Submitted by The first Beta of Opera 9.5 has been released. “Opera 9.5 adds Full Text History Search allowing you to access find pages you forgot to bookmark by simply typing just a few words into your toolbar! Opera also gives you the ability to Create Search shortcuts from any search field on the Web; and to Synchronize your Bookmarks, Speed Dial with any other Mac or PC computer, your cell phone, or the Opera-powered Nintendo Wii Internet Channel through My Opera.”
“Opera also gives you the ability to Create Search shortcuts from any search field on the Web”
This is not new. I have a few custom search patterns in my search field. For instance I have my domain name registrar listed there to search for domain name availability.
To add a search field, it’s easy, just right-click an input field on the web and click “Create Search”.
To be clear: It’s not new to Opera. It’s been there since 9.0 or 9.1 or something.
I think they should take this page down: http://www.operamail.com
Why? Who could resist 3 whole MB of storage space. 😉
I’ve been pounding on Opera’s door to fix a simple DOM/javascript bug since version 8.5
Since than they’ve added all kinds of features to the browser, from a jet engine to a kitchen sink, but this annoying little bug remains
>> I’ve been pounding on Opera’s door to fix a
>> simple DOM/javascript bug since version 8.5
What bug? I’d be interested to hear that since Presto tends to be more compliant that Gecko by a factor of ten.
The only ‘major’ bug I can think of is on the CSS side – the rendering error that occurs putting position:absolute elements inside display:inline elements… and anything doing that can hardly be called ‘simple’. (and was fixed in 9.5 by all appearances)
DOM/js side I’ve found nothing amiss – unless you are trying to ice-skate uphill on stuff that doesn’t work in IE or Safari either or using Gecko specific calls.
Of course, if you are a .js fan, Kestrel’s performance in that arena should be a real joy being it’s possibly the fastest implementation out there.
http://nontroppo.org/timer/kestrel_tests/
“I’ve been pounding on Opera’s door to fix a simple DOM/javascript bug since version 8.5”
Same for me. In KDE, Opera’s menu icon (File | Edit | View) have a grey background instead of displaying the native Opera background. Looks ugly. I have reported it to the Opera developers 3-4 times in their bug-reporting page, always with screenshots but no feedback and no fixes. It’s been there for almost two years now. Has anyone had any feedback at all from the Opera developers after reporting a bug?
Yes, but they won’t email you personally. Sometimes bugs get confirmed in the forums by devs, sometimes they’ll clearly state that they are working on specific problems, but usually the changelog is where you find out what’s actually been fixed.
just use the static package it will do the trick for you.
Now works with the mplayerplug-in. Great!
“Now works with the mplayerplug-in. Great!”
Wow… Now, THIS is good news 🙂
I hope Opera is faster with Ajax now.
Now if they’ve done something about the rendering engine and it renders as nice as Firefox, I’m sold. I’l have to take a look.
As nice as? Eh, do you mean improve its standards compliancy or the speed at which it renders a page?
I’ll think you’ll find that Opera’s record on standards compliancy has always been high. Its CSS compliancy is higher than the Firefox’s. Performance has been up there too. (Forgive the vagueness and lack of references as I’m replying from what I have read from memory)
That’s pretty impressive. Now if they can fix the “written in qt” bug, I’d be all set.
Why not just use a QT theme that renders similarly to the GTK+ theme you use? Seriously.
Klearlooks looks pretty similar to clearlooks and the interface fonts can be changed in Opera.
You have non-Qt browser alternatives already, as long as you don’t mind quadrupling your resource useage.
In reality, Opera is as much a Qt app as Firefox is a Gtk app. They make superficial use of the toolkits, but rely heavily on their own custom interfaces.
Which, come to think of it, does make it all the more remarkable that Opera is such a small, efficient app. compared to other non-standard-toolkit browsers… :O
Edited 2007-10-26 02:49 UTC
I always wonder why more people don’t discover this incredible browser. Far more customizable than anything else out there.
Have you heard of konqueror?
“Have you heard of konqueror?”
I have, but…You know, Konqueror is…I don’t know, it’s not my cup of tea, it doesn’t work with so many sites. It’s not Konqueror’s fault, but this is the truth. Many features missing in Konqueror also (see above).
“Have you heard of konqueror?”
As it has been mentioned before, Konqueror does not have the same rendering abilities as Opera has which makes it a bit unusable for some web pages, or, to be more correct, sadly not all web pages are compatible to HTML standards.
Furthermore, using Konqueror involves installing and loading kdelibs et al. while Opera does not require KDE (or parts of, except Qt) to run.
Opera’s GUI design and – yes! – its keyboard support are great. And I can’t imagine how I could live without mouse gestures. =^_^=
I’m using Opera since version 5 (I think) in the english language version. Allthough I have some alternative browsers installed to check out “optimization” of web pages (i. e. how they are rendered outside my standard browser and if they are barrier-free), I would not want to change my standard browser at this point in time.
But please, don’t get me wrong: There are very good alternative browsers (Safari, Konqueror, Firefox etc.) and all of them are better than the MICROS~1 web browser substitute. 🙂 But for me, Opera does the job best.
One thing I don’t like about Opera: Older versions seemed to have a better structured configuration interface. I agree this is a very individual point of view.
Konq doesn’t compare to Opera, and I say that as someone who uses Konq as their primary, every day browser. I moved to it from Opera, but there are several touches and areas of granular configurability that I really miss.
Konq is great because it’s fast and integrates well with the rest of KDE, which is why I use it, but Opera has a degree of polish that both Konq and FF lack, since it can only come from years of use and fine tuning. That’s not necessarily a knock to Konq or FF, simply a reflection of the fact that a legacy of tweaking and addressing issues with an established application can often trump the bleeding-edge nature of FLOSS applications. Not always, but sometimes.
“Konq is great because it’s fast and integrates well with the rest of KDE”
Opera integrates pretty well with KDE already, as it’s a Qt application (Same color theme). Granted it’s not a file browser.
Firefox is more customizable, but Opera is still more customisable than many people think. What I love about Opera is that it has many features out of the box and they aren’t bloat at all. These are the features that cause Opera to be my default browser:
– The wand (No, Firefox doesn’t have the same feature)
– Very fast
– Lightweight
– Mouse gestures
– BitTorrent support
– Usenet support
– E-Mail client
– Integration of everything (browser, mail client, feeds…)
– IRC client
– Notes
– A few neat widgets such as the analog clock
– Etc, etc, etc…
Sure but torrent support is buggy under linux
If you have heavy downloads it will crash
I hope they fixed this
…so if it had a bootstrap, it would an operating system…?
These reasons you list as features are actually the reason I don’t bother. I already have an email, bit torrent, IRC and usenet client. I don’t need or want a new one. Mine are set up the way I like it, work as I want them to and so I see little reason to bother with alternatives.
I don’t care for “mouse gestures”, widgets or notes.
For me, I just want a web browser which works the way I want it to. Firefox does this, minus it’s escalating memory utilisation.
I see no reason to bother with Opera. About the only thing I find it useful for is coming up with ideas which other browsers copy.
You say this like it’s no small thing. Firefox’s resource usage is getting out of hand. I have an old PII750 tower system with Kubuntu that I mostly use as a home server, and occassionally as a desktop. I can load Opera, bring up Google, execute a search, and click on any one of the returned links in less time than it takes Firefox to even load. Let alone the way the system will start to crawl after a couple of hours of Firefox being open with multiple tabs.
Some prefer to lead. You prefer to follow…
That’s a pretty long bow you’re drawing there, considering you don’t even know me.
I use Firefox because it does what I want. I’m not ‘following’ anyone. I ‘choose’ to accept Firefox because it does at the end of the day work the way I want it very well, even though its memory utilisation is horrid.
If you don’t use any of the rich features of Opera, at least there’s one big difference is speed. Speed to load the browser, speed to load pages, speed to go forward, backward. Another one is memory usage. If you want to use a lot less RAM, Opera is the way to go…Unless you have tons of expensive RAM under the hood.
Best browser out there
It would be nice if I could right click and rename or delete bookmarks without opening the bookmark manager. Perhaps by the time Opera 27.0 comes out they’ll add this ability. Meanwhile every other browser in the known universe let’s you do this simple thing that has been around since at least Windows 95.
>> It would be nice if I could right click and rename
>> or delete bookmarks without opening the bookmark
>> manager.
I’ll second that – it’s one of the great shortcomings is the lack of being able to right click in the menus.
THOUGH the ability to turn favicons into buttons via drag and drop – along with speed dial – has made me use the bookmarks folder a hell of a lot less.
And the world would be a better place, if Google and Yahoo treated it like a first class browser 😉
Yeah, i registered just to be able to express my love for opera.
I have to say that i’m really impressed how much better the 9.5 beta1 for unix is than previous releases. The previous versions were way behind windows versions in speed, but this new beta is really responsive & fast. Plus it takes ~15Mb of memory with 15 tabs open, while thunderbird takes ~20Mb…
I think that open-source software, when i gets big enough, suffers from not having a boss saying: now we’ll rewrite the engine. On open source you have long debates whether to rewrite or not.
This is one closed-source software that i can really recommend. Rarely you see a engine rewrite that actually makes things way better in all aspects (at least that’s what seems like now).
Sorry for the post being a bit incoherent, i had to pretend working while writing it…
I am a longtime Opera-user sinve version 5.
What I really would like is an option in the cookiemanagement liek “accept cookies from this domain but delete when exiting opera) there are some sites with mandatory cookies, for which this option would be grat, and no the general option of deleting all new cookies on exit is only a workarround.
It’s just amazing going from IE7 on a work system to Opera running on a slower laptop. Just the speed and responsiveness give it a decisive advantage over Firefox and IE; at least if you browse heavily with multiple pages open, or don’t have a top of the line PC.
I’m sure there are some bugs remaining in 9.5 beta, but so far I haven’t found them. Even the alpha was extremely stable on my system. The beta solves all the issues I experienced with 9.5 snapshots and provides even more speed.
Almost all of the remaining user interface issues that have annoyed me in previous versions have been fixed. For example it can now reopen accidentally closed windows, not just the individual pages they contain. Other little touches are very welcome, such as a quick find field on the incredibly useful windows panel.
No other browser can be customised to meet my needs even half as well as Opera. Even with all the extensions available Firefox lacks key features that make Opera fantastic to use. Overall I find every other browser painful in comparison.
I’ve been trying Opera on and off for years. I’ve always wanted to like it since it has a lot of interesting features, but I’ve never found any of them good enough or interesting enough to stick with as my main browser.
All that changed with 9.5 alpha. I’ve been using it for month now on both Linux and Windows and despite being alpha it hasn’t crashed on me once. It’s fast it’s slick and it has all kinds of cool features. Opera 9.5 is now my default browser, and the only thing I use firefox is my internet bank which refuses to work with opera (although my bank claims they’re fixing it). So if you’ve been looking at Opera for a while and never been quite sold, I recomend you check out 9.5, it might just change your mind.
use “/” to such just like vi