Opera now has a preview download of their new version, 7.50 available. New main features include RSS Newsfeeds, Opera Chat, Many improvements to the mail client, spell checker (not yet working on systems not using the lastest version of aspell), Menu/toolbar clean-up, new toolbar configuration dialog and more. Additionally, you can buy one Opera desktop license at regular price and send one extra gift certificate for Opera for any OS to a friend for free.
Opera 7.50 Preview 1 for Linux and FreeBSD available
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’ve been using it on FreeBSD and the parallel version on Win. The UI has undergone some fairly extensive changes. There are some nice new features, particularly chat; set the server to irc.opera.com and you can find other users, customer service folk, and even an occasional developer hanging out in the various rooms.
As this is a preview, well-thought-out feedback is very much wanted (in newsgroups, mailing lists, forums and now chat).
I’ve checked out Opera on Windows and on Linux and I don’t really care for it. The addware stuff is annoying and I don’t see any compelling reason to pay $$ for a closed source browser. I’d rather http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html“>donate . Just my !*opinion*!
The title pretty much says it all. I pay $20, you pay $20. Any takers?
I’ve checked out Opera on Windows and on Linux and I don’t really care for it. The addware stuff is annoying and I don’t see any compelling reason to pay $$ for a closed source browser.
Perhaps because Opera is faster? Opera has more features? Something along the line? Besides, I have been using the ad-supported version for a long time, and I barely notice it. Especially now with the Google textad thingy.
The ad banners got even smaller in 7.50!
Damn this opera! Who the …. **…. needs it on LINUX!!! Linux guys all use mozilla. Now where has the BeOS version gone?! Why even bother… And they even tried to do a QNX (!!!) port. Now is Opera really stupid or what? They have absolutely no users in QNX land, Linux and FreeBSD users will only laugh at what they call ‘closed-source software’ and use their mozilla, Windows users will use IE, and BeOS users have NOTHING! Opera!! Damn you!! Release that BeOS version at last!
I used opera on QNX for over a year, I would have stuck with it too had I kept the system I was using… but that turned into my server and now I’ve got this laptop which only runs Linux. Sorry to disappoint you, but up until recently I used only opera on Linux aswell. Mozilla just seems a bit too slow for my liking, and opera never gave me any issues, works beautifully. Keep up the good work Opera.
It appear Opera Inc didn’t learn from Netscapes mistakes. I wish they’d cut off all those useless features and get to work on the browser’s standard compliance problems. That and make it look like a Windows app!
– Crash fix: Fixed several crashes related to GIF images
– Fixed problem where interlaced PNGs were rendered blocky
– Fixed problem where images were only partially loaded on specific pages
– Fixed problem where some images didn’t display
Good to see. I wonder if Opera now saves ALL images when you select “Save with images as”. Last time I tried this feature on a web page most pics were NOT saved, which makes the feature useless to me. Mozilla and IE both worked fine on the same page.
I can only agree with you. Opera is the best browser available and the M2 Mail thing is nicely integrated with the browser so it feals very fast.
But now they are going to throw in a g*ddamm*t IRC part. What are these guys thinking of?! If you are geeky enough to use IRC then you are going to stick with mIRC or XChat or BithX, not a IRC built with the browser like Mozilla or Opera.
The browser’s “standard compliance problems”? I guess it’s not perfect, but it is far more standards-compliant than IE, Netscape, and most web-authoring tools, and pretty much equivalent to Mozilla.
Regarding “useless features,” I use and like the mail client and chat. How nice not to have to bring up another app to do those things. OTOH, I have used and liked Sylpheed for mail, for example, so I can understand if people have separate apps for mail, chat, etc., and just want to use Opera as a browser.
About “making it look like a Windows app”: I’m sure that will impress Linux users!
Actually, you can make Opera look however you want it to look by changing skins, which you can do with two mouse clicks. There are WinXP skins available for folks like Ronald, MacOS X skins for Apple lovers, and various Linux themes as well.
they are not crazy — QNX paid them, simple as that. So it doesn’t matter whether you want Opera for BeOS, people never bought it back in the day, anyways… I do recall all the discussion surrounding this back at benews.com. I people had shown interest while BeOS was still “strong”, you would have got your Opera, so stop mourning.
It appear Opera Inc didn’t learn from Netscapes mistakes. I wish they’d cut off all those useless features and get to work on the browser’s standard compliance problems.
Opera is pretty standards compliant already. More than IE anyway. If they can integrate all these extras without slowing down the browser, making it more unstable etc. I think it’s a good thing. You don’t _have_ to use the extra features…
That and make it look like a Windows app!
Why the hell should they do that?! Opera is very recognizable due to its look, and still all controls etc. are positioned and works like all other windows apps. (windows version). Now the browser looks about the same on all the platforms, surely that must be a good thing?
HC Andersson: You might want to try it first – then complain!
I’ve used mIRC and XChat, but I am by no means a “power user” of IRC. I simply want to have conversations with friends or interesting strangers, and for that Opera’s implementation is quite straightforward and convenient for me.
In any case, the Opera binary is small and the browser is fast, so you don’t have to use any feature you don’t want and no harm done.
As a browser I just find it good. But M2, the mail client, is the best ever writen. It is the only thing I miss from my Windows box.
IMHO, opera should stick to being a pure fast browser. Thats what got it recognition in the first place and that is what most people who use opera want. There are good apps for IRC on both windows and linux. Opera can only dream of surpassing the quality of those apps. The last thing I want is my browser crashing bringing down the IRC with it. Thats going to be frustrating. A half-baked IRC program isn’t gonna cut it. It will add bload for sure. If they are hell bent on IRC, they should develop it as a separate program.
Having used opera from time to time both on linux and windows, I think they should spend their time improving javascript, CSS, plugin and java support.
ManK
I’ve been using Opera for a couple years now, it is definitely my favorite browser. I appreciate Mozilla Firebird, but it isn’t quite up to Opera’s level yet.
Mouse gestures and Fast Forward/Rewind are probably the smartest things ever added to a web browser. I now find myself often trying to use gestures in Explorer and Konquerer.
The ads are really a non-issue. I don’t even notice them anymore at my 800×600 work PC, and at home with 1600×1200 they are all but invisible.
There is a 7.5 for sparc and the developers have mentioned working on an X86 version. It is really the only option on sparc if you have an old machine, Mozilla and even Firebird are painfully slow.
They fixed the bug that happened you use css events from one element to modify other elements. Before opera sometimes forgot about the other elements, depending on how fast you moved the mouse. Now opera, safari, and mozilla users work fully with the stylesheet on my website.
The browser functionality in O7 is even faster than before owing to an improved yet smaller rendering engine. The entire mail DLL in the Windows version is a couple of hundred KB, and my guess is that the chat functionality involves even less code. So there’s no bloat. If you don’t want chat in Opera, don’t set it up.
Regarding improvement of CSS support: Opera’s Chief Technology Officer invented CSS. Opera supports CSS that hasn’t even become an official standard yet. What would you like to see improved?
Opera was my life blood when I was on a slow machine. There was just flat out nothing to compete with it. But I now have a super fast PC rendering webpages correctly is priority #1 and firebird is nearly perfect for that. Only ESPN and other MSN sites are crappy (although still viewable unlike opera with overlapping pics and links). Opera is second to none in features and innovation though, still a quality product.
Kind of off topic but does anyone know of firebird has a place where you can save the zoom? I have to ctrl + everytime I load it.
Popup menu on left-mouse button. Anyone know where I can disable this? It’s facking annoying!!!
“In any case, the Opera binary is small and the browser is fast, so you don’t have to use any feature you don’t want and no harm done.”
Jud: Maybe I am overreacting a bit, but now when Mozilla do it right with seperating the half done applications from the good ones, Opera does the opposite!
But hey, what the… Opera is the worlds best browser! (And the only one who will have the chance to battle the thrown is Mozilla Firebird, when it comes up to version 1)
I have the latest version of aspell…
Does Opera use the Qt toolkit? Or is that only for the *nix ports?
For all that are saying that Opera is their most beloved browser and hardly notice the ads. I say just buy it. Or you’ll see it start having many lay-offs and as a company it will disappear or be very small.
They must be pretty desperate to be doing,
“Additionally, you can buy one Opera desktop license at regular price and send one extra gift certificate for Opera for any OS to a friend for free.”
They are trying to hook in customers because they maybe don’t have enough.
My favorite feature of Opera is the way there caching mechanism works.
With a slow net connection I like to set images to be “show cached images”. So what I do is load the page without images, then as I am reading I enable the images to download. If I visit the page again it will obviously be fast.
I wish Mozilla and IE gave you that sort of control over their caching.
Disable the Hotclick menu in “File/Preferences/Toolbars and menus”.
Spelling checker is there in the right-click context menu.
Only Opera for Linux uses Qt, although less and less of it.
“For all that are saying that Opera is their most beloved browser and hardly notice the ads. I say just buy it. Or you’ll see it start having many lay-offs and as a company it will disappear or be very small.”
No. It’s a Christmas special. You know, a lot of companies do that. It doesn’t mean that it’s going down the drain. And remember that there’s more to Opera than desktops. Ever tried Opera for the latest Nokia mobile? Don’t worry.
Ronald (IP: —.136-201-24.mc.videotron.ca)
It appear Opera Inc didn’t learn from Netscapes mistakes. I wish they’d cut off all those useless features
Those “useless features” are the reason I continue to buy Opera. I’ve experimented with attempts to clone functionality such as fast forward/rewind and gestures in Mozilla/Firebird and have found the open source implementations lacking cosiderably. Furthermore, Opera’s MDI approach affords many other nicities not possible with other browsers, such as shift+F6 to tile all pages (a.k.a. child windows/tabs) horizontally, something not possible with Mozilla. In addition there’s also Opera’s ability to scale all elements of a page while zooming. Finally, there’s the fact that Opera cold starts about an order of magnitude faster than Mozilla or Firebird.
and get to work on the browser’s standard compliance problems.
The number of outstanding rendering bugs in Opera 7 is minimal, and most of them are quite esoteric. See http://nontroppo.org/wiki/Opera7CSSIssues
It’s also been shown that Opera’s standards compliance is at least equal to, if not surpassing Mozilla. See http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/css2tests/intro.html
Bottom line, saying Opera has “standards compilance problems” is nothing but FUD. Opera is one of the most standards compliant browsers in existance.
That and make it look like a Windows app!
Opera does look like a Windows app when the classic skin is used.
ManK (IP: —.we.client2.attbi.com)
IMHO, opera should stick to being a pure fast browser. Thats what got it recognition in the first place and that is what most people who use opera want.
I disagree on all counts. I switched to Opera because it provides excellent implementations of novel features, most notably gestures and fast/forward rewind. Furthermore, Opera is still one of the fastest browsers I’ve used, regardless of the bloat that’s been accumulating in 7. I have not seen speed compromised dramatically by extra features, nor has the size of the Opera binaries increased significantly. Opera still weighs in as a much smaller download than Mozilla or Firebird.
I hope the Opera team continues innovating the browser UI and improving the usability of the web.
John Blink (IP: —.smelb1.vic.optusnet.com.au)
Does Opera use the Qt toolkit? Or is that only for the *nix ports?
Opera uses Qt on all platforms, including Windows and OS X, although they’ve been implementing the widget rendering code themselves much more in 7 than in 6. Like all Qt applications on Windows and OS X, Qt mimics the native GUI look rather than attempting to use native widgets.
Opera does NOT use Qt on any other platform than the Unixes, and even there it is limited to parts of the font code and the main menu or something like that.
Furthermore, Opera’s MDI approach affords many other nicities not possible with other browsers, such as shift+F6 to tile all pages (a.k.a. child windows/tabs) horizontally, something not possible with Mozilla.
Hey Bascule you forgot to add, “which makes it also really nice for locking it down as a kiosk in fullscreen mode”.
By using MDI it has the functionality of the windows taskbar in the browser.
The browser is the OS. Sorry bad quote
I’m a FreeBSD user and use Opera most of the time. My roommate uses Opera on Gentoo. Its a nice and fast(er than mozilla) browser, and does tabbed browsing better than konqueror. I really like it and appreciate the work put into it by Opera developers. (I’m addicted to mouse-gestures as well, which is better implemented and more usable than _any_ mozilla/firebird plugin I tried out).
On the other hand, I use the ad supported version, for if I had some money, I would surely send it to other projects (KDE or FreeBSD – I like them) first.
I have agree with you everything what you have said. Opera is a very unique app that I have seen and bought it. Almost same as with SoftMaker company that create TextMaker and other apps. However, Opera is my background that I always keep it in maximize. I love how M2 works on the mailing list, althought it still need to work a little more on it such as thread and very few others.
I enjoy using opera, and I think it is the best browser for me. However, as I boot between three different OS’s and use two diffent computers, I would need a lot of license’s.
Not that anyone useful is reading this, but I think I would instantly buy it, if they used a license similar to GoBe’s. I think non-restrictive licenses like that are important when trying to compete in a market that has a monopolost with 90% of the market share and a almost as good free implementation.
I use linux and bsd a lot. I’d be willing to pay for a browser that renders quickly. Galeon seems pretty speedy, and I’m using Konq at the moment. Galeon is a bit feature poor though. I will try opera. Tried the win one and didn’t like it too much though.
If your on an older win variant now is a good time to upgrade. There was a big exploit released lately, i think for 7.1 or 7.2 and below. I believe it included remote command execution, a threat. Although the script kiddie would have to endure thousands of IE hits to get a few Opera victims. Anyway packetstorm has details on the exploit and the affected versions, which probably listed on bugtraq as well. Given the amount of malicious sites for IE, i think it would be good to upgrade any weak browser.
There seems to be a big misconception that linux users won’t pay for stuff. But plenty are joining networks and buying boxed sets and making donations. I think there is room within linux community for money to be made on proprietary stuff. I’ve bought suse boxed set, fixing to buy a boot manager, bought winamp for xmas since I can rip my whole collection quickly and easily. I might spring for crossover office or winex in the future. For computing as a hobby, ur already spending a lot for bandwidth and hardware, so software costs aren’t out of line considering. I just hate some of the feature poor windows ware that is sold for extreme cost. But opera appears to be an exception. And honestly i often prefer to burn with cdrtools and mkisofs, rather than toy with windows tools.
Ok, forgot to ask: how do I enable flash in Opera on FreeBSD 5.1. It works in Mozilla (the only reason I have it installed), but I couldn’t get it to work in Opera. Any tips?
Ok, forgot to ask: how do I enable flash in Opera on FreeBSD 5.1. It works in Mozilla (the only reason I have it installed), but I couldn’t get it to work in Opera. Any tips?
I’m using Opera for a long time and really, in my opinion, is the best browser and mail client, in fact, it’s it inlays all the components to use web in a simple way. I think that Opera Software intends to make it a true central application to use of the Web (and services from it) in desktops and mobile devices.
Give bsdforums.org a visit and you should be able to find the how-to of www/linux-opera. Unless, you are speaking of native Opera (www/opera). In future version of www/linux-opera there should have the auto pickup Flash plugin rather than do it by manual.
Seems that there aren’t a flash plugin native for FreeBSD. Users can install the linux version under emulation layer and use flash plugins and others, I guess. About Java, there are native version, for while, just for FreeBSD 4.x, I have no made tests with Opera yet.
On FreeBSD 5.x using Mozilla, Mozilla-derived browsers and Konqueror you can use the www/linuxpluginwrapper port to use Flash 6, but you can’t do that with Opera, because Opera is compiled for FreeBSD 4.x and runs via the FreeBSD 4 compatibility libraries on a 5.x system.
If you are using FreeBSD 4.x, you will be able to use Flash with native Opera if you have www/linuxpluginwrapper installed.
So you have three options:
1) Wait until Opera releases a version compiled on FreeBSD 5.x (will happen soon, I think)
2) Use www/linux-opera instead of native Opera
3) Go back to FreeBSD 4.9
I guess 2) is the easiest.
I dig Opera’s speed and font scaling capabilities, but don’t normally use it for the following reasons:
– Lacks the ability to allow pop-ups only on certain sites (For those sites that have a screwy pop-up/Javascript implementation, it gets annoying having to constantly hit F12 everytime I go there)
– Missing Firebird’s ‘type-ahead find’ feature
– Mouse gestures in Firebird (via an extension) are more configurable
– Some people really dig Opera’s MDI interface, but I don’t particularly care for it, for reasons which I won’t go into here.
– I could really live without the M2 crap – I already have a very capable email program.
– Can’t edit a bookmark in a personal toolbar folder by right clicking on it
– Bookmark manager is beter than Firebird’s (IMHO), but somebody at Opera must’ve been smoking the fattie when they decided to make it ‘always on top’ of the MDI interface, so that when you launch a bookmark, it shows up BEHIND the bookmark manager window.
– AFAIK, the File Transfer windows can’t be seperated from the browser, so I can’t have seperate download windows minimized in the taskbar so that I can just glance at them and tell what the percentages completed are.
– Missing some of Firebird’s nifty extensions, like that one where you can right click on an image and kill it, or block all images from that server.
Note – I haven’t tried 7.5 yet.
but it dosent work.(im running SUSE 9.0)
josh@PhantomAMD:~> opera
/usr/lib/opera/7.23-20031119.2//opera: relocation error: /usr/lib/opera/7.23-20031119.2//opera: undefined symbol: __ti7QWidget
josh@PhantomAMD:~>
Any Ideas?
WorknMan, some comments:
– JavaScript popups: Set to “Open requested” – no filter needed – this setting only opens popups when you actually click a popup link yourself
– Type ahead find: Was in Opera long before it was introduced in Mozilla – called “inline find”. Enable from “Edit” menu to enable with Ctrl+F3, or just press “,” to search for links or “.” to search for text
– Configure mouse gestures in “File/Preferences/Mouse”
– Disable MDI in “File/Preferences/Windows” – “Separate windows”
– The latest incarnation of M2 does instant searches even with tens of thousands of mails – you don’t even have to wait for a second for all matching mails to appear. I urge you to try Opera 7.50 with the new M2, if nothing else, just to see what you might be missing
– It is 100% correct to make bookmarks open behind a *dialog box*
– Extensions aren’t really needed if the program covers your needs already. Of course, it it doesn’t, then extensions can be nice.
Josh, you need to download the static version, not the shared one.
the bsdForum just mentioned the DOS-Architecture, its also avaible for the PPC with Linux.
You will find it at : http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/7.50-Preview-1/ppc-linux/en/
No, its not avaible for OSX. But its avaible for Solaris on Sparc and Linux on Sparc.
krgds,
Frank
– AFAIK, the File Transfer windows can’t be seperated from the browser, so I can’t have seperate download windows minimized in the taskbar so that I can just glance at them and tell what the percentages completed are.
In Windows (and possibly in Linux) — Position Opera so that both the desktop and Opera are showing. Go to the Transfers tab. Make the Transfers window not maximized, and grab the blue part and drag it outside of Opera. Ta da. Works with any other window inside of Opera, too.
thanx, its working now
I find the MDI implementation in Opera 7 to still be the best of all the tabbed browsers. Everyone has copied this feature and session saving features into every other browser, but often with odd results.
I use Opera on Linux and windows mostly because its fast simple, reliable and it saves all my open websites. I love the feature that all my windows are still there when I come back. That feature alone converted me to opera back in the version 4 or 5 days. I still can’t believe IE doesn’t have tabs or MDI or sessions. MS has dropped the ball browser wise.
I don’t use M2 a great deal. It has awsome features, but I’ve never switched my mail to it. Chat is another thing I can live without. Opera still makes an excelent browser tho, seeing you can remove the all buttons linking Mail etc.
The best thing ever about O7 tho is the javascript console and proper DOM support. By far the best browser on any platform so far. (Although Firebird has some awsome extensions that are very useful for web development)
Thanks for the tips
I’m running 5.1 and native Opera. I think I’ll go for #1 – wait till Opera releases 5.x version. (It would be nice if 7.50 final will be compiled both for 4.x and 5.x, afterall, there are multiple linux versions as well.)
Thanks again.
JavaScript popups: Set to “Open requested” – no filter needed – this setting only opens popups when you actually click a popup link yourself
While this works in most websites (like 99%), it doesn’t work on all of them, as there are some sites where even requested Windows are blocked. While this doesn’t happen very often and when it does happen, it is the result of REALLY bad HTML coding, the option to allow pop-ups on certain sites is handy, especially when one of these said sites is one you go to every day.
Type ahead find: Was in Opera long before it was introduced in Mozilla – called “inline find”. Enable from “Edit” menu to enable with Ctrl+F3, or just press “,” to search for links or “.” to search for text
I tried this trick on CNN.com and, though it will correctly highlight the title of the main article, if I type in ‘,’ followed by ‘Technology,’ it fails to recognize the Technology link in the navigation bar. Still, this is useful, as I did not know about it
Configure mouse gestures in “File/Preferences/Mouse”
I didn’t say you couldn’t configure them in Opera – I said Firebird has more configuration options
Disable MDI in “File/Preferences/Windows” – “Separate windows”
I don’t see this option in File/Preferences/Windows (Opera 7.21).
The latest incarnation of M2 does instant searches even with tens of thousands of mails – you don’t even have to wait for a second for all matching mails to appear. I urge you to try Opera 7.50 with the new M2, if nothing else, just to see what you might be missing
Does it allow you to open messages in their own window instead of having to view them in the preview pane? That was my main gripe with it in 7.2. (And it may have other issues – I pretty much turned it off immediately.)
It is 100% correct to make bookmarks open behind a *dialog box*
Actually, this is probably not as big of a deal as I made it out to be, since I just noticed you can open bookmarks in their own window
In Windows (and possibly in Linux) — Position Opera so that both the desktop and Opera are showing. Go to the Transfers tab. Make the Transfers window not maximized, and grab the blue part and drag it outside of Opera. Ta da. Works with any other window inside of Opera, too.
If I did it right, I now have the transfer window ‘broken off’ from the other windows, but this still doesn’t solve the problem of wanting to have each file transfer in its own window.
That’s my problem with Opera’s MDI implementation is that as long as you have it turned on, it wants to put EVERYTHING inside the MDI and sometimes, that’s just not what I want. Firebird is a little looser with its implementation and it works better for me. I won’t go into all the reasons why, but it just seems to do things the way I expect.
it is great to see that opera is still adding new functionnalities, I am using opera since many years and can not work with Ie except when I am developing and testing at work. I have bought the licence and do not regret it, I will even buy a new licence for Linux, since it is also damn fast on suse too. Personaly I can not live without mouse gesture, zooming, avoid animate gif and all that nice features…
try it one more time, it is so great
Under the Windows preferences, there is a dropdown for “Window handling”.
In M2, just double-click a message to open it in a new page/window. This should be possible in 7.2x too. And M2 doesn’t really have a preview pane. That’s where most people actually read their mail.
>>Configure mouse gestures in “File/Preferences/Mouse”
>I didn’t say you couldn’t configure them in Opera – I said Firebird has more configuration options
Since you can configure mouse gestures to do virtually any action at all in Opera, from hiding/showing parts of the UI to dumping the cache to navigation to window and mail handling, I’m at a loss as to what might constitute more configuration options than everything?
>>The latest incarnation of M2 does instant searches even with tens of thousands of mails – you don’t even have to wait for a second for all matching mails to appear. I urge you to try Opera 7.50 with the new M2, if nothing else, just to see what you might be missing
>Does it allow you to open messages in their own window instead of having to view them in the preview pane? That was my main gripe with it in 7.2.
Yes. In fact if you liked you could configure a mouse gesture to toggle whether messages appeared in their own windows or in the preview pane, and/or whether to view the message text or the header list.
At least in the last version I tried (whichever adware version that was in the FreeBSD 4.8-R package collection. It was a nightmare land of menus and options requiring what felt like a research project just to effect a minor change in preferences.
Has this changed?
Opera has always been nice and fast though, and it’s tremendous list of features have always seemed to work (as in I’ve never seen anything in Opera not work).
As a Linux user, I have no problem paying for good software. And I have done so with Opera. My only complaint is that Opera for Linux 7.23 has messed up CSS support on sites that do not use inline styles to set attributes.
“I tried this trick on CNN.com and, though it will correctly highlight the title of the main article, if I type in ‘,’ followed by ‘Technology,’ it fails to recognize the Technology link in the navigation bar. Still, this is useful, as I did not know about it
“
Actually it does work… if it can’t find the link it says not found. Just try it,
,techology<ENTER> and see what happens
The reason it’s not showing up I would guess is because of the blue background I’m guessing.
Since Opera version 7, Opera uses Qt on all platforms.
Fonts don’t look nice.
It isn’t as standard compliant as mozilla and chokes on many sites.
I am a gnome user.
It’s not open source.
“Fonts don’t look nice.”
Really? If you have that problem I’d say the issue is not with Opera.
“It isn’t as standard compliant as mozilla and chokes on many sites.”
I love it when people say this. It’s the most standards compliant (if not the only one) browser out there. All other browser have “quirks” or extras modes. They put in their own extensions to the standards and botch up some of the standards. Because a website doesn’t work in Opera but does in IE or Mozilla/NS doesn’t mean Opera isn’t compliant you know.
“I am a gnome user.”
What exactly does this have to do with your browser choice? What is it, brand loyalty so you’ll use Galeon or the new Gnome browser? Your choice however.
“It’s not open source.”
This is the only one I can’t find any argument with because that is your ideological choice.
…would be _VERY_ dull without Opera. It sure is the browser of my choice.
Don’t like default then try a skin. My fav is Gnome Orbit which I use at home and work. I also love the integrated email. Beats anything else I’ve used. Oh, BTW did I mention I run Orbit in Opera on Windows? Best theme out there, now if only I could get the rest of my Windows 2000 install looking the same????
I mostly use Mozilla on linux and windows but Opera is my second prefered. Quite an application to learn though. Plenty of nifty features everywhere !
I’ve asked Opera to support drag and drop of an URL since Opera 6.0… and they basically gave me their arrogant “we know what Opera needs better than the user” answer. With 7.50, I see they still have their head stuck in the sand.
IE supports DnD URLs
Mozilla supports DnD URLs
Why not Opera?
You can drag and drop a URL from the address window of IE or Mozilla to Windows Explorer. This is great for putting your “bookmarks” into folders rather than keeping them in some crappy closed format.
Overall the Opera 7.50 UI is clunky compared to Mozilla. The people at Opera need to work on cohesiveness… the whole thing seems like it’s various ill-fitting parts that have been glued together.
The functionality in 7.50 is certainly impressive. All they need is a better UI and better platform integration.
Perhaps the 8.0 release will be the one that puts Opera over the top.
Page load/draw speed is poor compared to Mozilla.
There is no “close page” button.
There is no “new page” button.
Shift-F11 is certainly fun. But be careful not to use it on more than one window.
Window management… in general is broken in the beta.
Try making all your pages small and then tiling the pages. If you “tear off” one of these pages… then the window list shows some strange incomprehensible stuff.
Anyhow, until Opera decides to support DnD URLs, I’m not going to spend any more time with it.
joe
“Opera for Linux 7.23 has messed up CSS support”
Such as? Seems fine here.
ljp
“Since Opera version 7, Opera uses Qt on all platforms.”
No, it only uses it on Unix. Trust me on this, I know what I am talking about.
Frustrated Windows User, no need to resort to misinformation just because it doesn’t support DnD the way you would like it to.
Page loading speed is fine. Page drawing speed is fine. Both compared to Mozilla. Yes, actually there is a new page button, and there is a close page button. There are several ways to open and close pages as a matter of fact.
“Overall the Opera 7.50 UI is clunky compared to Mozilla. The people at Opera need to work on cohesiveness… the whole thing seems like it’s various ill-fitting parts that have been glued together.”
I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t make sense. If you find the UI in 7.5 to be clunky, then you must find Firebird to be clunky, right? Everyone seems to disagree with you on this, so it seems you are just looking for something – anything – to bash Opera on, even if it isn’t true.
Where? I’m using XFCE 4.0.2 and fonts look very nice with Opera.
See the image: http://img1.photobucket.com/albums/0903/RedPinguim/opera/opera_750p…
I’ve been using Opera for about three years now, I’ve even paid for version 6 and an upgrade to 7. It’s a pretty good little broswer.
Although I don’t use it as my “primary” broswer”. For that I prefer Mozilla.
But Opera has some great features and it’s smaller and faster than Mozilla. I love using Opera for searching. And the wand password manager is the best I’ve seen! In fact, I use Opera for all the sites I have to log into everyday. Just a ctrl+enter and I’m logged in! or if I have more than one account on that site, the box will pop up and let me pick which account I want to login with. I love it!
But as others have mentioned, I don’t understand why they’re including an IRC client with 7.5?? I really don’t see the need for it. And even if it doesn’t add to program bloat, it’s still taking up developer time and resoruces that could be spent on more important features and improvements.
I’ve downloaded and played around with the beta here, and I’m not impressed by it so far. Hopefully 7.5 final will be better!
For the longest time Opera has not posted downloads for suse 8.2 or 9.0. 8.2 has been out for at least 8 months. The static versions do not work either… I wish they would make the binaries because it is a great browser in terms of speed and resource utilization…
I think that everyone have a specific point-of-view, but if the IRC client doesn’t affect the overall performance then seems that is only one more good feature, no pain… Nobody need to use the IRC client if don’t like it…
I now have broadband so I don’t need it but when I only had dial-up I could really tell the difference in speed. The adds take up a lot of space. The price will be worth it to some. It is a nice clean browser (without the adds).