll have to reverse-engineer it by visiting every page on the internet with IE and Firefox and seeing what those browsers do with them? Gee, that sounds workable!