Linux.com has a review of Opera 9.5, which also includes various benchmarks for Opera, Firefox, Safari, and IE on both Windows and Linux. Linuxcom concludes: "Opera 9.5 is full to the brim with features and improvements and highly customizable. By rolling in apps such as the mail client and IRC chat application, and integrating them into a user's browsing experience, Opera 9.5 is a worthy challenger to Firefox 3. It surely has enough power and features to make it my favorite browser. If only it were free software and open source!"
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Member since:2006-11-14
if it is free software, then it is already open source (isnt open source one of the critical component of free software?)
or did the summary meant, "free" as in "free beer"? but opera is already "free" as in "free beer" ..can you have a non free(as in free beer) and open source software? .. i just dont see the point of having both "free" and "open source" joined together the way the summary did ..am i missing something?
seriously, what good will it do open sourcing it?
i think the biggest challenge opera faces is having people taking the trouble to install it. as long as there is something seriously and visibly wrong with people's browsers, most people wont go out of their way to look for other browsers and stumble on opera on their searches ..opera should start looking into making deals with computer manufactures to have it bundled on new installs ..they might start with talking to google to have it included in the software pack or whatever they call it
Member since:2007-02-05
Member since:2007-02-05
Free as in open source.
Considering that Linux.com is a magazine that pushes OSS I completely understand that this is a issue to them. Opera isn't in fact OSS, and to them OSS is preferable where such alternatives exists.
Kinda sad that Opera is closed. It's losing a lot on it. Before it didn't matter much, their rendering-engine was way way better than Firefox, but now Firefox is getting better, but more importantly: WebKit is making inroads. And it is: at least as good as, if not better than Opera's renderingengine on some areas.
Opera even has a lot of typical OSS-traits. Obsessed with standards. (Opera don't support a lot of non-standard HTML, instead they have their browser to fix non-standard sites to become standard on-the-fly.)
They have released some OSS-stuff. (JS-frameworks.)They use a lot of OSS in their browser. (Aspell, OpenSSL, FreeType) And not least: their CTO(Håkon Wium Lie) said in a interview that he'd love to open source opera if they found a viable(economic) way to do it.
Member since:2005-11-14
"I'll bite"
You hereby are mistaken "free" as in beer and "Free" as in Freedom. Pathetic.
More seriously, and despite the mistake of yours, obviously, people are bored of comparing Emacs and Vim, comparing MacOS, Linux and Windows, KDE and Gnome, so now its all about Firefox and Opera.
The bottom line is: everyone is spreading a bunch of FUD.
Let's take yours: Do you honestly think, for f--k sakes, that no one is looking at the Firefox code source?
How do you think people discover vulnerabilities, by luck?
How do you think, that during my daily job, I fix issues with Firefox?
We provide it to customers, and we're able to fix it when trouble arise. I couldn't fix Opera like that, because it isn't Open source.
Maybe that, by now, you've taken your head out of your ass and you start looking at the world around you: maybe a closed source software makes no *direct* difference to you, but it does to others.
Note that, by not figuring out that you indirectly get a lot of Free support through Open source software, it makes you look dumb.
This aside, Opera is a very decent browser, as well as Firefox. I prefer Firefox myself because I don't like the interface and integration of Opera. That's really a matter of taste, I guess.
Features and performance are ok. For company use, I prefer Firefox by a large margin because we can fix it or make it do whatever we need to. In fact, we wouldn't even think about Opera.
Member since:2007-04-29
i'll bite too 
We provide it to customers, and we're able to fix it when trouble arise. I couldn't fix Opera like that, because it isn't Open source.
If i start fixing bugs in firefox, i need to check out a lot of code, spend most likely weeks to get the build environment to work and then months to understand the code so i can get started. (just checked, ff 1.5 has 10K of files and 2M lines of code).
Do you really think i can justify the time spend to any customer? I don't know your line of business but i don't think you can either.
From a business point of view it's much cheaper to just pay the opera dudes to fix it. All that "you can fix it yourself" crap is pissing me off because it doesn't work like that in the real world.
Bug fixes can only done by people who know the effects on the other components as well, therefore it's much better to file a bugreport. In case of open source you can attach a patch as a bonus, but that's about it.
Did you really fix some stuff in firefox? (If so, please point out a commit entry on the firefox tree made by you, so you can make a fool out of me
) Anybody else who thinks of fixing bugs, take a look at http://hg.mozilla.org/ and try to get it even up and running, i dare you! (disclaimer : I love opensource, i run freebsd and a lot op open source products. But i only had the delusion once i could fix bugs in complex projects like firefox.)
Member since:2007-09-12
Member since:2006-03-03
Opera *IS* free, have you to pay anything prior to download and install ? Is the app feature and/or time limited ? Nope !
Open source ? What's for, Opera have led the browsing experience to such an extend no other so-called 'open-source' software have ! Compare what is comparable : Opera is not open-source, but is sleek, fast, reliable, full featured, unlike Firefox that had to come to version 3 to implement what's common in Opera since 7. So what's the benefit of open-sourcing if software enhancement just crawls...
Ho, and by the way, all the "I don't rely proprietary code" stuff is just non-sense : nVidia drivers, Opera browser, ... ain't considered as an issue on the Windows world, why would it be on the 'open-source' FOSS ? This is plain gross...
Kochise
Member since:2006-05-13
Member since:
2005-07-06
The article has a silly conclusion "if it were free and open source". Opera is free, no longer ad supported. And Open Source is meaningless if noone can be bothered looking at the code base. Even if it were free and open source, the next complaint would be "but its not GPL", "it doesn't use Qt", "it doesn't come in pink". Pathetic.