Opera 11 Alpha is out, brings plugin support | Hacker News Reader

Opera 11 Alpha is out, brings plugin support

opera.com

34 pointsbsk30 comments

"An option has now been added to have plug-ins such as Flash content load only when clicked on.."

nice feature there!. no more of pretty-woman-greeting me on page load.

I wonder if they will ever make their Mac version more native (e.g. standard OSX shortcuts would work in text fields). It's really strange that having a lot of stuff well polished, and releasing a lot of new features, simple things like that are forgotten about. Kind of like OSX not letting you select an arbitrary solid color as your background (that may be intentional though).

Well Opera has gone Cocoa since 10.5 and feels much more native than it used to.

Still, I wish it had the same level of polish as Chrome does on OS X.

They've been more focused on 'Macification' since 10.50 apparently. There's some discussion of this over on the Opera engineer AMA Reddit thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dtbcz/hey_reddit_join_...

Extension support is nice, but I'm disappointed by lack of CSS Flexible Box Model[1] support in this release. It is available in WebKit and Gecko for over a year. Only if Opera supports it…

[1]: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/the-css-3-flexible-box-mode...

Going to give this a whirl. Heard about extensions support when they were chatting with Reddit users the other day.

The thing I liked about Opera was the lack of plugins.

No waiting for 10 add0-ins you've never heard of to update themsleves and ask you to restart your computer.

No having to search the net for add-ins to do things like toggle image loading or prevent popups.

These aren't Firefox add-ins. These are small pieces of JavaScript and HTML/CSS. Probably won't bog down your browser any more than UserJS scripts.

According to them, these new extensions will also have [more?] control over tabs and windows, which plain JS (like their existing Widgets) cannot do.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/getting-started-with-oper...

If you haven't heard of them, why do you have them? Why don't you get rid of them?

I'm also interested in what kind of add-ons you have installed that require you to restart your computer.

I also don't see how the existence of extensions is a downside for a browser. Firefox ships with none to begin with.

Dependencies. You want to toggle image loading (opera's original killer feature), that uses the wibble library witch needs the flooble dll. So you get a message telling you a new flooble library is available everytime you start to browse.

The plugins generally don't need a restart - but under windows the default for installer examples is to restart and the guy that did the flooble binary packaging didn't bother to change it.

I'm very glad opera will finally support extensions. Hopefully it will provide a better interface for tackling ad blocking than the built in blacklist feature or doing it elsewhere(proxy,dns,etc.).

Personally, I've never found the built in ad blocking lacking. Where it missed anything (which is rare), blocking a specific ad is two clicks or so away. In what ways would you like things improved?

For me most useful would be subscription to some EasyList or whatever it's called to block 90% of the ads.

Alpha feels quite stable. Stumbleupon-Addon works great.

Whished the would made the addon-system compatible to Chrome's

Technically, it should be. They're using W3C Widget specifications, an open standard, to do extensions.

EDIT: But I don't think they're compatible out of the box, unfortunately.

Gave it a try on Ubuntu. Extensions are very alpha but nevertheless a welcome move.

Honestly, does anyone use Opera?

I believe they only have 3% desktop market share, but it's definitely the most used mobile browser: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-200909-...

We use it internally at one of my client sites. Until recently, it was the only browser fast enough to keep up with the realtime portfolio screens. Chrome and others are finally catching up, but Opera still performs the fastest with what we throw at it.

I started using it at version 10.0 (when it finally started looking better, thanks to John Hicks).

And the whole Cocoa conversion sealed the deal for me. That, and the fact that I can control it fully with only the mouse or only the keyboard.

I've been using Opera as my main browser for a few years now.

Same here.

Love it now to where other browsers feel boring. Opera takes a bit of commitment in the beginning because it isn't as "popular thing to use" but once you LEARN how humbly powerful it is (browsing speed wise AND feature set), you sort of end up catching yourself going back to it more and more to where you use it for most of the time. Many small features I take for granted now with Opera others don't have or you need some sort of extension to get (or they end up copying later).

Also, the times of running into sites not compatible with Opera are so far and few between now thanks to the growth of browser wars. It happens once in while, sure... It happens in Chrome too. BUT no other browser has a the simple though out ability to right-click the broken webpage and allow you to select to open it in another browser on your system. That to me is "friendly" and shows Opera has a open philosophy.

Try it

Something like 20% of Russia (yeah, I know, we're kind of an exception :)

Do you have any explanation for this? Thanks.

There are several components:

1. Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines. I mean faster in application tasks (launch/switch tabs/go back/etc.), not executing JS.

2. Opera is easy for normal people – it has a ton of features like built in mail reader, etc. but they don't get in your way, it is easy to ignore them if you don't need them. Also, you can't accidentally download a ton of useless Opera toolbars.

3. Opera is free, independent, standards-compliant, secure, etc. - a lot of things that we geeks love.

4. A lot of normal people ask some geek they know to set up their new computer - and we remove the bloat that comes with it and install the basic apps (often including Opera, Avast, ImgBurn, 7zip, etc.). Surprisingly I often hear these normal people saying they actually like Opera way more than IE. I thought they would not care.

Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines.

I strongly second this. I recently tried Opera for the first time in ages on an old ThinkPad ca. 2001 and it's astonishing what it can do with as little as 128MB of RAM and a Pentium 3. Where Firefox and Chrome struggle with even one tab and no extensions, I routinely find myself with a dozen or more open in Opera without it becoming even slightly sluggish. Whatever its faults, I'm extremely impressed.

> Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines.

Just tried it. Indeed it does!

So sad it allows for very little customization and has different shortcuts than other browsers, otherwise I would have jumped on it right away. Hopefully, the next version will fix this.

You're not an exception. Opera is quite popular in all of central and eastern Europe:

http://people.opera.com/dstorey/images/OperaMarketShareEEhov...

(based on StatCounter and Gemius data)

I've been using Opera since version 4, on Windows. I now use 10.63 under Linux. Years ago, Firefox enticed a little, and nowadays Chrome, but I haven't see anything convincing enough to make me switch away from Opera. It's a solid, polished product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com