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Comment by charlesju | Hacker News Reader

Opera,

How about you stop whining about how Apple advertises and just produce a superior product?

I don't think that's fair.

First, it doesn't look like this was an official Opera team complaint. I can't even tell for sure if the guy that started the thread works for Opera.

Second, right now each and every one of the web browsers available has some very stupid problems: Firefox 3 still uses silly amounts of memory, and can't even correctly scroll Reddit pages with lots of comments; Safari is only lukewarm, not customizable, has its own compliance quirks (some versions have a JS bug which will crash it), and isn't especially remarkable in terms of performance; and then there's Internet Explorer.

Opera at least is making an effort, and with fewer resources at hand than either Mozilla or Apple. I'm playing around with 10 alpha right now, and it can actually play TED videos on my PB G4 without skipping frames! Hooray!

With Opera's Dragonfly developer tool, about the only thing that keeps me going back to Firefox right now is AdBlock Plus. If only there were an auto-updating set-it-and-forget equivalent, I'd kick Firefox to the curb for not ironing out some of their issues before releasing 3.

Somebody downvoted you, which was stupid (guys, quit downvoting people you agree with if they're making good points, we're pretending to be civilized here), but I couldn't help but notice that while you've got criticism for Firefox, your things about Safari are things like "lukewarm", which isn't saying much, and "not customizable", which is false (Safari has some incredible plug-ins, and there're a handful of really good ones that people blatantly ignore because they don't advertise their existence). "Isn't especially remarkable" can be said about both Safari and Opera, who are pretty similar to me as an end user. The only impressive one is possibly Chrome, because of its multithreading.

Also, if you're a Mac user, I would recommend GlimmerBlocker (http://glimmerblocker.org), which works as an adblocker for every browser you have, which is awesome.

Thanks! I didn't know about Safari's plugins, and I didn't have specific criticisms of it -- other than the crashing bug with drove me nuts at one point -- because I haven't worked with it as much as I have Firefox. Usually it just hangs out in the background somewhere running Pandora and occasionally being a testbed for a site. (However, it just took forever to shut down...)

GlimmerBlocker looks great, I'm trying it out now.

I don't work for Opera or any browser company. I am merely an Opera user. The problem is that the marketing is dishonest. Generally people take offense to that alone but in addition, they are shedding negatively light on other browsers (chrome, opera, firefox, even ie) that have had the features and functionality they are claiming to have pioneered.

I haven't looked through Opera's page very much, but Firefox certainly does the same in reverse. They've fixed up their claims - before they were even worse - but they still claim a lot of pseudofeature crap that doesn't matter, while admitting that function-wise, Safari's at least on par with them. (When it first came out the marketing talk was much worse: it reminded me in the worst way of things that palm readers say.)

Probably a harsher tone than you needed to take but I do agree. It often seems like Opera's marketing strategy is to scream "me too!" every time one of the more popular browsers does something.

Bottom line: Even though they're right about Apple being a little misleading the sour grapes/call to arms strategy makes me less inclined to try Opera not more.

If they really felt the need to do something they should have taken it with good humor and then turned it into a marketing pitch by extolling their products virtues.

My goal was not to draw in Opera users with the post. My goal was to bring the truth to light.

Maybe Apple just don't think Opera matters. I mean, that does seem to be the general opinion.

Take a look at Opera's history[1]. Screaming "me too" is like Internet Explorer (and Safari) adding tabs and touting it as a feature. There is no "me too" in first. And either way, users are NOT working for Opera ASA. You think Apple's OFFICIAL false claims are just fine and a few Opera users who don't like these false claims make you want to try Opera less?

[1] http://www.opera.com/docs/history/

Opera has been a superior product for YEARS !

However, Apple has had superior MARKETING for years (and I admire them for that :-)

I feel bad for Opera that all the great innovations haven't been noticed by the public, but the good thing is that all the other browsers copy their innovations and get much better.

My killer browsing tip (which maybe the other browsers support as well - I don't know):

- tabs to the left instead of on top

I can have 50 tabs open on my 22 monitor (in portrait mode), and I can still read most of the titles (it shows "Hacker News | Add com..." for this tab while having 50 tabs open)

Hey sweet, thanks for mentioning that. I didn't know they could go there ... it's much better now.

OMNIWeb for OS X supports vertical display of tabs as well. They do it in a 'drawer', in the OS X interface parlance. I love this feature but eventually moved on from OMNIWeb as it got passed in stability, capability, elegance, speed, etc. by other browsers.

If Microsoft claimed that IE was the first browser to offer tabbed browsing, a dedicated search field, etc. - would your reaction be the same?

And how is Opera inferior to Safari? Opera's market share is lower than Safari's, of course, since it's not bundled with any operating system, but that does not mean it's inferior.

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