Faster and better browsing – Welcome Opera 41 | Hacker News Reader

Faster and better browsing – Welcome Opera 41

opera.com

92 pointsSykox104 comments

Wow, Opera has a built-in video pop-out feature. That's very nice. I wrote a script to do that in X11 a while ago: https://github.com/myfreeweb/dotfiles/blob/32c9cfd8d5e0a3a2c... after I saw a Mac app that does this.

Cute script.

Mozilla is also currently working on something like that, although it's not yet clear, if they'll include it in Firefox: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/min-vid

I've always wanted a fill-tab feature for video. The video fills the view port of the tab and removes all the other content but remains just a regular tab. Does it do that by any chance?

Firefox has an extension called watch in mpv which allows you to click on a given video or a button for the page and open the video in mpv. If your window manager allows tabbing various apps together you can even keep this in its own tab with firefox in the other.

Being its own app you can of course have this window floating and on top of your firefox window off in the corner. You could even designate a hotkey to move and resize this window to that position if you so desired.

Hi! I've created a really simple Chrome extension that does this for YouTube, check out it out:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fulltube/nmabgnejf...

source code: https://github.com/ijanos/fulltube

I use a custom URI combined with userjs(tempermonkey), mplayer and youtube-dl for same purpose.

First you add custom URI in windows, lets call it magnet3 (this should be a clue, it works just like torrent magnet links):

  [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Magnet3]
   @="Magnet URI"
   "URL Protocol"=""
   "Content Type"="application/x-magnet"

  [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Magnet3\shell]
  @="open"

  [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Magnet3\shell\open]

  [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Magnet3\shell\open\command]
  @="\"C:\\Users\\me\\Documents\\js\\youtube-dl mplayer.bat\" \"%1\""

then create your 'youtube-dl mplayer.bat' file (the %var:~9% nonsense removes first 9 characters from the passed link, '"magnet3:'):

  set var=%1
  for /f "delims=" %%A in ('d:\_learning\youtube-dl.exe -f best -g "%var:~9%') do start "" "C:\Program Files\smplayer\smplayer" "%%A"

or alternatively if your injected UserJS can extract direct link to media skip youtube-dl step:

  set var=%1
  start "" "C:\Program Files\smplayer\smplayer" "%var:~9%

now all you have to do is add userjs for the websites/services/players you want, for example I have a patched https://greasyfork.org/scripts/7096-convert-youtube-embeds-t... that replaces YT EMBEDs with a thumbnail linking to magnet3:link_to_yt, this is enough for starting mplayer on YT embeds.

Rube Goldberg sequence of hacks, but works perfectly.

Right now with Sierra even Apple has it's Picture-in-Picture as part of the OS itself. What I don't like is that they require the site to comply to their PiP & at the moment as I'm aware of only Vimeo does that. That aside there are some hacks how to enable it on other sites such as Youtube. [0]

I tested Opera's video pop-out as an alternative to macOS's PiP. What is positive here is that Opera's mode supports most of the video players. Also what I like in Opera's mode is that you can actually control the timeline in the pop-out which seems useful.

But the deal-breaker is when you change focus between desktops (Apple's Spaces). Opera's video pop-out doesn't follow you. Actually you have to transfer the browser window with you on the other desktop in order to have the video pop-out which kinda brakes the point of the feature for me.

[0] - https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-enable-picture-in-picture-...

Good to know, but nothing to make a fuss about: Looking at the video, it seems that they are now simply loading the currently open tab before the others (starting by the ones adjacent to it) instead of loading all tabs at once. Other browsers have had this for a while

> Other browsers have had this for a while

Hilariously, Opera itself used to have this! I think it was one of the first browsers that had this :)

(at least that's what I remember from back in the day, maybe my memory is deceiving me)

Well, the new Opera already had an option to load tabs on demand when you switch to it after starting up. I guess now they're adding an option to load them in the background. In terms of performance the load tab on demand works reasonably well.

Are you thinking of cooperative scheduling? If so, Presto did pioneer this.

When did Chrome get it?

For the longest time, Chrome has had the bad habit of consuming all available CPU when starting with many tabs (a couple of hundred), essentially making your system unusable until it has loaded all tabs.

It's pretty sad, really. Back when Opera 12 was discontinued, this worked well there - tabs were loaded sequentially, but you could still open new tabs while it was doing so. Even now the experience is sub-par in the major browsers (Chrome and Firefox. I can't speak for Edge).

I mentioned Chrome already, but Firefox is also awfully slow to start up with many tabs, even when lazy-loading (i.e. a tab is not loaded until you select it) enabled.

I've yet to try Opera 41, but at least it seems to be a step in the right direction.

You use a couple hundred tabs?

You don't?

The only thing i want from opera now is open source, I enjoyed opera for years now, and it is my favorite one by far,

But i am a little concerned about it is not opensource, witch make forefox a better choice for privacity...

TIL. I always assumed it was open source and was about to try it. Oh well.

Nope, you even had to pay to use it in the past.

I wish Chrome would adopt Vivaldi's and Opera's feature to not close the window if you're closing the last tab. This works nicely in Firefox, Opera and Vivaldi, and I always accidentally close Chrome. I've seen Chrome extensions for this, but they don't do this properly and take up considerable memory for something that should be a core feature.

Well, I actually enjoy that feature, especially using mouse middle click to close tabs & browser. Why do you want browser to stay open when you are actually closing it?

Because I'm not closing it. I'm closing the tab. Opening chrome takes a few seconds to open which is annoying when I want to quickly google something without loosing focus.

Ok, I understand.

But you can press ALT+D, type your google text, hit enter.

No need to close tab, no need to open home page, no need to move mouse.

The point is that I want to close my current tab - I'm done with it. I just don't want to close the whole browser - I want it hanging around with no tabs in it so that I don't have to take the time to launch it again. Like closing all files in an IDE or Photoshop.

Alt+D, Ctrl(/Cmd)+L, F6, many ways to skin that cat ;)

Just do Command+W, Command+T really fast on the last tab

It's interesting, on phones closing the last tab in chrome/firefox does not quit the app.

Because I don't want to open a new browser window because I closed the last tab and there's no Close-other-tabs key binding, just a menu item, if I were to emulate the behavior by closing all other tabs, optionally clear history and navigating to somewhere else in the current (now solitary) tab.

Speaking of UI regressions, Chrome's text input fields hijack Ctrl-Shift-Del, so you have to leave those controls before you can use the existing and standard key binding to invoke the clear settings dialog. Opera has the same bug, but Vivaldi, maybe because the UI is written in HTML, doesn't hijack it and the keybinding works globally in Vivaldi.

Options are a possibility, you know. You don't need to give up the way you do things, just because someone else wants to do things in a different way. No need to get all defensive about it.

Now if only they'd deliver on the marketing talk about actually getting Opera v12 features into Chromera, or at least do the human thing of opening up the source of v12.

Till then, quite a few people will stick with v12 as main browser.

Also, beware: The browser part of the Opera company was sold to chinese malware producer Qihoo 360, after they failed to buy the entire company.

The problem with sticking to 12 is that it's not really an option any more. You lose out on newer web technologies, and at least on Windows you run into security issues, since enabling newer TLS versions makes Opera prone to crash.

Incorrect. With these customizations you can make it very easy to open any page/link from inside Opera in any other browser:

https://gist.github.com/wchristian/9a479b6969ba653681f50b415...

It is in practice entirely viable to keep using Opera as the main browser and punt troublemakers to other browsers as necessary.

That it's easy to work around doesn't mean it's incorrect.

That aside, the SSL/TLS issues alone make it unusable. Changing the settings to make it use the newest TLS version it has support for makes it crash, and even if it did there are no updates at all any more. That means no security fixes, no support for new cipher suites, etc.

You said: "not an option anymore"

This is incorrect in various ways, if only because there exists at least one example of someone using it successfully as the main browser, while also being employed as a web dev: Me.

You're right; just not an option to most reasonable people.

Ah yes, ad hominem, the tool of choice for reasonable people.

I don't think you know what that means, and throwing the term around doesn't make you sound smart. I'm attacking your argument in that it is a ridiculous workaround for a problem that doesn't really exist.

Nah man, i know exactly what it means and what your game is. You're pretty sad. :)

Yeah... I guess my "game" is that I wouldn't use an outdated browser and rely on a plugin to avoid security bugs and sites that use modern features. What are you even talking about?

Primarily that you've sufficient lack of clue as to what you're even talking about that assuming I'm insane may in fact be healthiest for your machinery.

'troublemakers' as in, modern sites that v12 doesn't support? So now I have to use two browsers via a plugin? Yeah that sounds like solid UX there.

Didn't they announce they weren't going to add the v12 features back because the number of power users were so few? I swear there was a blog post about this a couple years ago.

edit: as for Quihoo 360: they may not be all bad. They seem to have a bunch of serious security researchers. Look at all the CVEs they've reported, like the most recent OpenSSL vuln.

Yeah, they had one of the most prominent old school devs talk about how they're going to maintain the values and they were working on lots of things to bring over, yet even years later they're still in not even a quarter of the way. They also talked a lot about how they spent real effort writing a new UI on top of the chrome core and how it was not just a chrome fork, and how the UI would allow them to do exciting things. And well. Look at it.

Vivaldi is better at being an Opera clone than Chromera ever was.

Re qihoo: Possibly. I have fairly bad memory so the details didn't stick around, but i remember fairly distinctly them distributing something that was straight-up malware.

I use Chrome , Firefox , Opera all for different reason. The one that I find most appealing even though I am a big chrome fan is Opera.Opera's inbuilt ad-blocker is pretty decent and combine that with the great usable bookmarking engine I find it very usable on 2 - 24 inch screens.

Firefox used to be great but rendering webpages just feels faster on Chrome/Opera. Opera has great potential to become a great browser as long as it focuses on adblocking and security by default.

And Opera is the only one who got tab switching with Ctrl+Tab right. That's the single most important feature which made me use Opera as my default browser.

(For dev tools, just press Ctrl+Shift+I instead of F12).

Interesting. One of my biggest issues with Opera is its seemingly random tab switching order. If I open ten tabs and want to go through them one by one, I first have to go through all my old tabs. There used to be an option to change this, but they removed it long ago :/

I like Vivaldi[1] for its keeping most of the options, such as the one you've mentioned.

[1] https://vivaldi.com

opera:settings > type "cycle tabs in most recently used order" and uncheck (some text editors also use that by default, hate that)

Opera is switching tabs by "most recently used" order, just like Windows does for applications with Alt+Tab. That's exactly what I want, but if it confuses you, you can turn it off in the settings ("[x] Cycle tabs in most recently used order")

How does it work differently from Chrome?

It switches tabs in most recently used order in Opera, similar to OS alt/cmd-tab behavior

In Firefox, enabling `browser.ctrlTab.previews` makes the Ctrl+Tab behaviour much nicer. Not comparing, just noting.

This feature will be a first-class citizen in the preferences UI starting with Firefox 50: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1116787

I concur. I could never use Chrome because I'd despise having to go through all my tabs just to get back to the last one I used. I tried a few plugins to get it to work but it never did. I can't remember what it was, but there were a few things about FF I could not get used to so I always went back to Opera.

A few months ago i stumbled upon the new Opera, in search of battery saving on my Macbook Pro. My battery lasts longer than when using Chrome, because of the built in power saving. The VPN addition is nice to, for testing purposes or just surfing safely. The only problem i have with Opera for now is that i'm not able to use Chrome plugins.. Not everything is available on Opera.

They would should have made it easy to sideload chrome extensions. Try this app "Download chrome extensions." It'll allow you to download extensions straight from the Chrome store.

https://addons.opera.com/extensions/details/app_id/kipjbhgni...

On a Mac, I just use Safari. It is very power efficient, fast, pages scroll smoothly, it's basically the best browser for the platform.

I switch to Chrome for web development because of the better developer tools, but my battery life suffers badly when I do that.

On a desktop Mac with a lot of RAM, would you pick Safari over Chrome for general browsing?

I've been using Chrome for a while but I'm thinking of switching back to Safari.

I no longer have a big need for extensions that are not available for Safari (I miss uBlock, but I think I can make do with a Safari Content Blocker list and dnsmasq) I don't have a Macbook but I might start using it soon, so it'd nice to use the same browser in both devices.

Yes, definitely. Safari is more responsive, scrolls better and is overall faster.

Firefox is the second best browser on OSX in terms of battery efficiency (at least from what I've gathered from benchmarks) and has good developer tools, too, so you might be able to compromise with that.

I had my Ubuntu 14.04 freezing a lot when Chrome is launched. I switched to Opera and no more freezes.

Beside, living in a sub-African nation, Opera VPN helps me access some restricted shows.

I use Firefox for downloading stuffs over the net : the DownthemAll extension is what makes me use Firefox. Nothing else.

I really wish I could use Opera, but without Tab Overflow, having more then 15 tabs means the tabs are so small, and you cant read the title of the Tab. This is espeically important when i have multiple Tabs open on the same site, and therefore same site icon showing.

Mouse Traveling to Tab List and select is just annoying. When you know the Tab you want is somewhere in here right next to it.

I really want to use Opera, it is so much faster, but for power ( many Tabs ) users It seems the only choice right now, ( and for the past years ) is only Firefox.

Vivaldi with vertical tabs work well for this too, coupled with the keyboard shortcut to bring up a fuzzy tab selector. It's pretty awesome. Plus you get tab cycling in recently used order - the only sane option.

...and mouse gestures still aren't customizable again (they already had this long, long ago).

I suppose that was while Opera was still it's own thing with it's own engine (Presto) and before they became just another Chrome fork

They are customizable in Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.net/en-US/teamblog/162-mouse-gestures-to-the...), another browser, which is made by ex-Opera folks, include the CEO and former core devs. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but Vivaldi is also Blink-based and has been restoring other Opera 12 features than Opera Opera has.

Customizable, yet not very usable - if the gesture you want to set already exists, Vivaldi doesn't let you overwrite it (unassigning the other one). Hell, it doesn't even tell you which one has taken it : ) Gotta find it on your own. Did they test it?

I haven't used Opera for a long, long time.

How does it stack up currently against Chrome?

Anyone here using it as their main browser?

Well, in case you managed to ignore the news in 2013 (a lot of people did), it uses Chrome's Blink-engine now, instead of the Presto-engine which they previously developed. So, it's very much identical to Chrome for the most part.

In fact, you can use Chrome plugins for Opera. It's basically Chrome with a slightly different feature set.

I used it for a while when Chrome's UI was broken on high DPI screens. I loved it; it did basically everything Chrome did with a bit more polish, and as a bonus all of my Chrome extensions were compatible. Of course, I didn't have that old pre-Blink baseline to compare it to, so you might be disappointed coming back to it. I went back to Chrome after the Qihoo buyout.

I was a long time Chrome user, and was driven to Opera as Chrome got slower and slower each year. Now I find Chrome basically unusable, in that pages take far too long to become scrollable, and suffer from other kinds of unresponsiveness. Opera has been perfect. Always fast and responsive.

Just installed it! Visibly faster for me, they seem to have done good work in this release.

Not bothering to read - is it still a reskin of Chrome and thus not Opera? Or are they moving back to an updated Presto engine? Because if not, SeaMonkey remains my primary browser; since Opera 12 is "unsafe".

How is Opera "unsafe" exactly? Are there any serious bugs or vulnerabilities?

I've been told that Opera 12 is unsafe now. I don't remember the details.

I'm happy with http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

I can't find the VPN option in Settings, even when I search... but the help page says it should be available under Privacy and Security..

Edit>Preferences> Private&Security > VPN.

Don't you have those ?

I'm on Mac, and no. All I have is a link to the VPN provider's website where I can purchase their VPN. There is no option to turn it on in the browser, even with 'Show Advanced Settings' selected.

The VPN is blocked in China. To get around this you have to set your computer's location to the US (or a country where the VPN is permitted), then reboot Opera. The computer's location can be changed in the System Preferences menu of a Mac.

I really miss the tab stacking feature, but also the integrated email and rss readers. :'(

Is Opera still running webkit, or did they switch to something else in the past few years?

As far as I know, they are using Blink (Google's WebKit fork), rather than WebKit.

Cold start Opera 40 - 63 seconds

Cold start Opera 41 - 8 seconds

Both values are so much slower than anything recent by Firefox or Chrome..? Who waits over a minute for their browser to start?

If you swap the video, they're counting the time to cold startup to fully load the page from your last session. And sure, I have dozens of tabs in Chrome, and while Chrome itself starts fast, fully load a webpage can take a long time.

I hate to sound mean, but Opera feels somewhere between the Moller Skycar and a Dyson Hairdryer.

To be fair:

Chrome is fast and adopts tech fairly quickly but kills your battery and your privacy.

Firefox is private and supports new things, but wastes your time.

Safari is battery-efficient, but waste your time and tech lags.

(IE is shit.)

---

Conclusion: Pick your poison for the appropriate task and time.

What about Edge?

Do anyone use Safari on Windows these days?

It's no longer a thing. [1]

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2012/07/25/apple-appears-to-currently-be...

I don't think so, Apple stopped supporting Safari on Windows since v5 & right now Safari is at v10.

Refer to IE.

I think [0] is a more useful link

[0] https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/86-percent-faste...

Looks like someone failed to change the link (it's now broken), and made the title refer to the wrong blog post.

The original title referred to this one: https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/86-percent-faste... not this one https://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/10/opera-developer-....

They finally got rid of the 1px space above tabs. They also logged me in on Reddit instantly upon new install, which is, at least, kinda odd as I never gave 'em permission to harvest my Firefox data.

So uninstalling.

Is it possible it remembered your login from the last time you tried Opera?

Just let him uninstall it.

62 seconds to start my browser if I had too many tabs opened before previously? Why is that even saved between launches by default then? It takes less than that amount of time to switch to chrome

Browsers losing my tabs on shutdown is unusable for me, that's one of the reasons I stopped trying to use Edge.

Yes same here. I normally leave my workstation running overnight so I can come back to it in the morning but given Windows 10 and its propensity to restart at 3am, losing all the open tabs is not an option. (And no, I can't reschedule this as I am under a group policy at work so it is out of my hands).

So saving tab state is ideal. I too stopped attempting to use Edge. It weirdly presents its own custom menu for right-clicks, which means there is one for Edge, one for the Start menu, and then the normal native one. Seems Microsoft likes making work for itself with 3 different menu implementations to maintain.

86% faster when starting up with 42 tabs open. I'd guarantee 99% of those people with 42 tabs open after startup immediately Close 41 of them.

Because it's so slow, perhaps they wouldn't have developed this habit if it wasn't

If they do not need them for some reason, why would they leave 40 tabs open in the first place?

I believe this to be a rather unlikely assumption.

Other way round. When I'm starting up with dozens of tabs, many of them will be left open but never touched. Sometimes tabs can be months old.

I'll occasionally do "cache spill to pinboard", but otherwise they remain open until I get round to them again or I have a "tab bankruptcy" imposed by software failure.

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