Opera is now Free

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,564
Location
I am omnipresent
I think that Opera is a flawed product, free or not. It certainly can't do things I want a browser to do.
 

time

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 18, 2002
Messages
4,932
Location
Brisbane, Oz
I think that Firefox is a flawed product, free or not. It certainly can't do things I want a browser to do.

I think that unless Opera goes downhill, I wouldn't take the time to even look at alternatives.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,564
Location
I am omnipresent
Do we need to go through this again?
I mean, when the best thing I can say about it is that it has nicer crash recovery than other browsers, it's clear that work still needs to be done.
 

Buck

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Feb 22, 2002
Messages
4,514
Location
Blurry.
Website
www.hlmcompany.com
Will Rickards said:
Wonder how they can generate revenue?
Premium support isn't going to get them much I would think.

Boston Globe Article
The Boston Globe said:
The company expects to recoup its revenue losses through the Internet search window built into each browser. Opera has deals with search giant Google Inc. and other online search companies. If an Opera user runs a Google search and is directed to Google advertising, Opera will get a cut of the ad revenues. Von Tetzchner said this advertising revenue could generate more than enough income to compensate for giving away Opera, if the company can persuade millions more Internet users to adopt the browser.
 

LiamC

Storage Is My Life
Joined
Feb 7, 2002
Messages
2,016
Location
Canberra
Whilst I am a FireFox user, I think this is a good thing. Anything that gets people off of IE is good. Nothing against Microsoft, but IE causes too many problems.

I have been trying Opera 8.0 and it is a vast improvement (out of the box) over 7.x. Yep, Opera uses less resources, but that is more a consequence of it's programming model--and in the days of 3~4Ghz processors/Model rating CPU's and GB's of RAM, does it matter? I don't subscribe to the idea that one browser can be all things to all people, so viva choice.
 

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
4,448
Location
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Website
www.redhill.net.au
Of course it's a bloody flawed product. It's a web browser, right? All web browsers are flawed. Yes, even Mozilla. At least Opera doesn't sink into the terminal offend-nobody-by-not-doing-anything-really-well mediocrity that Firefox lives by. (We won't even mention Internet Exploder. Doesn't deserve a mention in the context of "browsers" and "best".)

So the question isn't whether Opera is a flawed product or not, of course it is. The question is do Opera's flaws add up to a less-flawed product than the flaws of the other three browsers.

The answer to that question, of course, depends on the individual. It's a matter of taste and personal preference. And that is what freedom is all about. If you don't have choices, then you don't have freedom, and life without freedom is not life at all.

Viva Opera!

PS: posted with Opera, my second-favourite (and second-most used) browser. I was happy to pay for Opera (I've paid for it three times now, counting cross-platforms and upgrades) and I'll continue to be happy to use it free of charge in the future.

And half of you Americans will froth at the mouth and scream "but what about the money you wasted on a product that you can now get free?". Who cares about the money? Get yourselves a sense of priorities, OK? This is about quality, nothing else. Money doesn't count from 0.0001 secopnds after you spend it. Quality always counts. It doesn't matter if a product is $100 or $0.00. If it's good, use it. My word processor of choice costs $20. There are lots of more expensive ones around, and lots of free ones too, but this is the one I like the best, so I use it. My operating system of choice costs $500. So be it, it's the one that works best for me. Both my favourite browsers now cost $0.00. Fine. They are still the best, so I'll still keep on using them.

PPS: to misquote Bill, anything that gets people off of IE is good. Lots of things against Microsoft, but IE causes too many problems.
 

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
4,448
Location
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Website
www.redhill.net.au
PPPS: Bill, Opera 8 is indeed a vast improvement over Opera 7. But then, it would be a task of monumental proportions to make a worse browser than Opera 7 was. (OK, Microsoft could do it, but not too many other firms have the talent.) Opera 5 was good, 6 was excellent, and 8 is the best one yet - it really does challenge Mozilla for the title of best browser on the market. My view is that it doesn't actually beat Mozilla, but it certainly leaves Firefox for dead and runs Mozilla close. V7 was horrible though.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,564
Location
I am omnipresent
Firefox does lots of things amazingly well.
Like not crash.
Like having a non-broken user interface.
Like rendering web pages in the manner I expect.
Like being mind-blowingly extensible.
Like having same-day bugfixes when needed.
Like offer reasonable options for loading images to poor bastards on dialup.
Like having a livable security model.
Like support for Adblock and G. Filterset.
Like support for opening huge numbers of links at a time (linky extension)
Like support for doing filtered downloads off web pages (magpie extension, which is usually Firefox only)
Like having very sensible bookmark management.
Like having the same keyboard shortcuts as old-fashioned Netscape and also IE.

I've tried, but I can't see where Opera advocates are coming from. Give me Konq or Galleon any day. At least I've never seen either of them crash.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,737
Location
USA
I like firefox a lot, but I'll be the first to tell you it crashes. Maybe it's not firefox's fault but on many occasions I'll visit a web site, like the big ad link posted here on SF, and firefox freezes right up...all other instances are two sheets in the wind, and I lose whatever it is I'm working on. It's not often enough that I give up on the poor guy, but it sure can be a PITA.

I've found that imbeded video (of all types) + firefox = teh suck.
 

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
4,448
Location
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Website
www.redhill.net.au
Handruin said:
Maybe it's not firefox's fault but on many occasions I'll visit a web site, like the big ad link posted here on SF, and firefox freezes right up...

The fault for a web page that crashes any modern browser (or, for that matter, Internet Explorer) is easy to assign. It is the fault of the web designer/coder. Always. Every time.

(Except - and I hesitate to add this line because the exceptions are so extremely rare these days - except where it is a page of validaed code that crashes a browser. I don't know of even one example where valid code will crash any of the current browsers. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that if there is I am not aware of it.

Most browsers will make a pretty fair effort to reproduce even badly malformed pages these days. They really are very good.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,737
Location
USA
In my case, I believe it to be firefox's inability to handle quicktime movies (or avi). The link I'm refering to is here. I sent the page to the w3c validator and it doesn't validate as a well formed web page (no surprise). It could be the use of the embed tag, but I don't really know.
 

Bozo

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Feb 12, 2002
Messages
4,396
Location
Twilight Zone
I've been using the Firefox Beta for about a week or so. Works great.
The original Firefox locked up when trying to view Big Ad. The beta runs it fine.
I also had bought Opera a while back. Used it until V7 came out. Then switched to Firefox.
Guess I'll try the free version of Opera. Anything but IE.

Bozo :mrgrn:
 

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
4,448
Location
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Website
www.redhill.net.au
Crashing browsers: hmmmm ..... Explorer is, of course, the easiest browser to crash. Any fool can crash Explorer. Just open up lots of windows, and it will fall over every time. Especially if they are graphics-heavy.

Next easiest? Hard to say. I actually crash Mozilla next most often, but then I habitually push Mozilla out to a truly ridiculous number of tabs and windows. Right now, by my standards, I have only a modest amount of stuff open: er .... 13 Mozilla windows and ... (longer err) 97 tabs, but that's because I spent a few minutes shutting down another 50-odd tabs a little earlier. It's not unusual for me to have double that number going. And now and again, maybe once every two or three weeks, Mozilla cries uncle and dies on me.

Opera is my next most-crashed browser. I crash Opera about once every three months. But then I typically only have 2 or 3 Opera windows running, with (guess) 30-odd tabs in total. (Once in a while lots more though.) And when you crash Opera - well, when the power goes off on my desktops, or when I stupidly press the power button on my docking station when I meant to press the undock button (bad design, IBM!) , actual crashes are too rate these days to really count - Opera takes me straight back to where I was before. (Great design feature, Opera Software.)

My least-crashed browser is Firefox. But then my current Firefox workload is typical: zero widows with zero tabs. When I do fire up the fox, it rarely goes beyond a dozen tabs before the dumbed-down-for-the-unwashed-masses user interface starts bugging me enough that I shut it down again. Mostly I only use Firefox when I've got so many Opera and Mozilla windows open that it's hard to tell which one is which, and i just want a browser that stands out in a different colour on the task list for a few moments while I take care of some small job. Oh, and I also use it when I want to test some web page that has external Javascript on it that itself depends on a fixed-at-browser-startup variable, typically screen resolution. To test pages that do screen-size sniffing with Javascript, you have to code, test, switch resolutions, close down the browser, test, and so on. I.e., you need a browser on your machine that you aren't using for anything else in particular so you can shut it down and restart it everytime you want to check that your code is working properly. Firefox serves that role admirably, 'cause while it actually renders web pages properly and according to the standards (like Moz and Opera, unlike Internet Explorer) the UI is too crappy to bother using it for anything important.

Which would crash least often if I used them equally? Don't know. It's reasonable to assume, in view of their common code base and pending evidence to say otherwse, that Moz and the Fox would be the same. Better than Opera 7? By a mile. Better than ancient old Opera 6? Easily. Better than Opera 8? Don't know. Neither one crashes often enough to ever get excited about. I mean my habitual usage probably should be called "abuse" not "use", and even so I don't crash browsers often enough to ever worry about anymore. So who cares?
 

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
4,448
Location
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Website
www.redhill.net.au
Handruin said:
In my case, I believe it to be firefox's inability to handle quicktime movies (or avi). The link I'm refering to is here. I sent the page to the w3c validator and it doesn't validate as a well formed web page (no surprise). It could be the use of the embed tag, but I don't really know.

That page works perfectly on all five of the browsers I have installed on this machine: Opera 8.02, Firefox 1.0.6, Mozilla 1.7.1, IE 6 and IE 5. Mind you, this machine has a decided advantage over yours, Handruin: I do not have any version of Quicktime installed. ;) (Nor plan to!)
 

Fushigi

Storage Is My Life
Joined
Jan 23, 2002
Messages
2,890
Location
Illinois, USA
Handruin said:
In my case, I believe it to be firefox's inability to handle quicktime movies (or avi). The link I'm refering to is here. I sent the page to the w3c validator and it doesn't validate as a well formed web page (no surprise). It could be the use of the embed tag, but I don't really know.
It's not FF. It works just fine for me using FF 1.0.6 and QT 6.1.

In general, embedded media issues are more than likely the fault of the media player provider doing something they shouldn't be doing.
 

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
4,448
Location
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Website
www.redhill.net.au
It's a bloody miracly code that crappy works on any browser!

W3C Validator said:
Error Line 8 column 35: there is no attribute "LEFTMARGIN".

You have used the attribute named above in your document, but the document type you are using does not support that attribute for this element. This error is often caused by incorrect use of the "Strict" document type with a document that uses frames (e.g. you must use the "Transitional" document type to get the "target" attribute), or by using vendor proprietary extensions such as "marginheight" (this is usually fixed by using CSS to achieve the desired effect instead).

# Error Line 8 column 49: there is no attribute "TOPMARGIN".

# Error Line 8 column 65: there is no attribute "MARGINWIDTH".

# Error Line 8 column 82: there is no attribute "MARGINHEIGHT".

# Error Line 29 column 25: there is no attribute "SRC".

# Error Line 29 column 50: there is no attribute "WIDTH".

# Error Line 29 column 63: there is no attribute "HEIGHT".

# Error Line 29 column 78: there is no attribute "AUTOPLAY".

# Error Line 29 column 96: there is no attribute "CONTROLLER".

# Error Line 29 column 108: there is no attribute "LOOP".

# Error Line 29 column 128: there is no attribute "PLUGINSPAGE".

# Error Line 29 column 170: element "EMBED" undefined.

I mean, seriously, where do these people get off calling themselves web coders? Hell, one assumes that at the end of the day they actually put out their hands and expect the client will give them money for stringing together that bugfest.

I can think of four or five people right here on Storage Forum - a tiny little community when it's all said and done - who would not dream of calling themselves "web programmers" or anything like that because they are strictly part-time unpaid-tinkerer class HTML coders, not paid professionals, and not one of them would put out code as badly formed as that, let alone expect to get paid for it. (Me, Buck and Doug for starters, but there are a couple of others if I remember correctly, and even Tim the self-confessed beginner made sure that his code validated before he handed it over, and got older hands to look it over too.

I mean, if this is the sort of crap work that's good enough to get paid (and probably paid rather well) for, WTF are we all doing our day jobs for?

Sheesh!
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,564
Location
I am omnipresent
Handy, do you REALLY think I'd use a browser that couldn't look at the moving picture forms of pr0n? ;)
Actually, I habitually remove or change the MIME types for things like AVI, WMV and MOV from the firefox config (there's an extension called "Launchy" that can set this stuff up for you). I prefer to save or open those things externally, since very often the web-based players don't allow full screen, and sometimes launch in very ugly secondary windows. But with Media Player Classic and all its addons installed, I've found I can watch pretty much whatever, even inside FF.

The ONLY thing I have seen crash firefox in the last year or so is the horrid, evil AcroExch in-browser PDF viewer. Again, my solution was to fiddle with the MIME setting for PDF to open those files with the full, external Acrobat Reader. Who wants to download PDF files one page at a time, anyway?

I can't attribute any crashes to Firefox itself. I don't know what I'm not doing with FF that Tannin is with Moz (Tannin, I have two Windows open right now with 61 tabs, which is a similarly large workload to what you're doing, I think), but I don't really do HTML authoring, so maybe you're using some part of the browser that I am not?

I've seen Opera version 8 crash. I have a few misguided customers who use it for some reason. It's not like I have a lot of contact with it, but boy is it funny when an Opera advocate starts telling me how wonderful her browser is, only to open it up to the crash recovery doohickey.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,737
Location
USA
Tannin...I do have to blush a bit. If you run the validator on SF's home page...it has many errors. I've known this for some time and in true honesty, it's been a bit of laziness on my part for not fixing it (my apologies). A good part of the problem is the ashnews system we use and the "&" character. W3C doesn't like having those in the code where URL's are concerned. I do pledge to fix it as I don't want to be a hypocrite touting standard compliancy, yet I fail to do it myself. :oops:

=====

Merc, I'll look into that extension you mentioned. Like I mentioned, the crashes aren't frequent, so I haven't given up on firefox. I know that if this application pissed you off, you'd be the first to call it out (no disrespect implied).

Has anyone else noticed overlay problems with videos that use windows media player inside firefox? Sometimes when viewing a video, the image will go blank because I scrolled the page, or clicked on the volume bar. This only happens in firefox, which again is more likely a compatibility issue than an issue with firefox.
 

mubs

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Nov 22, 2002
Messages
4,908
Location
Somewhere in time.
I use FF, and frequently have problems with watching videos thru FF. However, I didn't have a problem visiting Handruin's link a couple of times other than Quicktime complaining that it needed to download something, to which I said no. The big ad played correctly every time.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,737
Location
USA
I have QT 6.5.2 installed...could be my issue. Fushigi had no problems with QT 6.1. I'm using FF 1.0.6 for the record with adblock, IE View, dictionarySearch, web developer, and downTHEMall extentions installed.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,737
Location
USA
Well, it's reproducible. I clicked on that link again and in 5 seconds of playing the video, firefox was locked up tight.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,737
Location
USA
Handruin said:
Tannin...I do have to blush a bit. If you run the validator on SF's home page...it has many errors. I've known this for some time and in true honesty, it's been a bit of laziness on my part for not fixing it (my apologies). A good part of the problem is the ashnews system we use and the "&" character. W3C doesn't like having those in the code where URL's are concerned. I do pledge to fix it as I don't want to be a hypocrite touting standard compliancy, yet I fail to do it myself. :oops:

We are now XHTML (transitional) compliant for the default forum theme and front page :excl:
 

Explorer

Learning Storage Performance
Joined
Jun 26, 2002
Messages
236
Location
Hinterlands
Many of those "earlier" 6.x versions of QuickTime have a security hole or two.

I suspect a Windows version of QT 7 will finally make its debut before the end of this calendar year.


 

paugie

Storage is cool
Joined
Dec 13, 2003
Messages
702
Location
Bulacan, Philippines
I am using Opera8.5 as I type this. it feels speedy. I think I like it.
I have use 7.1 and 7.21 before but I never really caught it. Used it only because it had a good download manager.
And it is cleaner than before. I remember the Opera I used looked cramped.

And yes, I remember having crashed Firefox every now and then. Maybe once or twice a month. And I hated it cause it took everything down with it.
 

paugie

Storage is cool
Joined
Dec 13, 2003
Messages
702
Location
Bulacan, Philippines
like a happy kid with a new toy

I liked Opera and Firefox enough because of the tabs to leave IE.

But I missed being able to read the pages I previously visited while offline. This was important to me because I was on dial-up and I would download pages off the online newspaper and read it after I shut down my connection.

There were times I had to close the pages before I was able to read them and whereas in IE, all I had to do was call them up while in "offline" mode, in Firefox and in Opera, I had to go online again.

I remember starting a thread here asking if there was a work-around for this. The answer was that, FF and Opera were designed to be online readers. There was no work-around.

Now, in the new Opera, I can do as I did in IE. Great!

But , now, I am on some kind of wireless unlimited plan (albeit 120kbps only) so I don't really have to read while "offline". Well, still glad I can read offline if I have to. :roll:
 

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
4,448
Location
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Website
www.redhill.net.au
Really quickly because I'm mega-late, just use a modern browser (any of the big 3 - Mozilla, the fox or Opera) and leave 18 billion tabs open till you are ready to read them. Don't reboot! I sometimes come back and read a page I opened the week before last.
 

mubs

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Nov 22, 2002
Messages
4,908
Location
Somewhere in time.
So, Tannin, you have a massive DB2 database running on an IBM OS/390 mainframe that keeps tabs (pun intended) of what's in all the gazillion tabs you have open? :eek: Hmmm, I want to read that page I half-read last fortnight; do a SQL query in DB2; aha! found it; select appropriate browser window; select appropriate tab; there you go!
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,564
Location
I am omnipresent
I'm afraid my habits are similar. Dozens of open tabs in each of three to five windows across 12 to 15 PCs.
One Windows for SF, another for the porno, a third for Slashdot...
 

paugie

Storage is cool
Joined
Dec 13, 2003
Messages
702
Location
Bulacan, Philippines
leave 18 billion tabs open till you are ready to read them. Don't reboot! I sometimes come back and read a page I opened the week before last.

I would love to do that, really, really love to. But the electric bill is high enough as it is, the missus would bonk me on the head and throw the PC out on the street if it ever went over P2,000 (USD40) per month.

Sometimes I can get away with keeping it on overnight when I am encoding/rendering something and I'm careful to shut the monitor off. But I almost always shutdown the PC for the night.
 

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
4,448
Location
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Website
www.redhill.net.au
mubs said:
So, Tannin, you have a massive DB2 database running on an IBM OS/390 mainframe that keeps tabs (pun intended) of what's in all the gazillion tabs you have open? :eek: Hmmm, I want to read that page I half-read last fortnight; do a SQL query in DB2; aha! found it; select appropriate browser window; select appropriate tab; there you go!

Yup. It's called a brain. Most of us were issued with one when we were very small. Some of us even remember to use it now that we are bigger. Mine, unfortunately, is very good at remembering which Mozilla window has the page I'm looking for, and that I was up to page 164 in my book last night when I turned the light out, and that the Brush-tailed Phascogale gives birth to between 3 and 6 young in early winter, typically 5 .... but absolutely brilliant at not remembering more important things, such as where I put my keys last night, and that I had to pay the phone bill by yesterday or else they will cut it off, and that Kristi's birthday is the 17th, and that this lady I'm talking to as if she were a total stranger is actually the same lady I met yesterday and talked with for over an hour about buying a new computer and I haven't only forgotten her name, I can't even remember ever meeting her before, and what was I looking for again? Oh yes, keys.
 

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
4,448
Location
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Website
www.redhill.net.au
Well, if you ever do get allowed to leave the computer on, Paugie, here are a couple of useful tips for the Tannin/Mercutio leave-everything-open-all-the-time method:

1: Use Win 2000 or XP or OS/2 or Linux. Win98 and its ilk crash too often.

2: Having a UPS or a laptop helps. (But hey! a little danger spices life up.)

3: Organise your tabs in different windows: if you are looking at naughty pictures, browsing through stuff about birds, reading the news, posting on Storage Forum, thinking about buying a new car, and coding up a web page (let's say), then do each of these things in different windows, with new tabs opened in the appropriate window. Much easier to find stuff.

4: If you are terminally scatter-brained like me and have 17 different subjects on the go at once, thus need 17 windows with tabs in them, use different browsers for some of the subjects. For example, I always read news and surf Storage Forum with Opera, post at Offroadsubarus.com with Mozilla, and visit Bird Forum with Firefox. Tea's Storage Forum posts are always made with Internet Explorer ('cause I'm hogging all the decent browsers). This way, I only have to look for the browser's icon (e.g., look for IE if I want to be Tea, Firefox if I want to have another look at that Bird Forum thread, and so on).

5: Use Toggleminimise, a fantastic little app that puts minimised windows into the system tray and leaves the task bar free for the things you are actually doing right now. Without TM, I'd be hamstrung. (On my OS/2 systems I have an even better one, but that won't be of interest to all you Windows users.)

(Merc would probably add 6: use lots of different computers. I do that too, but not so much these days. I tend to try to use the laptop for everything except business now.)
 
Top