Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit | Hacker News Reader

Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit

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59 pointskatovatzschyn37 comments

I've been using Opera for many years. I'm so used to its features that I have a really hard time using any other browser.

Some people think it has site compatibility issues. That was certainly true back in versions 7, 8 and even 9, but with the latest 10.6 builds, I rarely, if ever, find a site that doesn't work. If it doesn't it's usually due to browser sniffing rather than actual functionality problems.

My favorite features are:

(screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/114028/OperaScreenshot.png )

1. Left-side tabs - I have a wide-screen monitor, why waste the vertical space on tabs?

2. Visual tabs - thumbnails of the pages on the tab. I can't get along without tab thumbnails!

3. Speed Dial - My top 20 sites sitting right on the new tab screen. If a site isn't on my speed dial, I probably don't visit it

4. Address bar - type in anything and it'll search bookmarks and previously visited sites, including the site's CONTENT, not just the URLs.

5. Custom searches - Just right-click in any search text box and create a new search. Assign the search a shortcut (g=google, i=google images, wi=wikipedia, tv=tv.com, etc)

6. Built-in IMAP/POP3 client - I use Opera's built-in email client exclusively for personal email. The email search engine is extremely fast. Type in any word and get a list of emails in less than a second, despite having 25,000 emails indexed. Also, whenever I get email I get a notification right in my browser window. The sidebas constantly shows me the number of unread emails, so no need to open Gmail in a tab to see if there's new mail. I can also click on mailto: links and they work =)

7. Mouse gestures - Although I only use one, I can browser with out it. I use right-click to left-click flip gesture to go back a page all the time. I find myself doing it in every other browser and it takes me time to figure out why it's not working

8. Opera Turbo - I travel a lot and use a lot of crappy hotel internet, so Turbo is great because it compresses all the pages before downloading them, making my browsing much faster on the slow connection

9. Built-in RSS reader - Any page that has an RSS feed shows an icon in the address bar. Click it to add the feed right into the Mail panel. I have a whole list of RSS feeds I read right in the browser every day

10. Built-in ad-blocker - Right-click on any site and choose "Block Content" then click on the content to block. Easy.

I think most of these features are unique to Opera, and if not, many were copied or implemented by as extensions to other browsers. Does anyone else do visual tabs on the left?

I agree with everything you say, except that Facebook, GMaps and a few other sites don't work very well for me. Hell, I just opened GMaps to see if they'd fixed it and the browser froze.

Ditto. I use Opera for almost everything, but I use Chrome for Facebook and Google Maps.

The JS on the Amazon AWS pages doesn't work very well, either. Can't open up the dialog that has my secret key, for example.

Weird, I use Google Maps all the time in Opera, probably almost daily, and never have problems. It used to be a bit slow, but that's changed with the new JIT engine in 10.6/10.7 alpha.

Ah, I've had such problems before. I fixed them by deleting all my preferences files, which I shouldn't really have to do. I'll try a clean install and see if it fixes it, thanks.

Good thing we have sync, at least.

Hi! Full disclosure: I'm interning at Opera now. Site compatibility is a tricky issue, however it is one of our main goals. I'm personally working on OperaWatir, an Opera backend for Watir (duh). That means sites can take their existing Watir suite and run them in Opera. This should really help for sites like Facebook who have large Watir test suites and arn't currently targeting Opera compatibility. Official release date? When it's done :) However, you can read about it here: http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/03/06/test-automation-wit...

Ah, that's good news. I look forward to not having to launch other browsers!

Different strokes for different folks, but this is precisely what turns me off about Opera. I don't want a kitchen sink. I want an uncomplicated web browser.

That web browser used to be Firefox, but it got too heavyweight for me and Chrome's more minimalist approach became my preferred experience.

The Opera vs. The Rest argument feels a lot like the endless emacs vs. vi war :)

   The Opera vs. The Rest argument feels a lot like the endless emacs vs. vi war :)

I have thought this also.

  Opera - Vi

  Firefox - Emacs

  Chrome - Nano/Pico

  IE - Notepad/Wordpad

In fairness, any stuff you don't wish to use doesn't get in the way. I'm a longtime Opera user (I bought a license back when it wasn't free yet!) and I don't use the built in Mail and RSS clients. They don't get in the way and it's still extremely fast. I did switch to Chrome for a while as the Mac and Linux versions were rather unstable in the early 10.x series, but 10.6 is solid again.

>Chrome's more minimalist approach

I find Opera to be far more minimalist than Chrome from a user interface perspective. Chrome doesn't even let you remove the tab bar.

[ Here is a screenshot of me switching "tabs" in Opera http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/9053/operal.jpg ]

Opera is just flexible and customizable. Mine doesn't even have a toolbar, because I use gestures for everything (edit: I mean I don't see/feel any of the "kitchen sink" — I haven't enabled it, and I could even disable things that clutter other browsers)

Opera with the kitchen sink weighs less (14MB download Mac UB) than barebones Firefox (19MB) or Chrome (30MB).

Kitchen sink is something you feel (UI clutter, features most users don't want), not something you measure (megabytes).

Firefox used to have an actual kitchen sink as an easter egg:

http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/kitchensin...

I love Opera too, but mainly b/c it's always been fast, and I much prefer their infinitely more flexible Multiple Document Interface (MDI) to tabs. I actually hide everything - the sidebars, navbar, etc, and browse using shortcut keys (mainly Ctrl-Tab to switch through tabs and Alt-menushortcutkey) and mouse gestures. Here's an older image of Opera and FF side by side:

http://imgur.com/R2Wod.png

I'm using FireFox now primarily b/c of Vimperator, but still pop Opera up every now and then to give it some love.

Just FYI, someone wrote the equivalent of Vimperator for Opera. I don't have it to hand here, so you will have to google for it. I use it all the time and it works great.

Yeah, Vimperopera and Vopera, but both are abandoned. I have the source of the former and might one day get around to working on it, but that's pretty low priority as long as Vimperator and Firefox work so well.

The only other browser to do visual tabs on the left that I know of is OmniWeb for Mac, which is/was an awesome browser that doesn't see much support.

I still use Opera on my PC laptop because like you, I'm used to the interface and the built in features. However, on Mac I've never felt like it was as stable/fast.

One feature that used to be in Opera that now isn't (but is in chrome) is switching between your first 10 tabs using Ctrl+# shortcut. I've grown very used to that and was sad to see that go.

Reposting from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790843

Why you should care about Opera:

1. More minimal interface than Chrome. New-tab Speed-dial can be a solid background [or image] with no extra cruft. Unlike Chrome which adds bookmarks, recently closed, help links etc.

2. Equivalent performance to Chrome including JavaScript.

3. Firefox-isms while offering chrome performance. Aka Pop-in sidebars for downloads and history rather than new tabs.

5. CTRL-Tabbing is similar to operating system alt-tabbing. You don't even need a tab bar occupying screen real estate.

6. Password manager light-up button is a superior user experience to saved password autocomplete in Chrome and Firefox.

7. Right click mouse gestures. [and fully navigable keyboard only]

Also, it has a very good Firefox style "Awesome Bar" that can even search inside the text of pages in your history.

You will tear noscript from my cold, dead hands.

Opera is getting extensions, in the mean time you can use the built-in functionality:

Preferences > Advanced > Content. Uncheck Enable JavaScript to disable it globally.

Then when you want to manually enable JS for a single site:

Right-click anywhere on page> Site Preferences > Scripting. Check Enable JavaScript.

It's worth pointing out, you don't need to go through all the menus. Most (all?) functionality accessible in menus can be put on a button on the status bar. I have my Enable JavaScript checkbox down at the bottom, next to disabling images and CSS (useful for SEO work).

While we're pointing out different ways to disable JS, the F12-menu is also nice to have. F12 pops up a menu with some handy settings, including "Enable plugins" and "Enable JavaScript".

Yes, it is extremely inconvenient (available exactly as you described), and JavaScript is a small portion of what NoScript does for you. A quick rundown of features as I understand them:

* blocking is the default, with whitelist enables

* quick script block for individual sources on a page; I can disable content from turner.com and revsci but can allow cnn.com when I am viewing cnn.com pages

* block is for plugins, too, and I can left-click the plugin image to selectively enable that specific plugin, whatever site it is from -- flash, silverlight, java, and other embeddings

* blacklisting sources per site or for all sites

* XSS protection

* weird script behavior protection, such as malicious attempts to overlay controls so that a user accidentally activates the wrong thing

* global override (allow all scripting temporarily)

* some cookie control

Here is a more comprehensive description: http://noscript.net/features

Maybe there is not a one-stop shopping for Opera, though, and I can get all this with multiple Opera extensions? I did run down a path at one point that made the JavaScript control more NoScripty, but the rest of NoScript's benefits provide a too-nice user experience and sense of safety.

Note: I am not a Firefox fanboy. I just really love NoScript's help. The only other real advantage I feel Firefox has over Opera is its JavaScript support (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/JavaScript#Ve...). I periodically check to see if the next version of Chrome will support the hooks a NoScript clone would require, and Opera periodically grabs my attention.

> Yes, it is extremely inconvenient (available exactly as you described)

There is a shortcut key for that - F12, so it's actually quite convenient :-)

It's also worth pointing out that we recently added a preference for enabling click-to-play for plugins. Open this: opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableOnDemandPlugin url in the browser, and check the box.

I worked for Opera from the start of 2007 until the start of this year, (webapps team). It's really fun seeing the company from the outside again, great people, great place to work, great product; I just wish Norway suited me better.

My main hope for Opera 11 is that they focus more on their Mac version.

I've moved on from Opera. It took them forever to implement basic usability features such as text box spell-check, and inline password remember/find in page. They also removed great features such as one click bookmarking. Their widgets used to be great, one hot-key and they'd all pop-up on screen like on OSX. Now you have to basically manage each one individually with multiple clicks and they clutter your taskbar like crazy. Meanwhile they focus on low value features like Unite. In the default install, it takes several clicks just to get to your list of bookmarks (ignoring hotkeys or custimization, from a business perspective this is bad.)

These aren't just flukes, it seems to be a pattern in their priorities that has shifted in the past few years. Away from low friction usability and innovative features to something a bit more convoluted. Opera used to be top of the pack in usability, even for non-power users. But now for some reason they lost their edge. And aside from this reddit AMA, it seems to be very difficult to have a discussion with them about changes to the browser. They have a suggestions forum but it seems to be mostly ignored, at least in terms of feedback.

How about a UserVoice for Opera?

(just my analysis/opinion)

I have been doing massive Web Development targeting Chrome (Safari), Firefox and certainly IE.

I also give Opera a shot from time to time. My review is: Their rendering engine is fine, though not perfect. They have some minor problems. However, the JavaScript engine is awful. It doesn't behave like FF or Chrome engines. It's stupidly slow and sometimes freeze the browser. Font rendering isn't optimal, still better than IE.

As a developer, I find it hard to care about Opera.

Their business interests with their engine don't seem to fit with my interests as a developer.

I work as a core QA at Opera. Do you have examples of the javascript problems that you experienced? We rewrote the engine for 10.50 so it's possible that that has fixed the issues you saw. On the DOM side we are working hard with other vendors through W3C / WHATWG / etc. to make the web specs precise enough that we can all converge on the same behaviour.

Any bugs that you report [1] would be much appreciated.

[1] https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/

Funny, I do web development mainly in Opera and find that other browsers are fine, though not perfect :)

It's probably the same reason why people who develop mainly in IE find that Firefox/Chrome "is broken". Browser that you develop for is going to seem best, because during development you automatically adjust to its problems.

Opera was one of the first to pass Acid2 and render Acid3 pixel-perfect. They've been a bit late to the rounded corners/shadows game, but done them well (e.g. can render border style and radius on same element properly). They have really solid layout engine.

That "stupidly slow" JS engine is lately going head to head with V8.

One thing we can probably agree on is that JS error reporting in Opera is awful.

I just came here to post about it.. there are a lot of Opera engineers there replying to questions, so this may get interesting =)

I met some of the Opera devs at a conference a while back. They seem like they have a lot of fun.

Unrelated question: Is Opera paying Reddit for use of their website?

Reddit should really look into this if not. There could be real money in this, plus the community loves it!

wow nice configs there http://twitpic.com/2z0tdb

http://files.myopera.com/ruario/Pictures/eeepc_toolbar_confi... !!!

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