eWeek reviews Opera 9, and is full of praise: “It’s a good bet that if you want to see the features that other Web browsers will be adding in a year or two, you should download Opera 9, which was released on June 20. The free Opera 9 is available in Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD and Mac OS X versions. In our tests, we found Opera 9 to be one of the best Web browsing tools we’ve used in a long time, which is why we are giving Opera 9 an eWEEK Labs Analyst’s Choice award.” They have a set of screenshots as well.
Desent review, better then ZDNet’s one which got something wrong saying there was no history on the back button. If you dont know you hold down the back button and your previous pages come up.
Seems the linux version has tray intergration unlike Windows. I find that the widgets have to dark blue outline around them, anyone else get this in the Linux version?
Edited 2006-06-22 22:08
Or you can put a back button with the dropdown arrow by using the “customize” feature.
I don’t why Opera does’t use the drop-down button by default.
[i]I don’t why Opera does’t use the drop-down button by default.[i] (About back/forward buttons)
Because they’re totally useless?
The Tray Integration is also present on windows.
Ctrl + H
What opera needs, is more press.
I think that is the reason for firefox’s success, otherwise it would have been just another good browser.
I don’t think the last version of opera was ready for the big time. It was a great browser, but on Linux at least, it crashed fairly frequently.
In the same light though, neither is firefox’s extensions feature as a large number of extensions make firefox crash often.
I really like this Opera though. I’m especially fond of the fact I figured out how to set the render delay.
Yeah, I had a lot of problems with it crashing in linux too. Which made me sad.
I do some work with tomcat, and has anyone else noticed that where you used to be able to just type:
devel:8080
and it would just go there it no longer does? It works fine, until you have a port number in there. That’s going to be annoying for me….
What opera needs, is more press.
I think that is the reason for firefox’s success, otherwise it would have been just another good browser.
Definitely. What’s the single biggest difference between FireFox and the Mozilla suite before the focus on FireFox? Marketing. FireFox has had all sorts of marketing campaigns to drive it. The old Mozilla download page was full of warnings “This is a development product. Don’t use it unless you know what you’re doing! We’re not responsible if it erases your hard disk!”
That said, I haven’t tried Opera 9 yet, but 8’s window management drove me crazy. It was either all tabs or no tabs. I want to mix between the two, and even more importantly, I want things like History and Bookmark Management in seperate windows, not in tabs/sidebars (FireFox needs to learn that too).
I don’t quite understand what you mean by it’s window management not letting you do what you state? e.g. You just hit ctrl-N for a new window, and there you have a new window in this new window you can then hit ctrl-alt-H and suddenly that window is your History, and you can go back to you original window and keep it as just websites? It’s been like that since 8, and I’m pretty sure I remember 7 also allowing you to do that.
What opera needs, is more press.
I think that is the reason for firefox’s success, otherwise it would have been just another good browser.
Interesting. Mozilla and now Firefox were free, Opera was not, until recently. One was a group and a foundation, the other was a company. One has just recently started marketing, the other has been doing it for years. And now you say Firefox is more popular than Opera because of the marketing ? I call BS. First people say FOSS needs better marketing, then if it has, they start saying oh it’s only popular because of the marketing. Bah, get lost.
I don’t have anything against Opera, I like it and I use it for many years now, although mostly just for testing this’n’that. It’s a decent browser, with many features, and it’s free. In some ways it’s better than Firefox. Ok, so what ? We should just be happy that we have at least two really good free browsers (although I still prefer Konqueror for most of the things). Leave that oh-it’s-the-marketing sh*t for the bad guys.
Uh, actually Opera hasn’t really done that much Marketing. Firefox had things like the full page NYT ad and viral marketing with things like spreadfirefox.com.
The dark blue borders around the widgets are due to a lack of transparency. I’m not sure if there is a fix, but having a transparency enabled xorg may help.
@ma_d
Opera 8.00’s linux build had flaws that caused frequent crashes, and 8.01 needed glibc to be built with Native POSIX Threads Library, but after that in general Opera never had any stability problems on linux.
And with 9.00, Opera really has improved. My biggest joys are ctrl^t for a new tab instead ctrl^n, and the fact that Opera now has adblocking built in. That, and it doesn’t have the memory issues that Firefox has. Here’s to hoping that Opera can take the chunk of the browser pie that it really deserves.
My biggest joys are ctrl^t for a new tab instead ctrl^n, and the fact that Opera now has adblocking built in.
That’s my biggest peeve with the new one. I’m so used to ctrl n. However, if you go to preferences -> advanced tab -> shortcuts, and edit your keyboard shortcuts, you’ve always been able to change it to whatever you want.
I think that’s one of the things that I enjoy the most. Even the smallest things you think you’d never be able to change are easy to configure to your preferences with opera.
Also, they’ve always had ad blocking. I just think that they’ve given it a bit of a tuneup this time around.
>That, and it doesn’t have the memory issues that Firefox has.
Agreed, feeling annoyed with FF which again went very slow, I’ve tried Opera9 and it’s much better: I think I’m going to switch.
There are annoying issue when you go from FF to Opera: the tab navigation (Alt+page up/down instead of ctrl) plus the way it closes tab (I’ve updated the wikipedia entry ‘Criticisms of Opera’ on it, the solution given didn’t work), I didn’t find how to make it open tab with Ctrl+left click though but that’s not a big problem..
The only thing I don’t like so much about Opera is that is uses QT. Does anybody know if it will be ever ported to GTK? Is it possible/easy to do that?
I dont think so. Opera uses QT on all platforms not only Linux, and frankly I see no reason for them to double their work by coding in GTK. Opera performs great on Gnome and KDE and what would be the benefit of GTK anyway, apart from being under GPL?
Edited 2006-06-22 22:38
GNOME integration, I guess. Furthermore, there is a QT theme for GTK, but not the opposite. That said, a GTK port would probably require an important rewrite.
Anyway, it’s not like there aren’t any GTK alternative. Firefox uses GTK on *nix via XUL, yet I don’t hear any complain…
QT can integrate into GNOME pretty well, if the developers make an effort – look at Google Earth. You just can’t use the KDE libraries, and obviously Opera doesn’t do that.
Will it be rewritten in GTK? No. Right now, Opera has 1 toolkit that is being used on all platforms. If they switched to GTK, which wouldn’t be easy to begin with, they’d probably need to have 3 seperate toolkits. 1 for windows, 1 for linux, and 1 for Macs. Given their limited resources, I think they’d just have to drop all but 1 platform if they did that.
…and what would be the benefit of GTK anyway, apart from being under GPL?
It wouldn’t have to be under the GPL. GTK is LGPL. Therefore, it could be under any license. However, I agree with you and others that there is little point in Opera being written with a different toolkit. As long as you can afford Qt (because you don’t (commercial), can’t (GPL incompatability), or won’t (don’t like GPL or other reason) GPL your software), it’s a great library.
* duplicate post – blasted browser *
Edited 2006-06-24 20:22
“The only thing I don’t like so much about Opera is that is uses QT. Does anybody know if it will be ever ported to GTK? Is it possible/easy to do that?”
Why?
GTK is pretty good, but for productivity and features QT has it beat, hands down.
Anyway, Opera is outstanding. It has gradually become my favorite browser.
– Opera is the fastest of all browsers I’ve used (including IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Konqueror, and Epiphany), both in terms loading the program itself, and the spead of rendering.
– Opera is the most full featured of all browsers, as well as being the best at implementing the features.
– Opera is very nice looking, and is very customizable.
– Opera does all plugins very well and very easily (and supported out of the box).
– Opera is very stable and bug free.
In short, Opera is damn fine software. It is a shining example of software done right.
Seems to me like writing Opera in gtk would just be a waste of money. Although it would show off how well their software is setup to be toolkit independent it’d still be a giant waste of money.
What does Gtk run on that QT doesn’t? Nothing.
Considering that GTK+ is written in C with custom gObject classes (not really classes as C does not support Objects ) and Qt is C++ and heavilly relying on object oriented design … it would be a hell of an effort to port any Qt application to GTK+. I don’t know of any tool that allows for easy porting between the 2 so porting would basically mean rewriting the whole UI and this take a very very long time and a lot of money that Opera would never spend. Plus I don’t see what the deal is anyway. You have skins for Opera that your mimic the gtk+ look.
There is a lot more to integration than just the look of an application.
This is where I hope freedesktop.org will enter the picture.
Until then, one can always choose the Raleigh GTK2-theme, and the Windows QT-theme, and let that be. Or use Clearlooks for the GTK-apps (even better if colors are modified to fit QT-themes), and Plastique (for QT4)/Polymer (for QT3) for the QT-apps.
Please DON’T port it to GTK
If you install the tango theme and change the colour in kcontrol to match the tango theme colour, then you cannot tell it’s a QT app.
Actually, I think Opera does not use Qt on Windows, I’m not sure about OS X version.
I believe you are right. They actually use their own toolkit but use Qt for various things on nix platforms such as menus. But most of the app is their own toolkit still.
believe you are right. They actually use their own toolkit but use Qt for various things on nix platforms such as menus. But most of the app is their own toolkit still.
Yeah, they moved to their own toolkit for better skinning and theme support but Qt is still there for dialogs, menus, main window, drawing etc.
On a side note, for anyone running it in KDE and using the version for shared-qt, change your launcher to start it with opera –style default and it will better integrate with your KDE theme.
Although the website changes bother me – the ‘art {sexual preference slur deleted}’ pictures of ‘more than happy’ people reminiscent of Apple and Ubunutu’s marketing angle with an annoying splash screen before getting to the website is just a little too touchy feely for ‘old George’… Especially with the stupid ‘your choice’ people… When did Opera move to San Francisco?
Not to mention that it defaults to the 6.2 meg international download, and you have to go to http://www.opera.com/downloads to find the 4.6 meg ‘US English’ only version – not a big deal when on broadband, but for dailup users it’s a world of difference that I’ve already had many of my users complain about not being able to find.
Product GOOD. Website changes BAD.
I don’t have anything to add to what you said, but I did notice what appears to be an OSNews piece of censorship in your post and I don’t see any way in my preferences to turn that feature off. I think that is retarded.
I enjoy the freedom to speak and let others do the same. Yes, sometimes I get offended and I’m sure I have offended others, but it is worth the price of an occasional offense to be able to express ones views and feeling in any way one sees fit.
I think it is unfortunate that OSNews thinks it needs to be the “Feeling Police” and make sure that none of us ever get offended or use words that the O.F.P deems unfit.
Of course, it is their site and they are welcome to do whatever they’d like. I just wanted to point out that I think it is a shallow and intellectually dishonest thing to do.
I don’t have anything to add to what you said, but I did notice what appears to be an OSNews piece of censorship in your post and I don’t see any way in my preferences to turn that feature off. I think that is {mental disability slur deleted}.
>> I don’t have anything to add to what you said, but I did notice what appears to be an OSNews piece of censorship in your post and I don’t see any way in my preferences to turn that feature off. I think that is retarded.
I enjoy the freedom to speak and let others do the same. Yes, sometimes I get offended and I’m sure I have offended others, but it is worth the price of an occasional offense to be able to express ones views and feeling in any way one sees fit.
Actually, I self censored – It’s actually a good habit to get into. I know some people get thier panties in a twist over words like fag, so I elected not to use it. Words like Retard and Niggling also fall into the category of being better to imply than actually say. I’ve come to prefer the term ‘special’… in the same way some olympics are special.
Even when you use the word retard PROPERLY you can piss people off… Kind of like when the wife of the owner at a local hobby store tried to kick me out when I said “Ooh look, they’ve got retards.” – I was refering to the bombs on the bottom of a F-4G Phantom II model kit. Thankfully her hubby, the owner was a ‘nam vet, and knew what retarded bombs are.
Absolutely great browser; seems significantly faster than firefox, but I can’t trade browsers because I’d lose all my useful plugins(I’m hopelessly addicted to stumbleupon, in particular)
It’s not faster than firefox! and it never was.I dont know why people keep claiming that and have no numbers to back it up.
Try http://www.numion.com/Stopwatch/ and then lets talk. My results for http://www.osnews.com : Firefox1,5= 5,272 Opera9=8,570. Its allways been like that – Opera has allways been substantial slower than firefox. I did the same tests 6 months ago and the results where similar. This is on Linux, maybe someone can verify the results on Windows.
it is and always was faster then firefox.
the factors, that may influence your tests:
– the use of caching [did you try it on firefox before?]
– ad blocking [does the firefox show you the ad on top of osnews.com?]
– different ads loaded
i’ve did a quick test with your site
os: winxp pro sp2
page used: http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/
constant cpu load: 30%
not pre-cached
opera9 [build 8501]: 1.652
firefox 1.5.0.4. : 2.384
ie 6 [6.0.2900] : 3.985
btw. my take: benchmarks mean nothing, take what works best for you
p.s.
after you try this pages several times [cached], the result will be almost everytime different
It’s not faster than firefox! and it never was.I dont know why people keep claiming that and have no numbers to back it up.
You should take a look here: http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
Here: http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2005/02/javascript-benchmark-b…
Or actually, Opera seems to be fastest in most if not all tests. What a surprise.
>I dont know why people keep claiming that and have no numbers to back it up.
Simply because it feels faster?
I’ve tried Opera this afternoon after being annoyed with FF slowness (with no extension present) and I’m switching to Opera, it’s much faster: I feel the difference, no need of numbers..
Congrats Opera, you even beat FireFox to rendering Acid2 correctly
It’s a great browser and I’m using it more and more, but my biggest complaint is the bookmarks system. Why can’t you right click bookmarks to rename or delete them? You have to open the “bookmark manager” to do anything. No right click? I feel like I’ve gone back in time to using Windows 95 (remember when you couldn’t right click in the start menu?)
I’ve no trouble right-clicking bookmarks! All the options are there
Really? Not working for me, weird.
I think it’s because of your claws. The bookmarks are afraid of being clipped
I haven’t tried v9 yet, but in v8, you could right click on bookmarks on the toolbars, but NOT on the dropdown menu as you can in Firefox.
Drop-down menu? Huh?
You mean the bookmark-menu? It’s just a normal menu. A dropdown-menu is a combobox.
Personally I prefer to use the bookmark manager.
You mean the bookmark-menu? It’s just a normal menu. A dropdown-menu is a combobox.
Yes, I mean the bookmark menu. You can right click on the bookmark toolbar, but not bookmarks on menu (maybe they changed this in Opera 9). The bookmark manager is good most of the time, but when you want to make a quick change (such as renaming one), the bookmark manager is a pain in the ass.
lol, it took me a few seconds to figure out what you were talking about.
You have browser that uses gtk so get your hands off Opera.
What’s wrong with QT? Ask the GTK/GNOME developers to create something similar like KDE has done for better integration of GTK apps, or are you all just admitting that KDE IS the better Desktop, because everything fits in so nicely even if it isn’t written to fit in?
Have you ever seen any KDE/QT lover writing stuff about porting Firefox/thunderbird/mozilla to QT (there is a gpl version you know)? No, so if you have some critics on it fine, but complaining that it uses a better toolkit than your favorite one actually isn’t appropriate and is asking for flamewars (which I’m feeding I know, just had to get it of my chest).
Coming from a konq. user, here are my results for osnews.com
konq: 3.333
FF: 2.214
Opera: 4.125
Damn, my hypothesis was that konq would be the quickest =/
Firefox is nice…but Opera is great. I’ve been an Opera fan for a long time–but the 8.X series caused problems for me (couldn’t install on Linux, for one) and I went to Firefox. With Opera 9, I am back.
Well done.
That said, I haven’t tried Opera 9 yet, but 8’s window management drove me crazy. It was either all tabs or no tabs. I want to mix between the two, and even more importantly, I want things like History and Bookmark Management in seperate windows, not in tabs/sidebars (FireFox needs to learn that too).
Window management hasn’t really changed much in Opera 9 (a very good thing in my opinion as Opera’s window management is the main reason I use it), so if you don’t like 8 then you probably aren’t going to like 9.
Opera’s interface is highly customisable, you might be able to tweak it to meet your preference. I don’t really understand what you mean by a “mix between the two”, perhaps you could explain exactly what you want.
You can open multiple windows in Opera, and you can use that to display the History and Bookmark managers in separate windows. You can also use Opera as an MDI application, you don’t have to maximise all the pages in the browser window like you do in a standard tabbed browser. Personally I find its window management much more powerful and flexible using MDI and the Window Panel rather than tabs. That way you can have the bookmarks and history management windows visible alongside other “tabs” while still containing them within one window.
I haven’t been able to have the tabs just above the browser window. The forward/backward/addressbar always needs to be under the tabs??
I haven’t been able to have the tabs just above the browser window. The forward/backward/addressbar always needs to be under the tabs??
That’s because the buttons and addressbar are attached to each individual page/tab, while the tabs are attached to the top of the main browser window. It’s configured like that so that the addressbar and buttons are displayed on each page/tab if you use it as an MDI app without all pages/tabs maximised.
If you want a single global toolbar above the tabs, right click on a toolbar and select Customize, turn on the Main bar, then drag the buttons and address bar to it.
Hey Dave_K, thanks for the tip! Will try. If I would decide to use Opera mail too, maybe I should use Hugin & Munin, so that global toolbar won’t show up in the mail view too..?
All these posts and no one mentions, the GREAT svgt 1.1 support. Probably the best 1.1 svg renderer available to the public. (The best is only in the mobile space)
Finally a good 1.1 browser with declarative animation support!
Great work Opera.
Hi I tried both public Opera 9 betas and I think in Beta2 there was (for want of a better description) a ‘floating’ Opera Widgets tab, which would sit over all windows even when Opera was minimized etc.
Can’t see this in the gold Opera 9. Is it hiding somewhere?
Otherwise Opera – once again you are the king of new tricks! Even IE7 is bigtime in catchup mode – and it’s not even out yet! Firefox which a very worthy browser could learn a few things from Opera!
If you close the browser with a some tabs open, they re-appear when you reload it. Brilliant usability design! In Firefox I have often killed the process to achieve the same effect (with SessionSaver).
Opera has had this feature since version 6 I believe.
You’d be amazed at how much Opera has influenced browser design over the years…
Not sure why Opera does this but. If you set your home page to http://www.google.com/ig and save your password. When you start your browser you get an error from Google
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.
Then you type in a security code to proceed.
Like I said not sure why it does that, Firefox doesn’t. (happens on Solaris as well as Linux, haven’t tried Windows.)
Great browser otherwise. Nothing runs faster on Sun than Opera.
Edited 2006-06-23 14:53
“Opera is very stable and bug free.”
Well, they haven’t solved the Styles bug since the beginning. You cannot use the author’s Page Style Sheet with your fonts/links/background colors in user mode or author mode.
FF does this easily. Also dialog boxes have a white bg and black fg, not in FF. But as always with the Opera devs, ‘if it ain’t invented here, we don’t use it’. So, i use both, FF for newsgroups and opera 9 for navigation.
It’s pity FF is such a memory hog and slower than baseball.
Yup, back to elinks.
I m not Opera’s fan but still I think Opera is the best browser if compared with Firefox and IE.
I have to say, after using Opera 9 for a little while, it’s far better than previous versions I’ve used (in my experience). I have only two big complaints so far:
1) I don’t like the fact that middle-clicking on the page recenters my cursor for scrolling.
2) The built-in content blocker is not nearly as easy to use as the AdBlock extension for FireFox.
Other than that, it’s a significant improvement over previous versions. For years I’ve hated Opera’s interface and using it. However, Opera 9 is really nice.
I use it on Linux and Windows…Gnome users, just use a gnome skin for opera! It fits in well enough, not a big deal. Remember you can change the color scheme to match if you click on Tools–>Appearance.
I’m sticking with opera 8 right now because 9 is a little buggy– specifically with scrollbar issues on some pages that used to work.
Edited 2006-06-25 01:30