Submitted by Version 9.2 of the Opera web browser has been released. “Opera 9.2 is not only an important update with bug fixes and the new Speed Dial functionality, it’s also a milestone in spreading Opera to new users around the world: Opera 9.2 for Windows ships with 31 languages.” Download it from the download page.
I have always been a fan of opera. But i think the fact that he didnt swim across the atlantic as promised (the boss) kinda pissed me off =P
Yeah, he did swam in the cold Norwegian waters somehow
Back on topic, I love the Speed Dial feature. I’m a lazy sort of guy, and being able to have my OSNews and Digg links in front of me when I open a new tab comes in handy.
As a side note, PC-BSD users can download Opera 9.2: http://forums.pcbsd.org/viewtopic.php?t=8334
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But i think the fact that he didnt swim across the atlantic as promised (the boss) kinda pissed me off
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I think that’s pretty unfair of you. It is unreasonable to expect anyone to actually swim across the Atlantic.
That said, he could have at least *rowed* across. 😉
Common even google maps tells you that’s the way to do it. Just go to the web site and ask for directions from “oslo norway” to “NY”. Direction nbr 55 says “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean”. Try it yourself.
I bet Jack La Lanne could do it.
Chuck Norris did it with one arm tied behind his back while fighting off Nazi submarines.
Now he just throws that bad rug he wears at the bad guys. They can’t see, and he kicks them.
I like Opera very much, but I have a problem with it: Since 9.00 whenever I activate/deactivate plugins Java … (so clicking on the Site preferences and going to the correct options) it takes ages untill Opera responds.
Nice new features of Opera 9.2 instead of SpeedDial are Opera Developer Tools: http://dev.opera.com/tools
Withlist for Opera:
– support firebug Firefox plugin
– support addblock plus Firefox plugin
I would add inline spell checker instead of Aspell (which is very outdated for the Windows platform).
I take that back. Since I’ve started using Opera without the in-line spell checker I tend focus less on the spelling mistakes while I type.
My wish then is that Opera had a built in spell checker instead of having to download a third party spell checker, but it doesn’t have to be in-line.
Support for Firefox extensions would require support for XUL. That would be awesome.
“Support for Firefox extensions would require support for XUL. That would be awesome.”
Huh… Opera is already slow enough.
Just wanted to point out that Opera has had ad blocking for a long time now. Just right click a page and choose Block Content. Couldn’t be easier.
This ‘speed dail’ thing – I couldn’t find it, was hitting control and the buttons couldn’t get it to come up… Nothing anywhere in the menus mentioning it.
So I asked someone already using it, and found out that you set it up from a ‘blank tab’ as it now appears instead… Being that I almost never open a blank tab (since I usually leave three open, restored on new sessions), I would never have found it without being told it was there… They REALLY need to explain this a bit more explicitly when talking about the ‘feature’ as a lot of opera users don’t open blank tabs since they’ve done such a great job of making one not have to.
The ‘add a page’ dialog is a bit rough around the edges, but not bad for a first deployment – one does look at this and the recent ‘sunrise’ and go HMM…
Even so, it’s unlikely to get much use out of me, since even at the large thumbnails it’s hard to tell the sites I frequent apart, making me rely on the text… at which point just show me the text… Well, that and I have a bunch of launch icons in place on my address/navigation bar anyhow… then again this could be another of those features that I say that about, and inside a year cannot live without.
THOUGH, a method for opening up a speed dail in a new tab, instead of in the current one would be welcome. (I tried the usual suspect of ctrl-shift, no-go) I imagine you can probably set it up to do that under the keyboard shortcuts section, since most everything in opera can be done that way – I’ll need to play with it.
I will shout out one BIG thank you to Opera for one more than welcome change – pulling the unwashed buck-toothed skank dressed like a 1970’s bag lady from the installer splash screen. That **** was embarrassing, and one of the things that made it hard for me to get people to adopt it. They took one look at her and said “What’s with the homeless lady?”
I can see your point. I think the Opera designers just assumed that people would work in a particular way; opening new pages whenever they want to access a different site. That’s the way I use the browser, and in my experience most other users do as well. To me it seems strange to just keep three pages open and reuse them, rather than opening blank tabs.
How would you improve it? It seems quite well designed and straight forward to me. It displays open pages and history, as well as a bar to type in URLs, with auto-complete like the standard address bar. I can’t think of much else that needs to be added, too much and it would end up cluttered.
I also appreciate the fact that it isn’t a modal dialog; you can switch to another tab to check a link, then switch back and the Speed Dial dialog will still be open. There’s also drag and drop of links if you want to avoid using the dialog.
Really? They generally seem very clear to me. Clear enough that I can just about read the headlines on a news page that I’ve added to my Speed Dial. For some sites the thumbnail isn’t as useful, but it’s definitely a nice thing to have.
That’s very strange. For me shift-clicking, ctrl+shift-clicking, and middle-button clicking all worked as expected on the Speed Dial buttons. On the other hand, the mouse gesture to open a link in a new window doesn’t seem to work on Speed Dial. That’s an inconsistency that definitely should be fixed.
I can honestly say that I never even noticed what anyone featured on the installer splash screen looked like. I’ve certainly never had any comments about it from people who’ve tried Opera on my recommendation. I guess not everyone is quite so shallow…
>> To me it seems strange to just keep three pages
>> open and reuse them, rather than opening blank tabs.
That’s not quite what I meant – I rarely ever have LESS than three open. I tend to middle click to open links in new tabs, or open my more commonly used sites from the favicons dragged to my toolbar with ctrl-shift-click, again opening new tabs that way. (I WISH it let you middle click on those). I do open lots of tabs – from the links or from my bookmarks (via ctrl-shift since middle clicks don’t work in toolbars or menu items) – I almost never have the need for a blank tab that way since I open everything in new tabs directly… and anything I’d need to type a url for I probably either already have bookmarked or found… from a link.
>> How would you improve it? It seems quite well
>> designed and straight forward to me. It displays
>> open pages and history, as well as a bar to type
>> in URLs, with auto-complete like the standard
>> address bar.
Adding detection for url’s/favicons that have been dragged/added as buttons to the toolbars would be a start alongside perhaps adding drag and drop from those (though the ability to drag a tab to the speed dial page is nice), and perhaps ‘trimming down’ the history a notch or two on redundant entries (same url listed five times – Whiskey tango foxtrot). The ‘Frequently visited’ list showing a bunch of pages I’ve only visited once (albeit today) sure didn’t help, especially with certain pages I’ve visited over 20 times a day (like the ones I maintain) the past year not even making the cut. (when they too are on my address bar as buttons!) Maybe, Just MAYBE have an option to add from the users BOOKMARKS?!?
A lot of my ‘objection’ also stems from appearance – since it doesn’t use the same fonts or styling as the rest of the application. It does not use the same fonts as the menus, dialogs and windows as the rest of opera… or those of the host OS – The net result looks and feels more like a java swing crapplet than something integrated into the application… hell, whatever font renderer they are using it’s not even using the anti-aliasing/font smoothing technologies available in Windows, OSX or Linux (I just checked all three!) The fonts and general appearance looks like crap compared to the entire rest of what’s running. Not a make or break functionality issue for sure, but a matter of polish that they’ll likely get to sooner or later.
>> That’s very strange. For me shift-clicking,
>> ctrl+shift-clicking, and middle-button clicking all
>> worked as expected on the Speed Dial buttons.
Using the mouse to click on the buttons on the speed dial page – YES. I was referring to the entire point of speed dial, which is supposed to be a KEYBOARD shortcut (it does seem to be the only part of it that is explained on any of the websites on the subject – you have to dig into forum posts for anything more). So far we have CTRL-1 through CTRL-9 which open in the current tab. CTRL-SHIFT-1 through CTRL-SHIFT-9 has been used to remap the old CTRL-# keys opening up certain side panel elements. There’s no built in keyboard shortcut to the speed dials for opening them in new tabs (or a option to set that as the default behavior) – Though I believe one should be able to add that functionality since you can create your own key mappings as easily as you can create your own toolbar buttons – I just need to remember how to do it.
>> I’ve certainly never had any comments about it
>> from people who’ve tried Opera on my
>> recommendation. I guess not everyone is quite so
>> shallow…
I’m in New England – as a rule we are not friendly people, and when it comes to the white collar criminal ******** who run Boston area businesses wearing the five hundred dollar suits every day, they are less than receptive to that sort of thing. (in fact if you used the language they use when encountering people of that appearance in a truck stop, a trucker say “hey, watch your mouth there are mechanics in here”)
Edited 2007-04-11 20:59
I think you are trying too hard… all you have to do to go to the “speed dial” pages is Ctrl+(speed dial #), or F2 to open the new URL dialoge, enter the corrosponding #, Enter.
Very slick.
There’s no humor whatsoever in OSNews? Or is that you down-modders have too many points to spend?
I’ve been using a beta of Opera 9.2 for a while and the Speed Dial feature is well worth having.
It isn’t really a replacement for other methods of accessing sites. I can remember the URLs I enter regularly, and of course Opera’s auto-complete fills in the full URL after I’ve typed a few letters, making it almost as fast as Speed Dial. For sites that I only visit every once in a while I use bookmarks, and I don’t need a super fast way of accessing them.
What I find Speed Dial very useful for is quick access to individual pages that I’m watching for a limited time. For example, auction pages, newsgroup/forum threads, sites that are currently being updated, etc. I don’t want to memorise the URL, clutter up my bookmarks with temporary sites, or have a personal bar taking up space. Speed dial lets me quickly check them without having to keep them open in my browser. Plus I can often refresh the Speed Dial thumbnails to see whether a site has changed.
Speed Dial is particularly nice for keyboard browsing, particularly on a laptop with a fiddly little trackpad/trackpoint. Just hit ctrl+t to open a new page, then hit the Speed Dial number (with ctrl still held down) and the site opens. Accessing bookmarks using keyboard navigation is a much slower process.
One nice feature that some people may not have noticed, is that you can add pages by simply dragging and dropping an URL to a Speed Dial button. This works using bookmarks from the panel or personal bar, links from the history panel, open pages from the tab bar or windows panel, or you can drag a link directly from another page. This can be faster than using the Speed Dial dialog box to add a page. You can also rearrange Speed Dial buttons using drag and drop.
I also like the way that you can set the thumbnail refresh interval individually for Speed Dial buttons. It means that you can set it to automatically refresh a site’s thumbnail regularly when you’re waiting for it to be updated, without the others acting the same way. The way that thumbnails automatically resize themselves with the window is another nice touch.
Overall Speed Dial seems very polished and elegant despite its newness. Not that I’d really expect anything less from Opera, it’s become a really brilliant browser over the past few years.
I’ve liked Opera for awhile, but the one thing that’s always kept me from being a full blown convert was the lack of an in line spell checker. I’ve gotten used to it and frankly it’s hard to live without. However, I’ve installed Aspell and I’m going to try to live with that for now. If all goes well (which so far it it) I will start using Opera instead of Firefox.
I’ve been kind of wanting to ditch Firefox for awhile now because it just doesn’t feel like the browser that I started with. I suppose you could say the new has worn off. However, I have nothing bad to say about Firefox other than it’s a little slow to start and I have some printing problems with some pages that print fine in other browsers. Other than that I still suggest people use Firefox or Opera.
Personally, I don’t care about the new features at all. All I want is Opera that is as fast as it used to be in all versions prior to the 9.0 release. Unfortunately, 9.20 is still as supermegaslow on my PC as all 9.x versions. I’ve never seen anything like this.
I think there might be something wrong with your Opera installation. If there was a drop in speed from Opera 8, it wasn’t large enough for me to notice the difference.
Comparing Opera 9 with IE and Firefox, Opera is still easily the fastest, remaining responsive even when browsing a large number of sites on a slow computer.
In my experience Opera 9 is still perfectly usable on a computer as old as a 300Mhz Celeron. Admittedly early versions of Opera ran fine on a 386, but I think you have to expect some slowdown as features are added.
I think there might be something wrong with your Opera installation.
Then I must really wonder what that could be, as I tried several different versions on several different Linux distributions, both static and dynamic versions, under many different configurations… And always with the same results.
Edit: and when I browse the Opera web forums, Linux section, I can see that I’m definitely not the only one who can see major (and very weird) negative performance anomalies in the 9.x versions.
Edited 2007-04-11 20:46
I have to agree with Dave_K, I haven’t had any problems with speed in any install of Opera 9.x that I use. I even have 9.1 installed as the main browser on an old P-133 laptop with 40 MB of RAM running, shudder, Windows ME. Absolutely no problems. Even with all the features added Opera is still amazingly fast.
Having only been using 9.2 for a little while, I admit that I haven’t noticed a huge Wow! effect from “Speed-dial”. That said, I’m so used to using nicknames for all my bookmarks that I’m not sure if this feature will immediately make much difference for how I use Opera.
I have to agree with Dave_K, I haven’t had any problems with speed in any install of Opera 9.x that I use. I even have 9.1 installed as the main browser on an old P-133 laptop with 40 MB of RAM running, shudder, Windows ME. Absolutely no problems. Even with all the features added Opera is still amazingly fast.
Well, that’s certainly impressive, but it’s a known fact that Opera is much faster on Windows (but this is generally true for all GUI software). But the Linux version has some serious problems.
Try reinstalling from scratch. I can confirm it is every bit as quick as always, but installing over enough old betas can build up a bit of cruft.
Try reinstalling from scratch. I can confirm it is every bit as quick as always, but installing over enough old betas can build up a bit of cruft.
Of course I tried that. Many times. I’ve tried everything. Opera 9.x is simply supermegaslow on my PC and there’s nothing that can be done about it. And again, when I read the Opera web forums, I can see that quite a lot of people complain about the slowness in 9.x, too.
I can’t find the HOWTO I saved the last time this came up; could someone please repost or relink the howto and the url.ini?
Opera used to be my favorite browser back in the version 4.x days and I kept using it all the way up to version 7 when I made a switch to Mozilla PhoenixFirebirdFirefox more or less to to the ability to adblock. I still prefer Firefox for most things but like to keep around Opera to run those sites that crap out occasionally on me in Firefox (rare these days that). Having the adblocking url.ini would really restore my enjoyment of Opera again…
–bornagainpenguin
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/
Sorry to say but i get a better feel using firefox.
First of i keep jumping tabs more or Less on random. And i prefer to use keyboard to do so. Sure, the 1 and 2 keys are nice, if only they didnt stop working with a form field focused…
Gestures never did it for me btw. Keyboard shortcuts on the other hand…
I even use the arrow keys to scroll pages…
Browser: Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/3.1.7139/1662; nb; U; ssr)
Dude, are you kidding? You think Opera is lacking in shortcuts??? If you prefer to use the keyboard, you can for instance browse all the links on a page in 2D by using shift+arrows. Certainly a lot faster than tabbing through all the links.
The “1” and “2” keys have alternate shortcuts as well. To get a listing of the predefined shortcuts, if you don’t bother to add more or change yourself, can be found here:
http://help.opera.com/Linux/9.20/en/keyboard.html
http://help.opera.com/Mac/9.20/en/keyboard.html
http://help.opera.com/Windows/9.20/en/keyboard.html
Tip of the day: Hit “/” for incrementally searching through content on the page (like in Vi(m)), or “,” to search through only the links. I love these shortcuts 🙂
thanks. still miss the ctrl+1..0 to change tabs but ill survive somehow i guess
Opera fixed a couple of security flaws, as well. These include an FTP PASV flaw that allowed an attacker to snoop on other computers behind your router, along with Javascript flaws that enable cross site scripting attacks. My favorite is this one: “Multiple stability fixes.”
For these and various Web site compatibility fixes, go here:
http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/windows/920/
A new Opera also came out for the Wii today. A huge improvement over the previous version and much better (IMHO) than the PS3 browser.
Browser: Opera/9.10 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1621; en)
I’m running it on Solaris x86, and it is great, the one downside is their lack of providing a non-static version of Opera; some of us can actually download the Qt source and install it 🙂
Apart from that, its pretty damn good.
Operais cool browser. [url=http://www.prevedgame.ru/in.php?id=20508]i like it[/url]
I tried Opera 9 and ran it for a couple of hours but ended up switching back to Seamonkey. I liked the widgets idea but when I downloaded the clock and RSS reader Opera started consuming more than 50% of my CPU! I dislike the way it is still built on the Qt widgets and looks strange on Gnome even after you download a theme for it. It also appeared slower than Firefox too. I couldn’t really find a compelling reason to use it.
With all of it’s 1001 bells and whistles, it still doesn’t have SOCKS proxy support. wtf?
I’d like to have this to add to the other browsers I use to test code.
Schroot to run Opera is of no interest to me.
I love opera, it’s just a pity it experiences problems rendering some pages (not many though thankfully).
Still – i’d sooner have Opera than the current Firefox anyday.