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Comment by metamemetics | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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