“Opera 10 beta 3 was released Wednesday for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. With a strong European following, the preview version has been able to keep this popular alternative browser competitive by offering page rendering quality comparable to Google Chrome, while offering a robust list of features.”
It’s really funny how aggressively is Opera adapting to the European grounds … I don’t think it’s a US case. Can someone [preferably some US folk] tell something more about it?
This beta hasn’t had any accessibility fixes for OS X… so much for Opera’s commitment to accessibility. They implemented some parts in the 9.5 alpha builds and haven’t fixed it since then despite numerous bug reports. It’s basically unuseable, they might has well have not even bothered which would have at least been more honest. They’ve made no efforts for Windows accessibility at all and never have done so, and at the moment the Linux version is out of the question given it uses QT. Ah well, Safari and Firefox work fine.
Could you give specific problems please? I’m using Opera 10 b3 on both Ubuntu and Vista and it works like a charm…
In terms of accessibility, they broke the text-to-speech function in v9.5 and haven’t fixed it yet (unless they did in the newest beta, which I highly doubt). Not only that, but they have ignored any threads created about it on their forums.
Anyway, I figured out how to get that working through other applications, so have happily switched back to Firefox:
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=285583
Opera is a TERRIBLE browser. It was this one feature that kept me using it, and I had to hack it just to get that one thing working right. I lament that I have to keep it installed to take advantage of the voice capability, but at least I don’t have to use it anymore. Even if they did fix this, I don’t think I’d ever go back.
Text-to-speech isn’t the only thing that’s broken. They implemented some very basic accessibility API support on the Mac, but it’s been extremely buggy ever since they’ve implemented it in the 9.5 betas and they’ve ignored all bug reports concerning it. To summarize, the DOM tree’s accessible elements are presented in the wrong order, e.g. while reading Osnews, the comment titles all appear at the bottom of the DOM rather than with their associated comments. This makes screen reader support useless, as the page is so garbled anyway that it’s difficult to comprehend. Further, most form controls don’t work properly, the required output for lists is not spoken for example. It’s not useable, I don’t know why they even bothered to be honest. On Windows no such efforts have been made, and accessibility for the Linux version at least in terms of screen reader support is out of the question for the forseeable future as it uses QT for its interface. Guess all that time spent in complaining to the EU took away from the ever more important task of actually fixing the bugs in their own product.
Nice to see some progress on the Windows native skin. I’m surprised how long it’s taken, but it’s about 95% there in Beta 3. The panel toolbar’s the only UI component that still sticks out like a sore thumb.
As someone who loathes inconsistent non-standard skins, it’s nice to see it fit my desktop a bit better.
Visual tabs are still a pointless gimmick in my opinion – eye-candy that initially looks neat but has little practical use. But everything that makes Opera my favourite browser is still there, along with decent speed and stability, so I’m not complaining.
They should just open source the darn thing.
Why open-sourcing everything ? You think Opera’s team in unable to deal with the issues ? Why not asking Microsoft to open-source Windows ? China to get a true democraty ? Your neighborhood to leave their doors open for you ? Try to be a little more constructive…
Kochise
I, and I think many others, indeed think Opera is unable to overcome there issues. They focus on that what is important for there business and ignore the rest.
That text-to-speech thing for example, you realy think it was still broken if it was open source?
It would indeed be a very good thing if Microsoft where to open-up everything.
A true democratie is not compairable to open source, in a true democratie you only choose what person(s) rule everything for the next couple of years, the power is not with the people, with open source it is.
That neighbour thing it stupid, it’s like saying “Why don’t we ask the Linux-guys to leave there firewalls open by default.”
One of the things I like about Opera is that it is closed-source. I haven’t bought into the open-source philosophy. In general, I have found that the average quality of the closed-source programs I have tried is higher than the average quality of the open-sourced programs.
EDIT: This comment was a knee-jerk reaction. I still think it is true, but I would like to clarify by saying that there are some very high-quality open-source programs out there. I would include LLVM and WebKit as examples of quality open-source software.
Edited 2009-08-17 14:23 UTC
I just wondered if I was the only one puzzled by the ‘strong European following’ comment. I repair and maintain PCs for home users, and have so far never come across one home PC with Opera on it. I’m in the UK, btw.
I think Opera is popular in France or something. So far I haven’t either met a single PC here in Finland with Opera. I have been trying it myself every now and then but I just feel most at home using FireFox on my PC or Camino on my Mac, I don’t even know why.
Never, aside from a wannabe-hacker trying to be cool using a knocked off ad-free version 2 years ago…
I don’t think your personal experience in fixing computers (as good at the job as you may be) is really a fair statistic for Opera’s UK market share.
I’ll explain why:
Opera is still very much an “industry secret” so I doubt many PC users who are unable to maintain their own computer, would be the kind of PC users to have heard of (let alone installed) Opera.
If novices were to have installed an alternative to IE, it might be:
* Firefox (because of it’s existing market penetration – it’s reached “critical mass” where non-techies have started recommending it to their non-techy mates),
* Chrome (due to Google being a household name)
* and Safari (due to it being Apples preferred browser)
Opera, however, neither have a household name backing them nor have “critical mass” as a form of advertising and distribution.
Scrolling is jerky.
Just tried accessing the Timesheet web application at work, does not work (works in Firefox, IE and Safari), tons of CSS errors for things like “display: inline;” and padding with negative values? Could be the errors refer to something else, perhaps a missing semicolon before the specified infraction, but that it not what Opera SAYS the error is so…
Anyway. I *like* opera, I have a soft spot for all underdog applications, especially ones that were ahead of their time at some point, but… can’t be my daily browser.
>They’ve made no efforts for Windows accessibility at all and never have done so, and at the moment the Linux version is out of the question given it uses QT
What’s wrong with QT ?
At the moment, QT does not connect to the ATK/at-spi infrastructure for accessibility, as Trolltech used an incompatible protocol when they implemented it rather than the actual one in use. That makes QT applications useless for those requiring access technologies, at least the kind that involves needing access to the underlying application presentation such as screen readers and braille output programs. Work is being done, but there’s no telling when it will be at anything close to a useable state and it doesn’t exactly seem to be a high priority either with at-spi or QT developers. That’s what’s wrong with QT at least from my perspective since I do, after all, depend on such technologies so QT is useless at the moment.
>Anyway. I *like* opera, I have a soft spot for all underdog applications, especially ones that were ahead of their time at some point, but… can’t be my daily browser.
Same here… I wish Opera was more laxist and displayed most sites correctly. Currently, it simply doesn’t. And it explains why it doesn’t even reach 1% of the browser market.
I have found opera to be more that sufficient for daily use. I have used as my main browser it for years. Also, its market share is definitely more than 1%. According to http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-200908-bar, it has 2.91% and is the third most popular browser. According to http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0, it has 1.97% and is the fifth most popular browser. However, these statistics might be including Opera mobile browser versions in with the desktop browser. I think Opera’s mobile browser is the market leader for mobile browsers so it might improve the statistics if it is included.
But it does display most sites corrently.
It’s been one of the most standards complient browsers for a long time.
In fact, Opera 10 even scores 100% on the Acid3 test.
So I’m a little confused how you came to your conclusion (I don’t mean to sound rude, but are you comparing Opera to IE and surfing sites predominantly hacked to run in IE?)
That really depends on which figures you read as each website’s webstat will have a different bias depending on it’s clientele.
While some sites listed here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Historical… ) rank Opera between 0.5% to 3%, there are Easten European and Russian sites that see Opera as high as 30% ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)#Market_adoption )
Plus you have to take into account the technology competence of the sites user base (eg, a site like OSNews is going to have more webstats in favour of alternative browsers compared to a site like microsoft’s bing.com)
So in short, browser market shares is nothing more than a best guess, and best not taken too seriously.
[edit – tidied up my point a little]
Edited 2009-08-17 20:50 UTC