Opera 11 goes final | Hacker News Reader

Opera 11 goes final

my.opera.com

115 pointsKenw00t40 comments

The Best. Been a big fan of Opera browser for a long time now. There was a minor speed bump of bugs when 10.x first came out but starting at 10.10 it has been top notch. Once you learn all of Opera's nuances using any other browser feels outdated and not as well thought out for a user. Speed is right there with Chrome, built in mail/rss and now with the 11.x extensions there is no more excuses to try it.

The little browser that could.

> Once you learn all of Opera's nuances using any other browser feels outdated and not as well thought out for a user

From what I feel, the average user doesn't spend much time learning a software's nuances. They just want to use the first thing that works in the first go.

And from what I feel, the average Hacker News user is not the average user, so budman's comment is quite relevant in the context of this site.

"built in mail/rss"

I was an Opera evangelist for many years but all the extra bundled apps I never use finally pushed me to chrome.

The RSS is good, the Opera mail is good... the IRC and bittorrent, on the other hand, are not very good at all, which is sad, because it would be very nice if they were!

The only feature that was missing was autocomplete for textboxes, and now I found an extension to do it. Opera is finally complete!

The killer feature that kept me using Chrome before was the automatic page translations. There's a nice extension to do that now in Opera too and I am now very very happy with Opera.

After a quick look-over, I'll be sticking with Chrome due to two small UX issues that Chrome does exceedingly well:

1. Despite both having "tabs on top", in Chrome tabs extend all the way to the edge of the screen. In Opera, there's a small unclickable border area. This is a basic, basic Fitts' Law mistake that makes it so much harder to click tabs.

2. Chrome does that thing where when you close a tab, the "close" button of the next tab ends up exactly under your mouse pointer. This is such a nice and natural feature that you forget there was any alternative. Firefox and Opera both get this so wrong.

Opera lets you bypass the anachronistic 'tab' metaphor completely:

http://imgur.com/XuMkx.png

Use Ctrl-Tab to switch between tabs the same way you Alt-Tab between windows. Close a tab with Ctrl-F4, similar to closing windows with Alt-F4.

Firefox with Vimperator does even better - t to open a tab to a url or search string, d to close a tab, Ctrl-n and Ctrl-p to tab between them.

Of course, Chrome's Vim extension replicates similar functionality. Either way, reducing mouse-keyboard context-switching is useful.

A trackpoint is my way of reducing mouse-keyboard context switching :)

Also, right click + scroll

Do you know if there is a way to quickly jump to a specific window in Opera, with a strings search, like in Vimperator? This would be really nice.

This is interesting I have my tabs placed to the left and it works fine. When the tabs are placed at the top however they cannot be clicked on from the edge of the screen. Placing the tabs on the left has always made sense to me since most websites are designed for resolutions that are far smaller than 1920 pixels. The real real estate is the vertical space. Placing the tabs on the left also allows me to have a small preview of the page without waiting for the mouse over. I understand this solution is not for everyone.

Opera seems to listen to the community relatively closely so hopefully these two issues can be solved in a future patch (or maybe even an extension).

Yeah I've submitted bug reports about the tab-clicking thing, but their response has always been "but how else would the user drag the window!?!". Stupid. I'd love to see the metrics on how often users drag a full-screen window vs. how often they click a tab.

There was a brief period of time when the tabs did extend to the very top of the screen in Opera, but they changed it back to this. Presumably to make it easy to drag the window around.

I don't actually use the tabs to click on, so this is fine for me. I always switch by holding down my right mouse button and spinning the scroll wheel.

This is a great browser, and the competition is always good for the users.

For me it was easier when the only choice was hating IE and going for Firefox, right now i struggle between my emotions to use one or other wonderful browser as my main one...

When firefox 4 comes its going to be even harder...

Heh, same. I've been cycling b/t Opera, Chrome, Chromium, and FF for years now. Right now I'm stuck on FF b/c Vimperator is so awesome, but now that Opera 11 can have full-fledged extensions, that might change. Or, maybe not since FF4 is shaping up to be amazing too.

This is kind of off topic, but the Opera system tray icon drives me nuts and it is probably driving someone else nuts too. For whatever reason, the /notrayicon switch does not work for me after I upgraded. I'm not sure if previous versions have this, but in this one you can disable the tray icon via opera:config.

Paste opera:config#UserPrefs|ShowTrayIcon in the address bar, uncheck, save and restart.

Every OS I have ever used has a way to hide system tray icons. Windows has had this since 98, both Gnome and KDE have it, and OSX has it. What is the problem exactly?

And how are you so annoyed by a 16x16 pixel red O? Please never try to drive in NYC...

It's annoying to me too. I can't just hide all my tray icons because I need some of them, and the red O makes my desktop/theme look crappy since all the other icons are white (using GNOME with Orta theme + Faenza icons).

Yes, I understand that. You can configure the system tray to hide icons from specific programs. That way you have every icon except for Opera. The program need not include an option to hide it.

Right click > Properties

There is no "properties" setting for the Notification Area applet in Gnome (at least in version 2.32.0.2, which is what ships with Fedora 14), which is what the commenter you responded to said he was using.

You should submit a bug report.

Install Opera 11, visit intranet page, get prompted for password.

Search NTLM in config, it's got one option which is enabled.

(That Chrome for business blog post yesterday got me to retry Chrome which supports NTLM automatically by default).

Close opera, uninstall. Uninstall prompts that it crashed while editing preferences (it didn't) and offers to send a crash report.

I wonder if I could get a job as a software tester? I always hit bizarro behaviour just trying to use software normally.

As soon as you became a tester all the bizarro behavior would probably stop. I know this from experience :)

I switched to Chrome a couple weeks ago, I really love Opera and have used it for years, but it reached the point where it would take a full minute or two just to end the process after I closed the browser and 30+ seconds just to open it the first time. Drove me nuts, only happens on my desktop at least.

I recently switched to chrome from firefox as well for a similiar reason. Browsers are just getting too bloated. Although i just looked at their video demonstration of tab stacking which looks really cool. The problem is opera was even slow in the video which doesnt really make me want to use it.

I've been a fan since Opera fit on a floppy disk (3 or 4)? It has always been the fastest browser, except for the stinch in 9 and parts of 10. I've always had it installed and would use it along Chrome, FF, Flock. Eleven is just wonderful. Its fast as lighting, you can try this test, load up like 20 pages and close it. Now open it again, no 30 seconds of waiting for it to crunch it all up like in FF. Amazing! It also seems to respond more like it did from 6 and below where back mean truly instant redraw. Bravo Opera. Now we just need some extensions...

After upgrading, it kept freezing every time I started it. Turns out it was choking on the Google Body Browser tab. Quickly switching to Body Browser and closing the tab before it could load prevented it from freezing again, but it's not a permanent fix, or something I should be expected to do every time a tab becomes unresponsive. There ought to be a way to detect and kill unresponsive tabs.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011423 - opera.com - no comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011357 - arpitnext.com - no comments

Be careful: I just installed it and it decided it will be my default browser and take over the file associations (.htm, .html, .xhtml) and protocol associations from Firefox.

I thought we left this kind of crappy warfare in the late 90s.

In the first screen you have to click on "Options" to change this.

I like the streamlined installation process, but the options are indeed very easy to overlook.

Thanks. I clearly missed that.

The after-the-fact way is to use the Windows defaults tool, a Good Thing to emerge from the defaults wars.

Indic fonts are broken in both on Linux and Windows versions.

Disappointment :(

back to good old Firefox

I want to try and love Opera, but every time I try it out something goes wrong. Now, installing on Ubuntu I get:

"Error: Breaks exisiting package 'opera-static' conflict: opera ( )"

Try removing opera-static first.

Did you uninstall opera first?

you shouldn't need to do that manually. That's what package managers are for: handling updates and uninstalling old software in favor of the new version.

First bug so far: opening yahoo mail hyperlinks stalls forever in the current tab. It is fixed by opening all links in new tabs.

Anyway, the built-in adblock is top-notch.

I was excited about this, however after 5 minutes of use it seems more buggy than the beta. Guess I'm excited for 11.0.1 now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com