Submitted by Opera 11 has been released. “Tab stacking is a better way to organize your open tabs. Simply drag one tab on top of another to create a stack. Extensions help you personalize your browser and enhance what Opera can do. With the flick of your wrist, mouse gestures let you navigate back and forwards, open new pages, close tabs and so much more. In Opera 11, you now have a handy visual guide to the wonders of mouse gestures. We changed the address bar, so you can make better sense of the security levels of the sites you visit. Opera 11 now displays a clear badge indicating the security level and allowing immediate, one-click access to security and trust information about the site.”
Very polished, very slick; but the only way I could think about the browser market Opera finds themselves in now is “why?” What massively distinguishing feature does Opera have to claw that marketshare up? Firefox 1.0 vs IE6—clear as day. Opera 11 vs Firefox 4? Personal preference more than anything.
Why is it that Chrome can make such rapid inroads with developers / techs, and yet Opera is not? This is a predicament. Opera needs something much, much more radical.
Just to be cool I guess. Opera 10.x was garbage on anything not named Windows. Any good innovation made by Opera devs is quickly emulated by Chromium/Firefox.
The best product that Opera has at this point is Fastmail.fm.
Opera Mini is pretty good, particulary on the Symbian systems where there aren’t many alternatives.
Disagree. Opera 10 was pretty good on Fedora Linux anyway. I’ve always thought the developer tools were odd on Opera, and they really still are. Chrome’s is pretty useful, although with its quirks as well.
Opera on Linux was upgraded to an extremely slow interface since 10.5. Simple things like scrolling and resizing the window have a noticable delay and leave garbage on the screen. This was not a problem with 9.5.
Don’t know what to say. Didn’t experience that with 10.5 or above.
I’ve had problems like that on Windows too, especially when sites contain content like flash video. Even at the best of times the new UI is sluggish and unresponsive compared with Opera 10.10.
I’ve seen a few people on the Opera forums report graphical glitches when scrolling, or when a pop-up tab is on top of another tab. Some people blame it on certain graphics card drivers not playing well with the new Vega graphics library.
Ive also had issues with flash embedded not scrolling properly, hanging behind sortof, when scrolling the page up. 10.x.
And I did a mistake leaving opera 10.x running on my Mac Mini .. Almost melted the thing, due to flash I suppose .. When I was back the CPU temp was at 72 C and 150% CPU or so ..
Opera doesn’t control search across the world and doesn’t have bucketloads of cash?
I try and use Opera every release (I was full time from v6-9) but it just isn’t as far ahead of the pack as it used to be.
Easy, Chrome has what people are looking for:
– some powerusers: speed (even before Firefox 4 is being released) and security
(other powerusers want to use certain addons which Chrome does not have)
– ‘stupid users’: brandrecognition, people have no idea what a browser is, but they download the program because it came from Google and not some other company they never heared of
Google has been doing a lot of advertisements and links on the google search pages and this works.
Edited 2010-12-17 00:01 UTC
I don’t want to bash Opera here but it has a lot of small quirks(/bugs?) that can make the first experience pretty unpleasant. Menues are a good example of this. Sub menus won’t open if other sub menus still show which is very annoying. This alone can make you dismiss the whole browser and as long as Opera doesn’t fix these “anomalies” they don’t even stand a chance.
Myself, I use it because it’s fast (like the responsiveness of the UI especially), has a clean yet powerful interface, works reasonably well, and does not come from a big corporation.
Firefox 4 pre-releases and IE9 still feel very slow facing Opera. If I was to say why, I’d argue it’s because of slow load times that give a bad first impression, unresponsive UI, choppy scrolling and window resizing (GPU-rendered UIs seem to have this annoying side-effect apart from that of wasting power. Can someone remember me why I need them ?), and insufficient caching.
About the interface, just have a look at this :
http://img594.imageshack.us/i/capturemo.png/
* Apart from the RSS button, I regularly use all buttons of Opera’s interface interface, and I can tell what they’re all for. I don’t need nor want a single more. Since all controls are in a single place (except the tab trash), it’s easier to access them than with the new trend of putting the reload button on the right of the address bar.
* Firefox 4’s UI literally WASTES screen space compared to this, and not to do much more. My “back” button is big enough, no need to enlarge it, thanks. I don’t need this “bookmark” button, if I want a bookmark I type its name in the address bar or use the menu (which feels messy in FF4 in my opinion btw) in the few occasions where I don’t remember about it. Panorama… Well… Let’s just say that I don’t like it.
* IE9’s interface is relatively clean, but not powerful. I use extensively both tabs and the address bar, so I don’t like having to make a choice between them. The menus’ usage is far from obvious at first look, and at second look you wonder why they made three buttons considering the frequency at which you click each of them in normal browser use. Microsoft seem to have gone in a “my back button is bigger” contest with Mozilla, resulting in a rendering of the bottom of it which is simply awful. They made a reload AND a stop button, being alone to realize that it’s wasting space needlessly, and put them on the right of the address bar too. The “add tab” button does not give you a single clue about what it’s going to do. And my last gripe with IE9’s UI, which is not shown in this screenshot, is its notification system : it is way too weak visually, and to make things worse they have decided to put it a the botton of the browser instead of the top, where the attention of the user is when he looks for some control to use. Hate it.
Funny that while some years ago I disliked Opera’s UI a lot for being bloated and unclear, I now feel that it’s Firefox, my previous model in this regard, which is messy. Guess the Opera UI team has done its homework, after all.
Being pre-releases, FF4 and IE9 obviously don’t work well. Opera 10 has a few rendering issues (and does not let me resize memo controls, grrrrrrrrrrrrrr…), but a bit of scrolling is generally all it takes to get rid of them.
Hope this helps.
Edited 2010-12-17 04:36 UTC
Well, tried this release, and I’m going to downgrade to Opera 10.6. In a few minutes of toying, I’ve already seen :
-The installer displaying lots of error messages and UAC prompts instead of just doing its job
-A page becoming unresponsive, requiring a refresh before links work
-Choppy scrolling
-A silly “security” button in my address bar which is present even when it has nothing to say and which there’s no obvious way to remove (I know I shouldn’t put my credit card number everywhere on the web, I don’t need a nanny, thanks)
That’s enough. Hoping Opera 12 will be more polished.
Edited 2010-12-17 05:05 UTC
I can’t use a browser that doesn’t have a contextual menu to input customized text into input fields.
Also, I love the way things are integrated into Opera. It’s just overall better. The only downside is the lack of per-tab processes.
For example ? Do you have an idea what more to be put inside a browser ? A kitchen sink maybe, or a toaster ? I guess those are the only things that are missing from Opera and the rest of the browsers currently. There’s a torrent client, various extensions, mail and RSS client, sync, upload servers, turbo mode, sandbox, flashblock, spellchecker, gestures, debugging, the list could go on forever. Opera isn’t bad at all, it just needs more brand recognition – but yeah, they are not Google. Chrome isn’t bad, too, but it’s being pushed around every single corner you can think of, and inevitably ends up installed on your system. I tried the new Opera 11 on my Linux workstation, and I’m totally satisfied with the result. Don’t be too harsh on them, these guys own most of the innovations wee see in today’s browsers.
I’m not being hard on them. It’s a good product and a genuine question. Browsers take off because they capture developers and power users first. Opera needs to invest more in web developer education tools and material to draw in developers to use Opera first. Dragonfly is no Firebug, not even close, and the Internet could do with an up to date HTML5 / CSS3 / JS documentation, Mozilla’s site is full of holes and badly maintained.
You may be right about looking at web developers – it’s a totally foreign territory for me – I thought that all browsers have decent web-dev tools, to help these guys making this or that site look good with their browser, but apparently that’s not the case. Opera is still lacking Flash block as a straightforward extension, I wonder why … I still see the funny CSS file spreading around, and my dad certainly won’t like that, and I wouldn’t support him over the phone how to do this … I thought most of the useful addons are already ported, but I seem to be wrong. Anyway, it’s just a matter of time to see whether Opera will jump over the 3% market share by actually making some useful improvements. And last but not least – Opera could be too advanced, sometimes. I’ve spoken to a tech people that are too busy managing some hard-to-understand or maintain features in Opera, probably that’s another issue, too.
I agree with the too advanced thing. It’s why I set my mom’s computer up using Chrome instead. Opera has a lot of options and things to configure.
“Opera is still lacking Flash block”
From 11 on you can find on-demand plugin loading.
Preferences>Advanced>Content>Enable plugins only on-demand
It will replace the flash content with a circle with an arrow inside. It is a recent addition though.
Abso-freaking-lutly. Somebody hire that guy as a browser strategy guy.
Why firefox? why chrome? they haven’t got any massively distinguishing features either.
All browsers have their pros and cons. Fact is that opera just works the best on my system for the things I want to do.
As others have stated, the number 1 reason I can see is brand recognition. People also tell me speed and stability but on any reasonably fast computer (c2d/phenom + ) there is not much difference unless you are running insanely intensive JS web apps.
And as for stability? Ha. It might be stable for a lot of people, but I’ve had it crash as many times as FF. It also sucks up an amazing amount of ram compared to other browsers in my experience and the download manager is non-existant. Which is annoying.
I really can’t see any reason to switch to chrome from FF :p And its quick launching is also moot on a system with an SSD. FF launches quickly too after the OS caches it
My dad likes Chrome a lot, more power to him, I say. I don’t really care what people use, but the Chrome fanboys are worse than the FF fanboys of olde.
Like what?
I agree it’s about personal preference, but so is the case for everything. Yes, Chrome is faster (probably more secure?) than Firefox and yet I feel too attached and “at home” with ff to think of migrating completely. I have Chrome (+ Canary Build) and Opera, just so I can see where things are going, but my reason for using Firefox goes way beyond technical characteristics.
So – what do you mean by radical?
If you are prepared to run Firefox 4 beta7 (or later I presume), Chrome isn’t any faster than Firefox.
AFAIK, Chrome isn’t partucularly any more or less secure than Firefox.
Chrome is more secure because it have sandbox, firefox don’t. Chrome is faster than Firefox because it is, it is that simple. Benchmark are not real world senario. The UI jam everytime I do something, it just don’t happen with Chrome.
/sent from Firefox 4b8
you mean 7? I don’t think beta 8 is out yet.
The daily built is tagged b8pre, but b8 should be tagged any hours now, so I am using b8. It is a very good improvement over b7, but is still not that stable.
What do you mean by not stable? I run the nightlies and I can’t really remember any crashes since beta5. Though I might have had one in that time but session restore and quick restarting almost makes a crash unnoticeable.
It still crash for me, it may come from extensions, but I don’t think so, it happen when I switch tabs or scroll, it happen since late beta7pre.
oh ineteresting. I didn’t think of running the nightlies. I’ve been running the betas since the first one came out. Normally have about 20-30 tabs open. One of them constantly playing music in a flash player. No crashes yet. Only annoyance I had so far was I sometimes, I don’t know how, moved a bunch of tabs into a different ‘group’. very annoying. Hasn’t happened since b7 so maybe it was some bug that was fixed. Sucks that it crashes for you but so far my experience has been nice and stable.
For the person that a few comments above said that chrome fanbois are worse than ff fanbois from back in the day, I would have to agree. These days you practically get mocked for using anything besides chrome.
I always liked Opera… it always seemed to have something unique that really set it apart from all the others, and I liked its interface. But is anyone else disappointed with the last few releases? They’re making some massive UI changes that IMO aren’t needed at all. And this seems to be happening with Firefox too. And already done in IE.
Whatever happened to “traditional” user interfaces? It seems like ever since Chrome hit the scene, everyone else is running off trying to copy its UI. I will give Opera some major credit for almost always leaving options in their browser’s preferences to go back to the old style (the classic MDI is probably still available after a good amount of tweaking) and for their attempt to make their browser’s theme “fit in” better on their native desktops, though.
That’s more than I can say about Firefox–anyone remember the location bar before it was completely removed in favor of the so-called “awesome bar”? Or the time when the back/forward buttons had separate drop-down menus, and made more sense? I miss those days…
I have two things to say about that:
1. As far as I know, Firefox 4 also has the option to go back to the old UI.
2. the “problem” is “screen real estate”, people want as much space for their webpage, so they don’t have to scroll as much.
The silly thing is, they probably have enough space on the sides, but no browser maker moved the tabs to the left or right. Mozilla had some concepts though (and possibly there are some add-ons that do this already).
Opera has an option to put tabs to the side (any side) but I don’t really like that. Maybe it’s because I’m not used to it, but it felt very awkward. The same way as if you would dock your taskbar to one of the sides. I know of people who do that but I don’t like it at all.
Edited 2010-12-17 00:06 UTC
I tried that, you are right. It only kind of works. Also the address bar is still at the top. I guess there isn’t a good place to but it otherwise. 🙂
The problem is, in most cases almost no worthwhile amount of vertical screen space is saved. Removing one toolbar saves up, what, one line? Browsers have supported F11 (fullscreen) for what seems like an eternity; why not advocate using that? It gives you much more screen space than these UI redesigns ever will, without dumbing down the interface.
Edited 2010-12-17 00:26 UTC
I guess most people can’t find the fullscreen button or the way back out of it. 😉
The problem with full screen is that you can’t see desktop notifications anymore, at least on Windows. Full screen is very handy when you want to be immersed on something, but when you need to react to external changes, it’s not that great. Haven’t tried it lately on Linux, maybe the Linux notification system works better over there.
Edited 2010-12-20 09:01 UTC
I use F11 a lot ! Nice option..
yeah, I really don’t like some of the UI changes. Worse though, shacknews.com comments section has been broken since 10.5 with no sign of it getting fixed. As a several times a day site for me, it’s a bit of a deal killer. As such I am still using 10.10
A lot of features like that superficially appear to still be available in Opera 11, but unfortunately they don’t work properly if you actually try to use them.
MDI features in particular are badly broken, with almost nothing working as it should. To me that’s a real shame, as MDI offers a lot of flexibility that just isn’t possible with more limited tabbed browsing. It’s sad that I can almost get a better “MDI” experience in Firefox by using an extension like Tile Tabs.
Actually, it’s interesting seeing advocates of Firefox’s Panorama talk about the benefits of spacial memory, with relative tab position enabling them to be found more quickly. That’s something that MDI could offer, as it allowed you to cascade or tile tabs, minimise them to little bars at the bottom of the screen, and move then around the browser window workspace.
You could stack some non-maximised tabs partially off screen, effectively putting them to one side while they aren’t being used, while others are minimised completely out of the way, with just the tabs you’re working on remaining fully visible, and easily placed side by side if you want to compare multiple sites. With that kind of arrangement you can often use spacial location to quickly find particular tabs, without even moving to the tab bar.
It’s a feature with interesting “power user” possibilities that most people never bothered with. For example, creating a Follower Tab (which displays any link clicked in its parent) tiled alongside its parent (acting like an index frame), to more efficiently browse through a site.
Opera used to have a Windows Native theme that made it fit in perfectly with my desktop. In Opera 11 the supposedly native theme just looks weird and has a bunch of visual glitches.
Worse than that, some of the aesthetic tweaks are simply badly thought out and harm usability, such as making the pop-up tab switcher transparent. It’s a feature where you want to be able to quickly read down the list of tabs and find the one you’re looking for, and text on a transparent background being overlaid on top of website text definitely doesn’t help.
Fortunately that kind of thing can be fixed by tweaking the skin. It’s a shame that Opera’s bug ridden features can’t be fixed so easily.
Ouch. It’s been several versions since I did anything with the MDI options, and I admit that I didn’t test them fully myself (or maybe not at all, can’t remember), but they seemed to be intact. Have you been noticing them getting gradually worse, or have the options been “there” but broken for a long time now? I’m just curious.
And as for the theme not matching the OS… I don’t run Windows anymore so I don’t know about that, but it seems their GTK emulation, while not perfect, is decent. It certainly “fits in” with Gnome much better than older versions. In a way though, I miss some of Opera’s older, unique themes. To be honest, I can’t even remember exactly what the “Windows Native” theme even looked like.
Up to version 10.10 Opera just used standard Windows MDI. Of course it was hidden by default, but all the features of any other MDI app were still there.
This was dropped in Opera 10.5 when they switched to their Vega graphics library for all graphics rendering. It allowed things like rounded corners and drop shadows on pop-up tabs, along with the use of transparency effects and more animations in the UI, but badly broke MDI and some other classic Opera features.
As the name suggests, it matched Opera’s look to that of the Windows theme. Opera, and it’s non-maximised tabs in MDI, looked like native Windows windows, as if there wasn’t any theme at all.
Opera 10+5+ allows for a lot more eye candy, and fits in with Windows 7’s GUI, but it’s no longer possible to have a look and feel that’s consistent with my more minimalist desktop.
I feel the same way. My guess is that some decision makers in Opera are trying to create a clone for Chrome.
One day, closing the last tab will cause Opera to exit. Then, upon restarting, this tab will be reopened. That day will be the day I stop using Opera.
Nothing wrong with Opera copying good ideas off another browser for once.
But closing the last tab forces the browser to close is totally stupid behavior especially if your browser has speedial Opera would never do that.
Saw a comment moaning about the address bar hiding the full URL , there’s an option to show the full URL in preferences> Browsing.
Thats what i love about Opera there is always a choice.
:Want the address bar on the bottom of the screen.
:Tab bar on the side.
:Tabs shrink too much if you have lots open > wrap tabs to multiple lines or even better just use the windows panel to control your tabs.
Bad points Opera has trouble opening some sites due to browser sniffing or sites not being tested in Opera due to small market share, easy enough to open those using the right click context menu “open with” & selecting from the list of installed browsers.
Opera has a ton of features that are well integrated into the browser but none of it is bloat. Its a smaller download than the other main browsers & its fast.
Need more features, you’ve always been able to use Java scripts & custom buttons but extensions bring more choice & make it easier.
They actually fixed text-to-speech in the Windows version. I’m impressed. That’s been completely broken since v9.64
Tab Stacking is an utterly mediocre and unoriginal feature; highly disappointing considering Opera’s history of innovation. It’s one Opera feature that I can’t see other browsers bothering to copy.
I’m no fan of sluggish and bloated Firefox, but some of the features added by its extension developers (Tab Kit or Tree Style Tabs for example) did this kind of stacking years ago, and did it much more elegantly, with more features and flexibility. Then there’s Panorama of course: not a feature I like that much, but at least it’s trying something different.
Opera are coming late to the party, so their version should have been a lot more impressive and usable than Tab Stacking. As it is, I wouldn’t even consider this feature to be a decent alternative to Opera’s existing windows panel (which already offers tab search, multiple tab selection, and a form of tab grouping). Tab Stacking also suffers from lack of testing, as I’ve found a number of bugs and issues just playing around with it.
Then there are the few other new features. Extensions are worth having, but personally I’d rather have fully working and usable built in features. The visual gestures gimmick is slow, glitchy, and is causing problems for some gesture users. The new mouse gesture system is also less powerful, as you can no longer use keyboard modifiers in conjunction with gestures.
Even more disappointing than the lack of exciting new features is that there there are still bugs and glitches in Opera 11 that were first reported back during the beta testing of Opera 10.5 (that’s around a year ago now). New features are nice to have, but some of Opera’s classic features and customisation options remain semi-functional due to known bugs.
Personally I’d much rather have Opera 10.10’s older (but fully functional) UI than Opera 11’s flashier but bug ridden “upgrade”. For me there isn’t a single new feature in Opera 11 (or its available extensions) to make up for its problems and annoyances, like inconsistencies in tab ordering when opening tabs in the background, or duplicate empty windows being spawned if I configure the panel how I wish.
Compared to 10.10 it feels a lot slower too. Not when running artificial benchmarks, or comparing a single site loading on each, but in real world use it really doesn’t matter to me whether something takes 1.74 or 1.83 seconds to complete. Responsiveness is much more important to my browsing, and Opera 11’s UI feels sluggish when used heavily, while Opera 10.10 stays fast and responsive under the same conditions.
I used to be a huge Opera fanboy — half the posts I’ve made here have probably been in support of Opera — but the past few releases have pretty much cured me of that.
Overall I’d still rate it above Firefox for speed, and I like certain Opera UI features too much to switch to Chrome, but since the release of 10.5 Opera hasn’t been a browser that I actually enjoy using. Too many annoyances and frustrating issues, too many great features that don’t work as they should due to bugs.
Hopefully now that version 11 is released Opera will concentrate on fixing its issues rather than adding more features of dubious quality. Maybe by 11.5 it’ll feel like a final release rather than beta quality at best. But I’m pretty sure I had the same hopes after the release of 10.5 10 months ago, and I’m still waiting for a browser that works properly.
Just wanted to react to a couple of things you wrote.
This has always been the case. And that “one year” thing you are mentioning is nothing compared to bugs that date back to the 9.xx era: the most annoying one I can think of now is Opera’s tooltips popping up over other windows just because Opera is in the background and I’ve happened to move the mouse cursor above it. This has been there for, off the top of my head, at least 4 years. I vaguely remember that it had been fixed in one release but it reappeared in the next release and that regression remained.
I understand you. On my side, the killer feature would be “network resilience”. My browsing experience is plagued with network requests that never get a reply… and Opera sits there, its elapsed time ticking along without the browser ever realizing that the request might well never get an answer. It would be interesting if the browser could understand that it might be better to cancel a request and resubmit it.
The only thing stopping me from going back to 10.10 is that I don’t remember if there was a format change for messages (emails and feeds) between 10.10 and the 10.63 that I’m currently using.
Given your comment, I will install this version separately instead of going the update route.
Anything after 10.10 was just a big mess in Opera ‘country’ but with introduction of Opera 11 (I have used Opera 11 alpha version till yesterday) everything seems to work beautifully now, EVERYTHING … that is the Opera we know and like.
Its probably nice for most that Opera introduced extensions as other browsers do, but honesty after checking them, I haven’t found one that I would need, maybe its because I do not use Flash in my Opera browser … or maybe Opera has everything already?
Well Chrome’s and Opera’s extensions are kinda lame compared to Firefox’s.
Well Firefox speed and responsiveness is kinda lame compared to Opera and Chrome.
The reason for that is that the extension API is virtually non-existant for now. Beside a background (“hidden”) window that, in contrast to page/user scripts, has cross-domain access privileges, the extension API does not provide anything superior to the one for the old User Javascripts (userscripts), the latter being a subset of the former API.
Edited 2010-12-17 21:47 UTC
There are a few I’d find useful occasionally, but not often enough to justify putting their buttons on my addressbar. With a search bar and various buttons, I already have more than enough clutter on that toolbar.
Opera has hideable toolbars like the view bar that would be ideal for extensions, and I’d assumed that you could drag around the extension buttons, putting them on the toolbar of your choice, but it looks like that isn’t possible.
One of the things I dislike about recent versions of Opera is that they offer less user customisation, and this is a good example of how that can make the browser less usable.
What can I say I’ve been using Opera for a very long time since 1996. No complaints now. Previously it might have some weird rendering problems but it’s now on par or better than other browser.
I have enjoyed using Opera for a long time too – I don’t exactly recall when I first encountered it and used it. Probably close to 10 years now.
Despites some frustrations with the rendering of some pages in the past (likely no longer the case with 11.0), it’s speed and useability on even something as old as Windows 98SE has always been appreciated.
Yeah, I know it is most likely not going to happen (any time soon), but it’s the only reason for me not using it.
Opera is and always has been nice. Opera 11 is no exception.
It would be nice that Opera becomes Open Source. This would allow much creative development to occur along with maybe porting to other platforms (e.g. BeOS/Haiku, OS/2/eComStation).
I like exploring other platforms whenever I have some “free” time. However, I find that not being able to use my preferred (and non-main stream applications) limits my enjoyment of these other platforms.
What makes you think that a lot of “creative development” would occur with Opera? After all, an enthusiastic OSS developer wanting to learn about browsers or improve them can already go work on Firefox, Chromium, or any of the countless other OSS browsers already.
Just because you Open Source it, doesn’t mean that they will come
New features:
* Plug-in loading: Good one, thanks.
* Rendering: Nice continual improvement. Always on the front.
* Stacking. Tried, it. Maybe I’ll find a use. I recently switched to Win7, this seems native.
* Extensions. I never really needed anything Opera doesn’t now have integrated. Looked at widgets and never touched them again. With extensions, we’ll see. I wouldn’t want to slow down my browser as is the case with FF+extensions.
* Address bar: Don’t care much, nothing new for me. When I go to ftp://, still shows “Web”. WTF?
* Mail panel: I don’t use m2.
* Bookmarks bar: I don’t use it.
New bugs in order of subjective annoyance (after 1 day of using):
* the time to open a website seems to have much prolonged for me (on wired connection). seems network, not rendering related.
* mouse gestures now require longer strokes (since a few releases back, I think), so I often open a new tab (down) instead closing one (down, left)
* a mapping website completely broken
Annoyances:
* Pinned tabs are now made very small and moved to the very left. Why the hell!?!
All in all, a pretty normal release for Opera.
Thanks for another great release!!
I think it is an improvement over 10.x. I hadn’t paid close attention to development notes tho’ and thought the tabs would be individual processes.
But it seems to work well/render well. Snappy too.
Okay, I’ve seen everyone else’s comments, so here’s my $0.02 . . .
At home and at work I use several OSes: XP Home, XP Pro, Vista, Mandriva PP 2009.1 and PP 2010.1 (I don’t think we have 7 yet, somehow I am praying that we don’t . . .). I am on 2010.1 right now with the copy of 11 that I installed from the Opera global d/l site last night, as it is too soon after release for it to filter through from the PLF. It works perfectly, any “problems” present in 10.6x are unchanged, hence they are not really “problems” at all but “features” that I am accustomed to. Even more interestingly, I can still use a skin set from the 9.x days, which I prefer because it fits nicely with the colour scheme on my main desktop.
The perfect browser (from my perspective) is one which has been ported to all of the platforms I use, and offers a near-identical (if not exactly identical) performance on all of them. Since I prefer Linux, this actually cuts out anything which has not been “ported” to Mandriva (or can be shoehorned into it from the likes of RH as an rpm).
IE is one I normally do not use – it has actually shown itself incapable of using pages here in Korea specifically designed for it, so I was forced to find another which could support IE-intended web pages (and settled for Avant browser, some kind of “shell” for the IE rendering engine). Out-of-the-way browsers like Avant never seem to get a mention in these hallowed pages, I wonder why? Plus, of course, the sheer volume of malware, spyware, exploits . . .
The fact is that there is no one single browser which suits all of my needs. For most browsing I use Opera and it gives me most of what I need. But it doesn’t seem to work well with my online storage at http://www.startforce.com/ so I have to use Firefox or Seamonkey for this (strangely, I cannot get it to work with IE, either). Some web sites such as http://www.flashduck.co.kr/ are designed for IE but fail to work, and as they do not work with anything from Mozilla or Opera, I have to use Avant, and since Avant is IE-based and therefore Windoze-only, I can only really use it when I am in Windoze . . . so it goes on and on.
The only reasonable response to this seems to be “horses for courses”. Opera is fine for most of my purposes but when it isn’t, there’s always Firefox or Seamonkey. My Linux machines have Konqueror and Chrome, but I hardly ever use these; maybe I’ll find a unique use for them some day . . . the case of needing Avant is the most bizarre, and since it only runs on Windoze, this means supporting W on my machines when I would really just forget about it.
Of more relevance to someone like myself is why it is that I cannot ditch the dreaded Dubya and do everything on another platform, rather than forever being tied to what still seems a rather ill-conceived and vulnerable ecosystem – why software houses prefer to tie themselves to a single unwanted platform, and I as a customer have to suffer for that. If IE gave me everything I wanted, then fine, but it doesn’t, and the variety of offerings has proven to be a help, not a hindrance.
And I have always been happy with Opera. Plus ca change, etc . . .
I won’t even bother trying this release. Just close your stupid company, nor/swe gov will pay up your workers after anyways. Opera should realize their products are worthless and uncompetitive. I feel good that I don’t work at your company, losers.
I feel strongly that such comment does not belong here on OSNews.
Anyways, many of the features now taken for granted when using the main stream browsers originated from Opera. It maybe true that innovative groups/organizations do not necessarily become dominant in the marketplace and/or are heavily criticized when such features are first introduced. However, they deserve to be encouraged – not impeded by wishes for their disappearance from the marketplace.
shame on you buddy.
i’m an opera user since version 2.18 (1997 maybe?)
it is a innovation source since then.
i’m pretty sure your life is so successful to make this kind of comment.
sorry my english, and sorry to all osnews readers for this user’s comment.
Edited 2010-12-18 18:00 UTC
God damn, what did Opera ever do to you?
You can choose not to use it, but I’ll continue to have at least *some* interest. For a while, before Firefox came along, Opera and the Mozilla Suite were all we had (leaving IE out on purpose here)–and guess which one felt snappier while continuing to provide new features that would eventually be copied by all the other major browsers today?
Honestly, I don’t know what Opera could have possibly done to get such a heavy attack thrown their way…
TBH couple of years ago when I really needed job I applied there for some shit and got rejected with no reason after the interview obviously i wasnt swedie pusseh enough. But besides that their crapware browser was always forcing users to watch their ads thats enough to shame themselves. Want to make monnies you dumb faggots convice your tard govt to buy your browser dont force kids and students to watch your ads.
Opera, I am disappoint.
Even if I was that 0.1% of users…
Don’t be. It’s HTML 5 support is a year behind WebKit.
You mean that norm that is being written and shouldn’t be finished and published before years?
Yes, HTML5 is supposed to be great but using it now as a feature to choose a browser or as a reason to not feel disappointed doesn’t seem valid to me.