Opera 11 Beta Released, With Extensions Support 142
An anonymous reader writes "Opera 11 Beta has just been released and now includes support for extensions. Also new in this release Tab Stacking, Visual Mouse Gestures, performance improvements, new installer, and much more. Even with its many new features, Opera 11 is 30% smaller than Opera 10.60. That means that Opera downloads more quickly and installs in fewer steps. There are over 130 extensions and climbing including NoScript and AdBlock! Extensions can be found here."
I'll have to check it out (Score:2)
Extension not exactly needed for adblock (Score:5, Informative)
Opera had adblocking built in for a long time, it just needed a list [fanboy.co.nz] - yes, somewhat more basic (much more basic script blocking also there); but even with rare updates of the list I don't remember having to use GUI website element blocker.
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Opera also makes it very easy to block ads as you encounter them. Right click, block content.
Script blocking however has been terrible in my experience. You can block scripts by default, and can make exceptions for sites, but you cant allow single scripts within a page, at least not that I've found. Noscript is really a huge plus.
Re:Extension not exactly needed for adblock (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally get by with Opera the 'Enable Plug-Ins' checkbox placed on the status bar and turned off by default. This stops any flash ads. This works for me as I follow the 'Ad blocking hurts the websites you love' approach, and its the flash ads that are the really annoying ones - YMMV.
You can turn FLASH on (BY SITE, not just globally) (Score:1, Informative)
"I personally get by with Opera the 'Enable Plug-Ins' checkbox placed on the status bar and turned off by default. This stops any flash ads. This works for me as I follow the 'Ad blocking hurts the websites you love' approach, and its the flash ads that are the really annoying ones - YMMV." - by rishistar (662278) on Wednesday November 24, @05:51AM (#34329196) Homepage
One nice thing is, that IF you need to use FLASH (or any other addon, or javascript, etc./et al)? You can set what you have GLOBALLY for all websites, and yet you can also MAKE EXCEPTIONS too, so you have sites where you can use various addons or javascript etc.!
Additionally, it's VERY SIMPLE/EASY to do!
You do this simply by right-clicking on the webpage involved, and choosing the popup menu item "Edit Site Properties" where you can set an "exception" and allow whatever you WISH to allow, albeit for that si
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Whenever there is something asking for a plugin, Opera will display a place holder and only load the object (and only that object) when you click it. No need to reload or anything.
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Yeah, that's actually close to how I browse for some time now (I do have a buddy who finds adblocking in Opera invaluable - who switched from FF a year or so ago and actually thinks the Opera one is very slightly better - so I can say it still works fine) - if ads on some sites tend to be obnoxious, that's a great reason to not visit those sites, to reward tactful ones (I wouldn't know with adblocker)
But - inevitably "Opera has no adblocker ... whah! ... whah!" comes out at the start of probably every discu
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You are right, but in my experience setting up adblocking on Opera has been been a pain compared to Adblock. So not exactly needed in the theory. But if users use another browser because of this, then for Opera, it is really needed. This has been the case with me at least.
same for iCab... (Score:2)
Yes, the same can be said from iCab (which invented ad filtering more than 10 years before FF!) -its interface to this feature does exists, but is very poor... and that counts...
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There was a poor UI version for ad filtering on older versions of Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape 6 as well. Hand editing userContent.css.
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What's the difference between the old Widgets and the new extensions? I found a lot of useful widgets like Youtube video downloaders and Image zooms..... do I have to stop using them now & find a new Extension?
I'm confused.
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Well, UI integration of new ones should be more workable (being based on W3C standards might count to some, too...). But in large part - marketing?
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HOSTS files eat A LOT LESS CPU cycles than browser addons do no less
Browser:Oh look, I have this request to adserve.ng, I shall make a request for the IP! /go.php?disp=346t235y2&refer=cheapwowgold.tk!
DNS:Looks like a request.... Just hold a sec while I parse this large ASCII text file.... Ahha! an entry in the HOSTS, I shall just use that!
Browser:Oh how lovely, adserve.ng is 127.0.0.1, I shall make a request for
Browser: request!
Browser: derp!
Browser: seven!
Browser: Well, it timed out. 127.0.0.1 must not be running a web serve,. but I only wasted 30 seconds on it!
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i have opera on my pc just because xkcd is banned at my uni (dunno why) and opera turbo is easier than using crappy web proxies and faster than tor.
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Please make Randall (after current situation passes) /xkcd forum know, we might have some fun with this ban ;>
Good job Opera (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a long time Opera user since when they used to sell licences. I was always a happy Opera user because the browser suited my browsing style much more than any of the competitors.
Then came Chrome, after trying it for a little while I was blown away by the browser and its capabilities.
It was fast and robust and I really liked it, but it didn't get me to convert from Opera.
It wasn't until the "cool" guys at work started using it I decided to give it a proper try, so that's what I've been doing the last year
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I installed the non-google Chromium 8 yesterday. It's okay but has various annoyances that make me want Opera or SeaMonkey instead. Like the "find" function is not as easy to use, and when you click on a Audio or Video link it doesn't open the link. It just sits there for a while with a little "tab" on the bottom and you have to click on it to open it up. It feels like an unfinished browser.
The one good thing about Chromium is the small size (about 40,000 kilobytes) in memory. Even SeaMonkey (120,000
noscript knockoff? (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't find noscript available. There's noTscript, which claims to be the same thing, but where's the real thing that I've been using for years?
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I can't find noscript available. There's noTscript, which claims to be the same thing, but where's the real thing that I've been using for years?
It's unavailable, so if you don't want to use the combined Adblock + Noscript version, you're out of luck.
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I'm aware. That's not the same thing. I can't enable specific scripts on a page, I can only turn them all on or all off per page. Noscript also has a better interface.
Has anyone mentioned ad blocking yet? (Score:2, Informative)
- The new Tab Stacks feature is almost what I've wanted for some time, needs some more depth to it (labelling, pinning, and loading sessions as stacks in particular), and to undo the wonkiness introduced to the tab bar behavior in general
- Nice to see Opera join the Extensions party, but slim pickings so far, need to see what gets developed for it to measure its worth.
- While the Mouse Gestures overhaul/vis
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Too little too late? (Score:2)
Addons are Firefox's deal - they are pretty locked down in that aspect (making FF an 'addon-platform' more than anything else) - I don't think its going to compare with FF's popularity.
I'm pretty sure Opera users will be happy with their nice addons now - but I don't see this drawing anyone away from anything else - if you want speed - you go Chrome, if you want
Re:Too little too late? (Score:4, Insightful)
#1 browser in Ukraine [statcounter.com], exchanging #1 spot with FF in Russian Federation [statcounter.com], nearing 50% and far above other browsers in Belarus [statcounter.com]; generally a very notable share in most of ex Warsaw Pact. Some worldwide stats appear to be underreporting, by focusing on pages most likely to be visited by specific demographics / rarely visited by some others. How Opera is the #1 mobile web browser worldwide by website stats (despite most of its users being in places with expensive data access, certainly frugal about number of pages visited) might help one day, when those people shift to desktops.
Opera addons are at least based on W3C widget specs...
(if you really want speed you'd better not ignore Opera BTW - especially in cases when it really matters (slow machine, slow connection; this contributes to CIS popularity))
Anyway - they have healthy, rising profitability as is (also during the last 3 years)
Re:Too little too late? (Score:5, Informative)
>>>I don't think that Opera is ever going to be anything better than that "Weird browser which few people use" - not on desktops anyway.
And yet everyone keeps copying ideas from Opera:
- tabbed browsing.
- "paste and go" in the address bar
- Opera Link (bookmarks stored online)
- Opera Turbo (speeds-up phone connections)
- Live Bookmarks
- Speed Dial (copied by Chrome)
- and on and on.
Opera is the innovator that everyone else copies.
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>>>I don't think that Opera is ever going to be anything better than that "Weird browser which few people use" - not on desktops anyway.
And yet everyone keeps copying ideas from Opera: - tabbed browsing.
Say what?
Opera is not the first browser to implement tabs.
While I do recognize Opera’s inventiveness, it would not do to give them too much credit.
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Though it does have MDI interface from the beginning, with the list of open pages not on some tab bar but in the Window menu. Fairly close / was probably a good choice in times of 640x480.
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It may not have been the first, but it had tabs long before Firefox for IE.
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>>>Opera is not the first browser to implement tabs.
Not the first overall, but it was the first on Windows PC, Mac, or Linux.
First there was Mosaic/Ibrowse for the innovative and advanced Commodore Amiga in 1999, and then Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4). Prior to that Opera did not use tabs but instead used a tiled interface to open several pages at the same time. So Opera was innovative in that respect as well. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MultiTorg_Opera.png [wikipedia.org]
Those
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FireFox 4 Beta? (Score:1, Insightful)
Guess what? FF4 now has the identical thing!
Opera has always had the URL attached to each "Tab". Meaning there is a tab and under the tab is the URL, which is unique to each tab. As opposed to other browsers where there is just one URL above the tabs and then as you click
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People use to talk about firefox/mozilla/netscape the way you talk about opera. Back when IE had something crazy like 90% of the market.
It was the guys using beta mozilla stuff that helped bring FF usage to what it is today. So don't be so quick to feel sorry for anyone using Opera. They might just be using the browser that everyone (the zerg) will be using a few years down the road.
OPERA IS FASTER THAN CHROME (recent) (Score:1, Interesting)
"if you want speed - you go Chrome" - by Haedrian (1676506) on Wednesday November 24, @05:13AM (#34329018)
Oh, really? See this below (CHROME LOST TO OPERA VERY RECENTLY ON THAT ACCOUNT, FIRST URL BELOW IN FACT, in javascript processing (where Chrome does well, but not well enough) & in HTML work? Opera's been WIDELY KNOWN as "the fastest webbrowser there is" for nearly a decade now... & the data below proves it in numerous tests no less - read on):
Opera is also apparently lately AGAIN (as per usual mind you) the OVERALL FASTEST Browser there is per this test & article on /. recently, here:
---
http:// [slashdot.org]
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More than 140 million users are "few users"? Wow.
Actually, Opera is currently faster than Chrome.
Why are you "sorry for Opera"? They are getting millions of new users every single month. They now have more than 140 million users.
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I agree, its still a hell of a lot of computers. This is similar to the whole "Oh, linux users account only for 1%" argument. You're right, its a large number - and I'm sure many individuals will be effected (50 million or so in fact) - but given the 30% and 12% FF and Chrome have, its not too much.
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Of course, those "global stats" focus almost exclusively on North America. And fail to detect Opera properly.
And Opera actually has more than 140 million users, which translates to a market share of about 7%.
New dimension (Score:1)
For feature like tab stacking I have long dreamed. I always end up with loads of tabs open during the day.
As for extensions, it's not something I really have missed, but a lot of my friends criticized Opera for not having extensions like FireFox does. They open a whole new dimension of possibilities for the browser.
Congratulations on the new wonderful release!
still no smart card support (Score:1)
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Opera is great but can be buggy (Score:2, Interesting)
I love Opera. I use it on my dektop, my laptop and my phone. I love the way it all integrates together. I love the look and feel. I love the way it has so many useful features built in as standard (things like clone tab and view tabs side by side). I love the speed dial page that doesn't try to outguess you (looking at you Chrome). I love the option to enable server side compression very useful if you are on a slow network connection or subject to a download cap.
I love all of these things but Opera is the
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Seems they was too much rushing in the times of 9.6x-10.x. Luckily, lately it seems to return to the quite polished state of 9.2x releases.
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From where I am, everybody was complaining that post-9.2x dropped most of the characteristics which made Opera really worthwhile (and no crashes in either, it wasn't about stability in late 9.x and early 10.x)
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Opera Slashdot! (Score:5, Informative)
Everyone always forgets the best feature of Opera; typing /. into the link bar is a shortcut to Slashdot!
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To be completely honest, taking you to slashdot when you type
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file:/.
Still not great (Score:1, Interesting)
It still scores terrible on the HTML5 tests [html5test.com]. Considering it's a bleeding edge new version you would think it would support the latest HTML features.
With that said Opera Mobile is awesome for low-end devices like my S60 phone. Other than that I don't see Opera offering much.
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LastPass (Score:1)
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Waiting for LastPass then migration will occur.
Well whaddaya know - it's here! http://bit.ly/dQ4q9a [bit.ly]
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It's not just about extensions... (Score:1, Interesting)
There is no easy way to make this handy feature work without a hack [blogspot.com] because you cannot re-map ctrl left_click [operawiki.info].
So you never ctrl+clicking or none of you ever actually use Opera at all?
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I don't know about Opera but almost all browsers support the "middle click" to open a link as a background tab. Try it..
You can also close any tab by middle clicking it. It's great.
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Never control-clicking. Middle-click... otherwise I have to use two hands.
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What I like and What I Don't like about opera (Score:1)
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http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/ [fanboy.co.nz]
This is what I have used, it works fine.
Re:adblock extension (Score:5, Interesting)
>about fucking time
Say what?
How bloody hard is it to copy a file? A text one at that? How hard is it to literally grab and drag a file from "Download" to where your local .opera directory is, or to directly save the file to .opera?
So now it's got a GUI wrapper? BFD. It actually makes it *more* complicated.
I swear that every complaint that "Hurr, durr, Opera had no adblock" is an intelligence shibboleth. Those that said it are stupid, without reservation.
Two best browsers on the 'net - Chrome and Opera. Hands down. The others aren't even close. Not Webkit nor Gecko based browsers. And IE is just a special case all to itself - a reminder of a bygone era when standards didn't matter.
--
BMO
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not about hosts [fanboy.co.nz], and could give you at least most of what you want. JS can be whitelisted and disabled by domains, that's a bit more than all or nothing.
As for you list (at least when it comes to those with descriptive names) - page zooming and fit-to-width works in Opera also for images, there was some weather widget and also way to put forecasts in the Speed Dial IIRC, downloader has a bit more features than is typical (maybe list of files on a given page and filtering, by chance? Similar with cookie
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page zooming and fit-to-width works in Opera also for images
images, flash content and probably everithng else.
I love, when I can zoom some little flash game to the fullscreen...
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You mean according to standards?
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Is it according to standards that Opera often loads the wrong images when all other browsers seem to get it right?
I'm glad that there is such a thing as Opera. It is the only modern browser light enough to run on the ancient Win2K box I'm forced to use at work but rendering oddities and doing everything "the Opera way" can be frustrating at times.
Re:adblock extension (Score:5, Informative)
That's not Opera's fault. The web-developer looks at the browser code, sees "Opera", assumes it's a non-compliant browser, and then feeds it trash. Trash-in / Trash-out. It's the developer's fault.
It's also why Opera features "mask as firefox or IE" to trick the web-developer to feed proper code. Then it renders perfectly. I've found several pages that failed to render or gave me an "Opera not supported" feedback, but never found a page that refused to render properly after I used the "mask" option.
Opera passes all the ACID tests, which is more than Firefox 3.6 or IE8 could claim.
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It seem to render my web page [bredband.net]* just fine! ;D
(* not very recent but not _THAT_ old ;), still: Renders perfectly!)
Re:adblock extension (Score:5, Informative)
http://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/does-your-browser-behave.html [chromium.org]
^only about js, but it's quite characteristic and from a fabulous source.
Standards compliance of course might be a problem here and there, in places still not far from "best viewed in IE" - some pages unfortunately settled on "best in IE and FF" instead of targeting standards, not much of an improvement - but it's getting better. Especially where there's strong third or even fourth major player, as in most of CIS / ex Warsaw Pact (where BTW Opera is often actually at or near the top)
In fact, one funny thing: I keep an old version of Opera (9.27, a solid "classic" release) on an old dual PII 266 that I keep around and still boot sometimes. Lately many pages tend to work much better in it (despite obviously not targeting such old release, probably not even Opera generally) - I suspect due to dropping focus on IE6.
Re:adblock extension (Score:5, Informative)
Opera 10.50: 78 failures,
Safari 4: 159 failures,
Chrome 4: 218 failures,
Firefox 3.6: 259 failures and
Internet Explorer 8: 463 failures.
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Opera 11.00 Alpha: 74 failures
Firefox 4.0b8 Pre: 178 failures
Big improvement for Firefox's new javascript engine, minor improvement for Opera's.
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For the record: IE9 public Beta: 80 failures. Puts it back in league with the others, although one would need to test against other beta browsers for a fair comparison.
Also, a lot of the failures looked like the kind of thing that the dead code optimizer might be removing. Not sure about that, though. Will be interesting to see when the RC comes out, or even the current platform preview (which I don't have).
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From what I've heard, the problem with recent Opera releases (basically from 10 onward) is that they tend to overemphasize running the tests correctly over real world issues. To clarify, I don't mean non-standards-conformant websites rendering incorrectly, but rather actual bugs in Opera renderer and JS engine.
Personally, I used to be an avid Opera user, but have dropped it recently due to the quality of releases significantly declining in the last two years. It used to be that stable versions were actually
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Seems they were caught a bit off-guard with sudden focus on JS, rushed changes too much between 9.5x and most of 10.x. Luckily, 10.6x releases seem to finally return to that nice feel of 9.2x.
But just to be more weird - for me the problems were never about crashing (though how I mostly disable plugins might help)
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It's perfectly fine with some (face it) niche ones. It gets old really, really quickly with majority of whiners, listing functionalities present in Opera for a long time... (or even pioneered by them)
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Listing counter examples is trolling? Opera fan boys have mod points today.
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Isn't Chrome a WebKit browser?
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Chrome is Webkit based.
But I agree.
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>about fucking time
Say what?
How bloody hard is it to copy a file? A text one at that? How hard is it to literally grab and drag a file from "Download" to where your local .opera directory is, or to directly save the file to .opera?
So now it's got a GUI wrapper? BFD. It actually makes it *more* complicated.
I swear that every complaint that "Hurr, durr, Opera had no adblock" is an intelligence shibboleth. Those that said it are stupid, without reservation.
Two best browsers on the 'net - Chrome and Opera. Hands down. The others aren't even close. Not Webkit nor Gecko based browsers. And IE is just a special case all to itself - a reminder of a bygone era when standards didn't matter.
-- BMO
Your mentally challenged or just plain ignorant by mocking WebKit and praising Chrome. Chrome is WebKit with Google crap bolted on. Thanks to WebKit we have Chrome, Chromium, Epiphany, Safari, and other WebKit based browsers.
By the way, Opera 11 beta still blows chunks for HTML5 support. Wake me up when it's HTML5 Algorithm is complete and HTML5 Tokenizer, HTML5 Tree Building, SVG in text/html and MathML in text/html for HTML5 is supported. Their HTML5 Element support is garbage and their user interaction
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Harder than having the computer do it for you. Humans shouldn't have to do what the computer can automate.
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GUI wrapper is a BFD to almost everybody, if you don't care, don't act like it isn't a big deal to others.
My complaint with Opera. It's different, and not in a good way. Firefox improved over IE. Chrome improved over Firefox. Opera may have improved over IE as well, but it sure doesn't improve over Chrome in my opinion. If I had gone the other route I may like it, but it's too late.
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Two best browsers on the 'net - Chrome and Opera. Hands down. The others aren't even close. Not Webkit nor Gecko based browsers. And IE is just a special case all to itself - a reminder of a bygone era when standards didn't matter.
You know that Chrome is based on Webkit, don't you?
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By Adblock you mean Adblock Plus right?
It's the automatic list of things to block that you like, isn't it?
Opera has had a somewhat simple content blocker for a while now but you had to either ad things yourself or find a list online and add it to Epera.
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Ignorance is bliss. Opera's content blocker has been around for many years.
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/
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>>>Any browser that doesn't support Adblock is quite useless.
I don't use adblock. I think if I'm blocking the ads then I'm doing the equivalent of stealing service from the Website Sysop. I'd rather see the ads, and help the owner pay his bills.
By the way SeaMonkey has a lot of the same problems as Opera. There are many addons available in Firefox, but not available in SeaMonkey, even though they both use the same base (Mozilla Gecko 5). Developers aim for the largest targets (windows and Firef
Re:Opera on Linux (Score:4, Informative)
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Which is also why it works on such a wide range of Linux distros, from F14 to RH9.
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