Opera Casts Off Legacy Code for Speed

Submitted by dave_sn 2002-08-21 Opera 56 Comments

Opera, the self-described “fastest browser on earth,” has decided to jettison its legacy code in favor of something a little faster. The Oslo, Norway-based company is on the verge of releasing a trial, or beta, version of Opera 7, which will resemble its predecessor only in superficial ways. The rendering engine–the heart of the browser, which interprets code pulled down from Web servers–has been rewritten from the ground up over the past 18 months.Our Take: In two years time, Opera has jumped 3 numbers in their versioning scheme. Especially the jump from version 4 to 5, was a marketing decision for the most part, in order to catch up with IE. This whole version jumping is not really important, but it doesn’t make them look good either… Especially in the eyes of other developers.

About The Author

Eugenia Loli

Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.

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56 Comments

2002-08-21 6:25 am

Anonymous
Since Opera is my favorite web browser, I hope to God that version 7 doesn’t suck. Basically, I just hope that it doesn’t come out “broken.” The developers should take their time and work out as much of the bugs as possible. It is time for Opera to go on a diet too. Lately, it has been getting more and more chunky with every release. Just make Opera lightweight, fast, and as compatible as possible…in that order, please.
2002-08-21 6:36 am

Anonymous
A new Opera release is always good news.. I’ll look forward to this.
2002-08-21 6:36 am

Anonymous
I don’t really see why changing version numbers quickly would lead to a lack respect from the developer community. If I chose to start a 10.0 and then increment .1 each time, I dont see how thats any less respectable than starting at 0.0.0 and working my way up for the right most digit. Some companies have even started appending things like ME and XP to designate versions. Basically what it seems is that version numbers are used to show what the newest release is, and give a chronological history of how the program has changed. While you can say maybe its not worth a whole new version number – thats a matter of opinion, however rather than using how important one think the update is its better to go by how that company weights individual numbers in their version scheme. As far as I have read, I have yet to see a versioning “standard” in the industry, but im wrong please correct me.
2002-08-21 6:41 am

Anonymous
There is no standard. It is just a commondity.

It is like saying that farting in front of other people is not really bad. And if you think of it, it is not really a “bad” thing, animals do it all the time. However, it is a commondity to not do it, as this way we comply with unwritten laws and other people won’t get surprised.

Same thing for versioning. 😉
2002-08-21 7:06 am

Anonymous
My dream come true, a leaner, meaner Opera! I switched to Netscape 4.7 while they were running the flashing and jiggling banners, but when they removed them I was so happy to come back to Opera, and I have resumed my usual custom of proclaiming how much more comfortable it is to surf with. I used to think aaaaiiiIEeeee 5.01 was the fastest, but Opera gets so many fewer pop-ups. Two issues though, Opera with Java won’t work on Java Arcade sites even though Netscape 4.7 *will*, and also Opera won’t work if you try to upload files to yahoo lists. If they really want to scrap something and start over, it should be the worthless Java support. But for now Opera is the best thing out for making older pc’s completely up to date internet-wise. It installs on pc’s that IE refuses to install on. On a cutting edge pc it must be awesome. If they trim down it’s size while making it faster it will be a welcome return to their original values. Opera used to fit on a single floppy I think.
2002-08-21 7:16 am

Anonymous
> I switched to Netscape 4.7 while they were running the flashing and jiggling banners

So, you mean that the idea of purchasing Opera in order to get rid of the ads never got into your mind? Wow…

> but when they removed them I was so happy to come back to Opera

They never removed them. Which means that you either cracked the software, or you actually decided to register it but you never realized it.
2002-08-21 7:18 am

Anonymous
maybe one day we’ll wake up and enough people will be using opera/mozilla/konq that the stupid and broken web sites (like yahoo) which aren’t w3 compliant will have re-written themselves?

its generally not the browser which is the speed bottleneck, its the web-site…
2002-08-21 7:40 am

Anonymous
Well, there’s a RFC for HTML 2.0, the last sane version…

If there’d just be a browser with some serious TeX-like line-breaking, hyphenation and general font display niceties. At least in Opera you’re just one click away from “scrap the designer, let’s override this with my personal style sheet”. I just wish this would be possible with Mozilla…
2002-08-21 8:04 am

Anonymous
turn off java

turn off javascript

turn off flash

turn off dhtml

suddenly the web is speedy

i second mr dingler — html after 2.0 is pretty worthless

?
2002-08-21 8:32 am

Anonymous
Opera 7.0 would be buggy and crash a lot. It is fated. But subsequent releases means better stablity. Thank god for the rewrite, because I have been playing with the idea of moving to Mozilla or Galeon..

I don’t really see why changing version numbers quickly would lead to a lack respect from the developer community.

It is marketing, my friend, marketing. Solaris 9 for example is 5.9, not 9.0. Windows XP is 5.1, not 6.0. (Longhorn would be 6.0). There are people who don’t respect versions, like Mandrake and other Linux companies, but it doesn’t mean the rest don’t. They sell it to the user under a marketing version, not the real version. Would anyone buy XP if it was advertised as 5.1? No, they would demand at least an upgrade price…

Opera 7.0 on the other hand is a huge upgrade to Opera 6.x.

My dream come true, a leaner, meaner Opera! I switched to Netscape 4.7 while they were running the flashing and jiggling banners, but when they removed them I was so happy to come back to Opera

Then stick to Netscape 4.7 because the flashy jiggly banners are sticking there till you pay $40.

maybe one day we’ll wake up and enough people will be using opera/mozilla/konq that the stupid and broken web sites (like yahoo) which aren’t w3 compliant will have re-written themselves?

Yahoo works fine on Mozilla, not on CSS. Never used Konqueror for it. Do you have proove that it isn’t W3C compliant, or that Konq/Opera doesn’t have support for the standard they are using? Noooooo.
2002-08-21 8:36 am

Anonymous
Opera is definately my favourite browser (outside of OS X)

There are just a few things missing in Opera that it definately needs (these are current OmniWeb features as well):

* Intelligent popup killer. That is to say, popups are allowed when opened by you clicking a link, but not otherwise. As is you have to hit F12, click Accept pop-up windows, open the popup window, hit F12 again, and then click Refuse pop-up windows. It’s just a little annoying.

* Adblock. OmniWeb has fairly extensive adblock, including code which detects common ad image sizes as well as an editable list of addresses which appear to be sources of ads.

Of course, that’s not to say that OmniWeb isn’t missing about 20 features Opera has. Opera is just missing these two and they’re somewhat annoying.
2002-08-21 9:12 am

Anonymous
More and more people are using Opera now, it’s just a shame that the average Joe Bloggs isn’t aware of it as an alternative to IE/Netscape.

It’s speed on a dialup is incredible compared to other browsers, and the rendering is so much more efficient (visibly anyway) than IE on my XP machine.

In response to the flashy ads – I’m glad they took those out and replaced them with static images, they were v annoying and not the most pleasant thing to watch as you were browsing your favourite site

Also – take note of Opera’s lack of many security vulnerabilities, and when there is one it’s patched within a couple of days and a new version is available to their users. Excellent work guys.

The version number thing is a marketing issue, however it is also used as a pseudo-version control – look at the move from v4 to v5, a huge difference. v5 to v6 wasn’t quite as necessary – a change to the default buttons/skin and a few other things. I’d say the current v6.05 is probably more v5.8

However, v6 to v7 is exciting and I can’t wait for the betas to start appearing….I hope its not as buggy as a usual .0 software release, I really want to start raving about Opera in all the forums

Now all we need is built in ways of changing the search engines other than manually editing the ini file/using third party software…..oh, and the whole javascript popup thing – “but I wanted that window to open Opera….”

Completely contradicting myself, I think O.S need to concentrate on the browser/rendering engine rather than any more features. I don’t use the email client aspect (does anyone?) and the newsgroup client is good for quick access to news items.

Come on Opera, give us v7 beta……
2002-08-21 9:13 am

Anonymous
I prefer to think that Solaris 9 is really 2.9

It’s SunOS 5.9, but (according to Sun) that’s the kernel of the OS.

(Much like RH7 runs Linux Kernel 2.4[?]).

The Solaris version systems have tended to get themselves caught up a bit, but I’ve never thought they were problematic.

The move from SunOS to Solaris was a significant change in direction for Sun, and warranted a new name.

The dropping of the “2.” just made sense, because it had been “2.x” for so long, that the “2.” no longer made sense.

MudOS ( http://www.mudos.org ) did much the same thing when it moved from 0.9.19 to 20.0 (or something similar).
2002-08-21 9:18 am

Anonymous
Initially 2 people were working on the rewrite (ZS- Refactoring), and now all 60 developers are working on the new code base… I wonder if Scott Barta is one of the 60.
2002-08-21 9:38 am

Anonymous
> I don’t use the email client aspect (does anyone?)

Yes, I do. It’s just fast, has all the features I need, and is great in shortcuts keys.

And since I have loaded Opera (nearly) all the time, just press Ctrl-E and there is a new message without any waiting time.
2002-08-21 9:42 am

Anonymous
Bascule: There are just a few things missing in Opera that it definately needs (these are current OmniWeb features as well):

I think you better email Opera about this. v7’s feature set may be already decided, but features following it aren’t. They most probably aren’t checking sites like these… :-p.

tpv: I prefer to think that Solaris 9 is really 2.9

It’s SunOS 5.9, but (according to Sun) that’s the kernel of the OS.

Sorry, I confused the both.

tpv: The dropping of the “2.” just made sense, because it had been “2.x” for so long, that the “2.” no longer made sense.

This is simply because they can’t go to 3.x. That’s because there isn’t any significant change. But the main reason was that they wanted to charge for it more….

tpv: MudOS ( http://www.mudos.org ) did much the same thing when it moved from 0.9.19 to 20.0 (or something similar).

If 0.1 was stable, I would agree with the move. But if it wasn’t, it is misleading. Besides, it seems the project is dead…
2002-08-21 10:28 am

Anonymous
For version 5 and up, Opera rewrote their GUI using C++ and Qt, which has made ports from Windows to Linux/X11 and Embedded Linux fairly easy.

However, as I understand it, the core HTML rendering engine has remained a direct descendant of the original Opera 1 rendering engine, implemented in pure C and now embedded within the Qt GUI. This was never written to be particularly portable (although it has been hacked to work on all sorts of devices), and I would imagine that as it has become more complicated, it has become more and more of a nightmare to maintain and extend. C gets very ugly very quickly when trying to implement something as complicated as the DOM.

So, I suspect that the rewrite of the HTML rendering engine will be a rewrite in C++ and Qt. They already use this for their GUI, so it seems silly not to. They get easier maintenance, faster development, built-in bi-di language support, and portability to any platforms Trolltech choose to port to.

Also, they have no doubt seen how well the KHTML rendering engine used in Konqueror works, also written in C++/Qt (clue: it is walloping Opera 6 in standards-compliance, despite it being written by people as a spare-time project). One of the KHTML developers works for Trolltech, and Trolltech share a building in Oslo with Opera, so it would be difficult to miss. It sounds like there might be some consulting fees heading his way right now…
2002-08-21 10:35 am

Anonymous
Does this mean there wil be a version 7 for the Mac? While version 6 was the greatest browser for Windows, version 5 for Mac was just plain bad. From what I heard, Opera _was_ working on v6 for Mac with full speed as the main goal. Maybe they just decided to wait and then make a jump directly from v5 to v7.

On the other hand, it’ll have to be quite good for me to give up iCab
2002-08-21 10:57 am

Anonymous
I use opera for everything. The email-client has improved in later versions, and is now good enough for me. You’ll just have to learn to browse the list of messages with ‘u’ and ‘j’ and you can read lots of mail without using the mouse. One problem is decoding of multipart messages — when people sign their messages with gnupg and the signature and the message and signature aren’t integral, then the message-viewer will show the two parts as two attachments, which is irritating.

I paid an upgrade from v4 to v6 and I really hope I’ll get the next version for free, or a really low upgrade price.

However, if I continue to pay for opera or go to a mozilla/gecho-based browser all depends on if opera are going to go back to adding features again.

We need IMAP, better popup-killing and better support for user-css. Today you can only have one user css file configured (available at ctrl+g) — this must be extended to be really useful. Basically, all features should be configurable on a global AND site basis.

gnupg-integration in the mailclient would be very nice too, with automatic validation of signatures, etc.

Opera Software needs to keep up with the features, or there’ll be no reason (for me) to pay a premium for their browser.
2002-08-21 11:37 am

Anonymous
The new version numbres are IMHO not only for “looking good”, but for getting new registration fees. When the version jumped from 5 to 6, the update was free for people who registered Opera 5. Opera 4 useres had tp pay again (a lower special update price) or accept the ad banner.
2002-08-21 11:37 am

Anonymous
I think all of the features people are discussing are great ideas, but I hope these don’t come until further down the line i.e. some time after the .0 release.

More bloat = less speed
2002-08-21 11:59 am

Anonymous
Then stick to Netscape 4.7 because the flashy jiggly banners are sticking there till you pay $40.

A lot of people seem to be really turned off by the $40 price tag, and think it should be free. I think Opera is $40 better – maybe not a whole lot better – but it’s the overall speed and the experience. Mozilla renders beautifully, but is sluggish in comparison. If I’m using a dialup, or have an older PC, its worth $40 dollars for one of my most used apps.

It seems inevitable that it will be a couple of versions past 7.0 to get most of the more horrible bugs, but perhaps the results of the rewrite will be worth the wait and inconvenience – it remains to be seen.

As far as the Opera MDI/vs.Mozilla tabbed browsing goes, I still prefer the Opera MDI – as far as I know you can’t save all the tabbed windows when you exit with Mozilla. Being able to start the browser with a dozen pages you look at regularly is for me one of the best conveniences – it takes a while for them to all finish loading, but you can do something else for that time. There’s just so much less clicking involved.
2002-08-21 12:42 pm

Anonymous
I guess aside from tabs I think speed is more important than features. Speed is one of the reasons I like Opera more than Mozilla. The other browser I sometimes use is K-Meloen, it’s a perfect example of what can be done with the Gecko rendering engine but without the bloat that Mozilla adds. The home page it K-Meleon is http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net
2002-08-21 12:54 pm

Anonymous
I’ve seen more than one comment from people who seem to like both Opera and Mozilla, but Mozilla is slow. I know its a pain, but try recompiling Mozilla. You can significantly increase the speed by compiling for your specific machine.
2002-08-21 2:05 pm

Anonymous
Jim: I guess aside from tabs I think speed is more important than features. Speed is one of the reasons I like Opera more than Mozilla. The other browser I sometimes use is K-Meloen, it’s a perfect example of what can be done with the Gecko rendering engine but without the bloat that Mozilla adds. The home page it K-Meleon is

2002-08-21 2:24 pm

Anonymous
“K-Meleon is pretty dead. If they are not having a active public appearance, they are doing an awfull good job at that.”

Well, I am not quite sure what the sentence above means, but if you are interested in K-Meleon, you may like to know that version 0.7 is on the horizon which will add tabbed browsing, importing of opera hotlists, etc…

http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article2396.html

2002-08-21 2:39 pm

Anonymous
I think K-Meleon was started by Christophe Thibault of NullSoft and all but died when he left the project. There is slow progress still being done on the 0.7 release. I think the last beta was 0.65 build 431.

2002-08-21 3:10 pm

Anonymous
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-954561.html?tag=dd.ne.dht.nl-sty.0

The company claims 1 million new installations per month.

—————

I wonder how many of these installations are due to people just downloading the new incremental 6 versions.

That said, IMO, Opera is the best browser overall. Too many time-saving features (mouse gestures, toggling images, auto reload frame, brilliant right-click menu items, download manager, easy 1-letter google searching, toggle user/author mode, true pop-up kill feature, customisability out the wazoo) for me to give it up. Mozilla is showing lots of promise though, and is a bargain considering the price

2002-08-21 5:22 pm

Anonymous
Wow, this just amazes me. What a colossal waste of time.

Rather then refining, and fixing, and cleaning up bugs, increasing stability, they take the core and START FROM SCRATCH!?!???

?Redo from start — to quote MS-BASIC

Haven’t they always claimed to have the faster rendering browser? “And now it’s even faster!”.

So, they have a 7.0 product with a 1.0 core.

Look at the About MS-Explorer and you’ll see that it STILL claims to be “Based on NCSA Mosaic”. That means that there is still code in there from Browser version .001.

While Opera put 1.5 to 3+ Man years on rewriting the rendering engine for a specification that is essentially very stable, Other Companies put that effort into advancing the product. And then you wonder why things like Opera “can’t keep up”.

All the effort in the 18 months that Opera put in to the new rendering engine, Moore’s Law would have done for them “for free”.

What a waste of money.

2002-08-21 5:51 pm

Anonymous
I’ve used Opera 4, 5, and 6 and I have to say that they all are fast, but they seem to be increasing lag behind Mozilla in standards support. I think that it would be nice to see better standards support rather than more and more speed. Some pages rendered worse in version 6 than in version 5. Also Opera needs to be better at rendering html not up to standards like mozilla’s quirks mode is. Improved Jscipt support would be good too. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Opera’s support for Jscript lags even MS IE’s which seems sad. While Opera has gotten larger since the 3.62 days the feature set is certainly larger than it was back than so while 3MB is a bit large I can’t imagine they will be able to get it back under a 2MB download without taking some things out. Opera 5 I recall added a flash plugin which adds 300K to the download, so not all of the extra size is code bloat. Compared to Mozilla or IE Opera is still quite lightweight. One thing I would like is if the install allowed you to not install the mail client, or chat client. I know they can be removed, but that was one reason Opera has gotten larger.

2002-08-21 6:02 pm

Anonymous
maybe they want an easier to port program that is also easier to add new features to than what is currently possible.

Moore’s Law applies to hardware as far as i know.

>>Look at the About MS-Explorer and you’ll see that it STILL claims to be “Based on NCSA Mosaic”. That means that there is still code in there from Browser version .001. <<

also realize how big a piece of crap IE is. its like the frankenstein of browsers. just right now i found another css bug that is extremely annoying and now i have to make my project harder just to make a work around. (was adding a background image to an hr element thru css if you want to know. works in opera and mozilla not IE)

>>While Opera put 1.5 to 3+ Man years on rewriting the rendering engine for a specification that is essentially very stable, Other Companies put that effort into advancing the product. And then you wonder why things like Opera “can’t keep up”. <<

i think its safe to say IE hasnt “kept up”

2002-08-21 6:09 pm

Anonymous
pretty decent but it doesnt respect css rules for nested div elements of around 3 layers deep. it just starts to ignore them. not fatal but can make pages look weird. i cant remember anything else i have run across.

2002-08-21 6:13 pm

Anonymous
IE can put a bg in an hr element but its not cascading correctly in the style sheet. bad ie bad. [spank] [spank]

2002-08-21 6:27 pm

Anonymous
Well, I can only hope that the rewrite is to make Opera easier for porting, because I mainly use BeOS for my e-mail and web-browsing. Mozilla is coming along for BeOS, but still a little lacking…

2002-08-21 6:31 pm

Anonymous
” Correct me if I’m wrong, but Opera’s support for Jscript lags even MS IE’s which seems sad.”

What is that supposed to mean? IE by no means has poor javascript support. I am sick of people bashing IE just because it is a MS product. IE is a damn good browser, and saying otherwise does not change this.

Oh and I hope you mean javascript when you say “Jscript”, because Jscript is just MS implementation of ECMA 262.

Now, back on topic I really like when companies do things like this. It is refreshing to see products released that are pretty much free of cruft and excess baggage. Other products that come to mind are Gobe Productive and of course, BeOS.

-G

2002-08-21 6:55 pm

Anonymous
Yes eugene that’s right, registering to get rid of the flashing ads never entered my mind. I pay out of respect, not out of coercion. You don’t even use Opera, you’re just miffed to see so many people pay for Opera when your precious sub-grade NetScrape is free. They made a business model where people could avoid paying by agreeing to view paid advertising. We accept those terms. Too bad people prefer Opera and Windows when crap like NutScrape and linux is free, but that’s the way it will always be.

2002-08-21 7:07 pm

Anonymous
So when does OperaOS come out??

2002-08-21 7:30 pm

Anonymous
> I am sick of people bashing IE just because it is a MS product. IE is a damn good browser, and saying otherwise does not change this.

Well said Gmlogo.

2002-08-21 8:00 pm

Anonymous
> I am sick of people bashing IE just because it is a MS product. IE is a damn good browser, and saying otherwise does not change this.

And also Ferrari is an excellent car, no doubt. But I can’t afford it and you, probably, can’t, too — or, at least, will have the common sense of not putting most of your money in a car because of looks. And if you think you can run at 300 Km/h then => haha.

To be completely true, soon I will be able to buy my own copy of Windows and I will buy it, mostly because of unavoidable future business needs. This does *not* mean I agree it’s correctly priced (here you can guess my opinion about the Ferrari, too).

The point is: I can buy a FIAT (just so nobody thinks I’m against Italians), which is an excellent car and a lot more reasonably priced.

OTOH, I like linux a lot and will remain a linux user, no doubt… still, there I am forced to use a Microsoft product — and I cannot justify this obligation on a legal or moral ground.

Now, if you want to be “simplistic” and just technical, yes, Ferrari and Windows XP — two “products” I didn’t test — are said to be excellent products.

Have a nice day.

2002-08-21 9:45 pm

Anonymous
“v5 to v6 wasn’t quite as necessary – a change to the default buttons/skin and a few other things. I’d say the current v6.05 is probably more v5.8”

Yeah, if your world knowledge is restrited with english-speaking countries only, there wasn’t big difference.

But for remaining 90% of Earth population difference was noticeable – they rewrote most of code in order to handle Unicode properly. And it resulted in perfect i18n support

2002-08-21 9:50 pm

Anonymous
“However, as I understand it, the core HTML rendering engine has remained a direct descendant of the original Opera 1 rendering engine”

No. Just rendering engine was rewritten between 3 and 4.

and overall Qt-ing seems also overestimation.

They developed special portability layer + platform-independent core since ~ 3.5.

2002-08-21 10:27 pm

Anonymous
if i want full features i use IE(in windoze) and mozilla in BeOS,I have never liked opera,don’t care for the general layout of it and it renders the worst looking pages of anything i have ever seen(especially in BeOS)who the hell needs all those built in bookmarks anyways?the only thing i did like about it was the ability to switch off the graphics if you are in a hurry

2002-08-21 11:03 pm

Anonymous
I think you better email Opera about this. v7’s feature set may be already decided, but features following it aren’t. They most probably aren’t checking sites like these… :-p.

I’ve already e-mailed Opera about it (as a paying customer) No replies, of course. I’m assuming it was simply deleted.

2002-08-21 11:35 pm

Anonymous
I hate to say it, but Opera needs to clean up that GUI, it is awful and disorganized!

It is a fast browser mostly, but I like Chimera the best and have slowly made Chimera my main browser for now, though the OmniGroup has plans of a whole new browser in the wake for early next year that is faster than OmniWeb 4.1!

2002-08-22 12:02 am

Anonymous
wtf is chimerea? and what platform(s) does it on?

2002-08-22 12:08 am

Anonymous
this little audrey kb is to small for my big sasquatchian fingers hehe but for less than $100 who cARES

2002-08-22 12:16 am

Anonymous
It is Mozilla for Mac, OSX only i think, but may run on OS9. So if you want to use it you need a mac, and need to bring along a real keyboard to uses with it.

2002-08-22 5:42 am

Anonymous
i’ll use opera when it has the features the free browsers have.

but it’s cache system and poor rendering actually Slows Me Down.

and no i don’t blame “evil corporate” MS for having “satanic noncompliant html, that forces webmasters to use it” for it’s messy browsing.

2002-08-22 7:16 am

Anonymous
“i’ll use opera when it has the features the free browsers have.

but it’s cache system and poor rendering actually Slows Me Down.

and no i don’t blame “evil corporate” MS for having “satanic noncompliant html, that forces webmasters to use it” for it’s messy browsing.”

You’re not fooling anyone. Have you ever even used Opera? From your post I doubt it. Calling Opera “messy” isn’t so much an opinion as it is a blatant lie.

2002-08-22 7:23 am

Anonymous
wtf is chimerea? and what platform(s) does it on?

Chimera is a very broken OmniWeb clone which uses Mozilla’s NGLayout rendering engine. It is devoid of all the features that make OmniWeb a good browser, yet still touted by open source advocates as the best browser for OS X.

2002-08-22 10:47 am

Anonymous
Lee Nooks: This does *not* mean I agree it’s correctly priced (here you can guess my opinion about the Ferrari, too).

Is not priced correctly? The only other people making money out of the desktop OS market is Apple, and their price is $125, only $75 less. Plus, Apple don’t make much money out of it, they make it off their hardware. They also could cut cost by using OSS software (BSD, for example), which isn’t available when Microsoft started developing NT.

Tell me ONE, just one company that made money out of selling an OS cheaper than Windows (and Mac OS). I bet you would say none (e.g. All desktop Linux distros don’t make money).

Bascule: I’ve already e-mailed Opera about it (as a paying customer) No replies, of course. I’m assuming it was simply deleted.

Bah, Opera never replies, unless you are emailing to tell them about a huge security flaw in Opera that no one else knows. Bad company PR if you ask me.

CattBeMac: I hate to say it, but Opera needs to clean up that GUI, it is awful and disorganized!

It is so in the free version because of the ad. The paid for version is much more organize. Plus, you could disable the toolbars you don’t need.

sasquatch666: wtf is chimerea? and what platform(s) does it on?

Mac OS X’s Galeon. It is Gecko with a Cocoa front end. For Mac OS X, obviously.

Brad: It is Mozilla for Mac, OSX only i think, but may run on OS9. So if you want to use it you need a mac, and need to bring along a real keyboard to uses with it.

It runs only on Mac OS X because it uses Cocoa.

chad… : i’ll use opera when it has the features the free browsers have.

And I’ll use free browsers one they have the features Opera have. And you probably didn’t read the article: the rendering engine is being rewritten. So, in other words, your only problem with Opera would be resolved.

Bascule: Chimera is a very broken OmniWeb clone which uses Mozilla’s NGLayout rendering engine. It is devoid of all the features that make OmniWeb a good browser

It is quite good for its age, and the fact that it is still an alpha stage app.

Bascule: yet still touted by open source advocates as the best browser for OS X.

Wrong, touted by CattBeMac as the best browser for OS X. :-). OSS advocates normally side Mozilla…. (did you know Brett Larson on Call For Help on tech TV uses Mozilla now?).

2002-08-22 12:57 pm

Anonymous
>>Bascule: Chimera is a very broken OmniWeb clone which uses Mozilla’s NGLayout rendering engine. It is devoid of all the features that make OmniWeb a good browser

It is quite good for its age, and the fact that it is still an alpha stage app.

Bascule: yet still touted by open source advocates as the best browser for OS X.

Wrong, touted by CattBeMac as the best browser for OS X. :-)<<

Helk yeah… me and a few other Mac freaks like to think so 🙂

2002-08-22 1:04 pm

Anonymous
>>wtf is chimerea? and what platform(s) does it on?<,

Chimera is an open source spin off of Mozilla (Mac OS Fizzilla) and instead of using Mozilla’s own UI layer ‘XUL’ it is using the native Cocoa UI layer to make it more OS X friendly and stable!

And as the guys mocking me above, yes in my opinion and a lot of other Mac users opinion, it’s the best web browser for Mac OS X thus far (for it’s youthfulness), though I am more of an OmniWeb advocate myself and I am typing this in OmniWeb (4.1)!

2002-08-22 8:50 pm

Anonymous
Opera Interface is very tunable. You can remove or move buttons, add new buttons, replace or remove toolbars, change buttons sets and appearance etc etc.

And rendering is also very fine.

Maybe your opinion about rendering is based on Opera 2.* or 3.* experience.

2002-08-22 11:04 pm

Anonymous
yes i did use opera, used it a lot off and on.

but it renders many pages both slowly and poorly. mozilla does a much better job.

it also has many more options for script protections, more autocomplete features, and is FREE. there’s not one feature i miss from leaving opera. not to mention blocking image servers can eliminate the need for any 3rd party filtering application.

and how do you know it’s rewrite will be any better? you said it’s been solved when it’s Not Even Released.

another moron… probably since i complimented IE’s rendering.

2002-08-23 12:45 am

Anonymous
“yes i did use opera, used it a lot off and on.

but it renders many pages both slowly and poorly. ”

You know what? You’re just plain *LIEING* and passing it off as an “opinion” or maybe even a “fact”. Legions of Opera users know you’re confabulating. Try this experiment: Load Opera and some other browser and after they’ve both loaded, time how ling it takes to load a pic from off of your own desktop. Opera is clearly faster. Then try it with a web page. Other than drek like Hotmail.com they just plain look better under Opera. Quit making up your own “facts”.