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Opera The Internet

Opera Developer Comes With Address Bar Speculative Prerenderer Feature (opera.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the strange-features dept.
Earlier this month, Opera announced a new interesting feature with Opera 43 developer that predicts the website you're about to go to. The company explains: There are two ways we can predict what page the user will soon load. When the current page tells us so, and when we can determine from the users actions that they are about to load something. Pages can use the tag, and for instance Google uses that for search results if they are pretty sure of what you will load next. When someone writes in the address bar they are humanly slow. Sometimes it is obvious what they will write after just 1-2 characters but they will just keep writing or arrowing through suggestions for millions or billions of wasted clock cycles. We expect this feature to results in an average of 1 second faster loads from the address bar. The company insists that this feature saves time and energy without compromising the security. What's your thought?
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Opera Developer Comes With Address Bar Speculative Prerenderer Feature More

Opera Developer Comes With Address Bar Speculative Prerenderer Feature

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  • Whoa! 1 second! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Monday December 05, 2016 @09:45AM (#53424763) Homepage Journal
    Wow, a whole second? Definitely should be implemented. Don't bother addressing the bug lists, only do new features. It is waaaaaay more fun.
    • Bug lists ARE a pain to deal with, enhancements only bit better. The most fun is creating stuffs from scratch, and then having to debug that :-(
      Worked at one company where they gave all the new development to juniors and only seniors were allowed to fix the code base, stupid bloody idea, should be the other way around. Suffice to say they have a high staff turnover and code that makes an abortion seem neat and tidy (OK, for all I know abortions are neat and tidy, have no clue).

    • Wow, a whole second? Definitely should be implemented. Don't bother addressing the bug lists, only do new features. It is waaaaaay more fun.

      For once we agree 100%.

      Fixing bugs is so dreary, but potentially shaving an entire second off of getting to the next bit of clickbait or cat video, well that's just revolutionary!

  • Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bluegutang ( 2814641 ) on Monday December 05, 2016 @09:47AM (#53424785)

    So arrowing through the suggestion list is bad because it uses "millions or billions of wasted clock cycles", but downloading and rendering an entire website is perfectly OK?

    I think they meant that it wastes the user's time, not that it wastes clock cycles.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by michelcolman ( 1208008 )

      My thoughts exactly. Billions of cycles on the client's machine, billions of cycles on the different servers that are needlessly serving this speculative content for the first few incorrect guesses, billions of cycles on all the routers in between...

      Where exactly do they think they are saving energy? One second of display power and idling cpu on the client side? I would be highly surprised if this would be net positive.

      Yes, it will load pages slightly faster. But at the expense of quite a bit of wasted ener

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by darkain ( 749283 )

        Not only that, but CPUs are extremely power efficient while in their idle state. CPUs down-clock and turn off internal components dynamically while not in use, even for a fraction of a second... Nothing is at waste at all here.

  • wasted resources (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Every failed guess is more bandwidth, server load, client load wasted.

  • Protip (Score:5, Funny)

    by PvtVoid ( 1252388 ) on Monday December 05, 2016 @09:56AM (#53424825)

    Never, ever type "goats e..." in Opera.

  • Sounds awful (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Stop wasting my present time trying to predict what I'm going to do in the future. Nothing is more aggravating than waiting on my computer to finish whatever it predicted I would do, so that it can do what I was actually wanting to do. Because now, when I go to a different page than the one it predicted, it has to stop rendering the prediction and start rendering what I wanted. Just fuck off with this shit.

  • Is this the Opera development news feed now?

    Why is Opera getting so much press lately? Did they hire a PR guy or something?

  • Cynical me thinks this was done to game the browser usage statistics.

    • Cynical me thinks this was done to game the browser usage statistics.

      Cynical me agrees with you. It's only slightly different from adware that directs all your searches to their preferred site. "Yes, you typed 'Asthma Medication' but we predicted you were going to search for Viagra."

  • Provided the prediction engine is clever... (Score:3)

    by itsdapead ( 734413 ) on Monday December 05, 2016 @10:23AM (#53424979)

    E.g. I type "o-p-e-r"...
    Browser immediately opens "Download Google Chrome"* page.

    *or other browser of your choice provided it doesn't have a mouth-frothingly insane "speculatively download and render potential malware" feature... because nobody ever left any security loopholes in any code ever.

    Even the existing not-very-smart-bar feature in most browsers keeps wanting to google "http://mytestwebserver.local" or "192.168.1.254" instead of doing what I obviously want.

    • Even the existing not-very-smart-bar feature in most browsers keeps wanting to google "http://mytestwebserver.local" or "192.168.1.254" instead of doing what I obviously want.

      http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyw... [mozillazine.org]

      HTH, HAND.

      • Thanks, but had to laugh: from the article:

        This article describes the preference keyword.enabled. To add, delete, or modify this preference, you will need to edit your configuration — do not edit this article.

        Someone has got the measure of the typical user...

  • people only knew about bookmarks. How often do I see someone type 'google' in the google search bar, click 'google' in the google search results and then type 'facebook' once on a new google page...

  • Constant pre-loads (Score:3)

    by John Napkintosh ( 140126 ) on Monday December 05, 2016 @10:31AM (#53425043) Homepage

    I'm thinking that the browser is constantly guessing what I'm going to try to load and is preemptively loading additional content in the background just in case it's right. It may eventually get the right answer, but more often than not it's probably going to be wrong; I'm just wondering how much additional bandwidth this feature is going to use.

  • I don't care in the least if my computer sits idle for a few seconds waiting for me, the user, to tell it what to do. I care very much if it arbitrarily decides to waste some of my all-too-limited monthly bandwidth incorrectly trying to second-guess my intent.

    Dear Silicon Valley (or in this case, Oslo): Kindly fuck off and quit acting like the whole world has the same nice gigabit FTTP connections you've come to enjoy. Over half of the US (and more than half of the planet) doesn't have effectively unli

    • Opera has this feature called Turbo which was basically a compressed web proxy - it really makes a difference on poor connections and was specially useful for me in the early days of mobile broadband data.

      They really used to pioneer useful features back in the day...

  • This is sad. (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 )

    I still remeber when Opera was the best browser around - not that long ago, in fact. I was a loyal fan until they became yet another Chromium skin and the company ditched their entire codebase, spending ages to release a non-Windows binary in the process.

    I now look forward for Vivaldi.

  • Their government logged and spied-on browsing history to be filled with unfortunate AI driven preload, when the algorithm land them into troubles.

  • I am sick and tired of desktop systems trying to go the extra mile. Do NOT go the extra mile. Just do what I tell you to do. Do not try to predict, do not try to run the show. I run the show, you shut the fcuk up and do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it. You are not intelligent enough to know what I want or I need, so do not even try. Just stay in the background quietly, ready to do, as promptly as possible, what I tell you to do. Do not bother me with nonsense. Do not remind me of things, unl

  • Unintended consequences (Score:3)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday December 05, 2016 @10:41AM (#53425111)
    This "feature" just screams UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.

  • If it's like the suggestions that Google puts up when I'm typing a search query, then it's useless and annoying to me, and I'd turn it off, just as I've turned Google's inept attempts at reading my mind. The problem is, the suggestions are almost always either wrong, or incomplete. It would be useful sometimes, if it allowed me to populate the search field with one of their suggestions and add text to the suggestion BEFORE they do the search.

    In the case of Opera, what they consider 'obvious' has a good cha

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • What a great way to burn through all that extra bandwidth that you never use. *cough*

  • The company insists that this feature saves time and energy without compromising the security. What's your thought?

    Potentially wastes a lot of bandwidth and generates visit logs on sites I don't visit.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Wulf2k ( 4703573 )

      Well, there's the solution to permanent monitoring.

      Everybody has visited every web page, so logging is useless.

      Tada.

  • This will waste time for me in two ways: in a small way, the flickering display of suggestions will distract me and instil doubt from the answer I already know I'm typing; in a large way, I expect it will act like autocorrect does in wordprocessors and webforms, and I will have to erase what was filled in (maybe a more than once) to get it to be what I intended to type.

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