le nozze di figaro

September 20, 2005 3:00 AM

Opera is free. If Opera isn't the best browser, then it's a very close second. They hope to make money through ad revenue generated by search engines instead of banners.
posted by raaka (77 comments total)

Surely this is a swift suicide for Opera ... although, are they still getting money from licensing on embedded devices?
posted by bwerdmuller at 3:13 AM on September 20, 2005

It may be free, but the Windows download button isn't working.
posted by alumshubby at 3:14 AM on September 20, 2005

For what its worth, I just Googled "best web browser" and hit "I"m feeling lucky" and it gave me Firefox. I loaded it up on my new IMac G5 and it beats the pants off Safari and IE. I tried Opera on my old Mac (9.2.2) and it didn't seem to improve on IE so I scrubbed it.
posted by donfactor at 3:24 AM on September 20, 2005

Umm... isn't this a bit of a big 'Fuck you' towards all those people who bought Opera over the years?

"Thanks for all the money, but now it's free!"
posted by slater at 3:26 AM on September 20, 2005

No, the people who have supported them this long are glad to have helped get them to this point.

I've used Opera for years as my primary browser, would not use anything else. Especially not Firefox.

Also, there is a torrent on the opera download page.
As you can imagine, their normal ftp link is being swamped.
posted by nightchrome at 3:35 AM on September 20, 2005

Especially not Firefox.

Out of interest, why not?
posted by bwerdmuller at 3:39 AM on September 20, 2005

It's bloated and buggy. All the best features are in plugins which are constantly in need of updates, and often don't work well. And it still doesn't do many of the things I take for granted in Opera.
Now, to be fair, not everyone is as picky as I am.
posted by nightchrome at 3:47 AM on September 20, 2005

Especially not Firefox.

Yeah that caught my eye, too. Why not?

And not to start this into a Op. vs. FFx flamewar, but I heartily LOL'd at "[Opera,] The most full-featured Internet power tool on the market"
posted by slater at 3:47 AM on September 20, 2005

I get the impression a lot of people are dissing Opera without ever having seriously tried it.
posted by nightchrome at 3:50 AM on September 20, 2005

I've tried every version since ... lemme think... around Opera v5. Still can't stand it. *shrug*
posted by slater at 3:53 AM on September 20, 2005

I wonder if that 10th birthday giveaway was Opera dipping their toes in the water to see how popular the free option would be?

Good luck to them - competition is good and I hope they're successful, although I'll stick with Safari for by day-to-day browsing and FF for my development work. Opera's UI sucks horribly - until that gets remarkably better, I just find it unusable.
posted by TheDonF at 3:54 AM on September 20, 2005

slater,
Okay then. Different strokes for different folks.
It's not like having more browser choices is a BAD thing.
posted by nightchrome at 3:55 AM on September 20, 2005

TheDonF, that's so weird, because one of the things I hate the most about Firefox is the UI.
posted by nightchrome at 3:56 AM on September 20, 2005

nightchrome: FINE! ;) :P
posted by slater at 3:59 AM on September 20, 2005

Nightchrome: FF's UI was better before they hit 1.0 - there was some kind of dispute between the icon designer and the Moz organisation and they pulled his work, replacing it with the mucho average buttons we have now.

Opera seems to have side bars, weird dropdown things spouting from the address bar and other things that just clutter up the app. But, whatever floats your boat, I guess. If I was some kind of genius, I'd combine the best of FF, Op and Safari and build my own browser. But I'm not unfortunately.

Out of interest - what does the title of this thread mean?
posted by TheDonF at 4:07 AM on September 20, 2005

I tried Opera when they were doing that 10th anniversary free registration keys thing. It's a nice, fast browser, but I absolutely fucking hate the UI beyond all belief. I always hated the classic MDI interface they had, and now they just hide it (badly) under the guise of tabs. Yuck. Maybe Opera should have used some of that customer money to hire UI designers?
posted by Josh Zhixel at 4:10 AM on September 20, 2005

Well, Firefox does tend to consume a great deal of RAM over time. Because of that, it benefits from a shutdown/restart every couple of hours. (I think they're planning to fix this in 1.5, which is in beta now.) And it has some rendering bugs. Sometimes there are highlight problems in text-entry boxes (like this one). And Slashdot very often has a problem where the columns spill out of their borders. That one is really annoying, and I believe it's also fixed in 1.5.

So you could indeed argue that it's both bloated and buggy, but these buds don't bother me much. (To fix Slashdot, I use control-mousewheel to raise and lower the text size, which reflows the text properly.) Yes, it definitely needs improvement, but it's quite good already.

I think the plugin architecture is a great idea, and I don't hold the Firefox developers responsible for their problems. Kinda by definition, a plugin isn't 'official' code, so if it breaks, you keep both pieces. :) I use Adblock, Flashblock, and Forecastfox, and of the three, only Fox needs updating much, and it's been totally painless when I did it. If you're having problems, I'd suggest checking into alternate plugins to do what you need.

I've tried Opera a couple of times, but the interface just drives me bats. I really like how FireFox is like IE to start, and then you can customize it in all sorts of crazy ways when you're ready. Opera has such a strange interface that I've never liked it.

Competition is good, though. The more successful browsers there are in the world, the more likely it is that sites will work with the one I choose, whatever that might be. Even if it changes. So don't feel like I'm evangelizing you to switch... I honestly don't care what you use. I'm just sort of rambling about my experience. :)
posted by Malor at 4:11 AM on September 20, 2005

What's the best thing about opera? PAGE ZOOM! Everything zoomed, not just text... functionality which STILL does not exist on IE or Firefox/Mozilla.
posted by adzm at 4:12 AM on September 20, 2005

I seem to be the only person on the planet who actually prefers MDI interfaces. I dunno why, but tabs drive me absolutely insane.
posted by nightchrome at 4:13 AM on September 20, 2005

Well, Firefox does tend to consume a great deal of RAM over time. Because of that, it benefits from a shutdown/restart every couple of hours. (I think they're planning to fix this in 1.5, which is in beta now.)

FWIW, the apparent memory leak does seem to be fixed in 1.5 Beta 1.
posted by musicinmybrain at 4:18 AM on September 20, 2005

nightchome, it took me awhile to figure out a way to really make use of them. What I used to do was read a main page, and then open a bunch of other browser windows, and then go through the windows. The thing is, those new windows might have more links, so I'd pop open yet more windows... and eventually would get lost in what I'd seen and what I hadn't seen.

What I've found is that tabs totally fix that. Each time I see a link, I mousewheel-click it, which opens it in a new tab while I keep reading. When I'm done with the first tab, I go to the second tab, start at the top, and read until I'm done, possibly opening yet more tabs. Because they're in the order that I opened them, I tend not to get lost... they're a visual record of what I was doing and the order I did it.

Right now, for instance, I have 11 tabs open... I'm actually done with all of them and back in the first tab, but that's about an average Metafilter-induced session. Links here tend to be interesting and spawn yet more links, so I really depend on tabs to keep myself organized.

Took me a long time to realize why they were so good, but now that my aged brain has finally figured it out, I'd have a heck of a time doing without them.
posted by Malor at 4:21 AM on September 20, 2005

Oooh, shiny v8.5
And, having only needed to pay out once for about 4 years of product upgrades, I'm delighted they're giving this away free. It was the only way to get a proper foothold in the market; I can't believe they really think they're going to make a mound of cash from the search engines, though.

(and thank fuck they got rid of that "web superman" character. I'd was tempted to stop using the browser just because of that.
That and because v8 kept crashing. Stupid piece of crap that I love.)
posted by NinjaPirate at 4:22 AM on September 20, 2005

And what should I do with registration code I received for them on their anniversary party?
posted by snark9 at 4:24 AM on September 20, 2005

additionally, when you close an Opera tab, it will take you to the tab you were on previously, like a "back" button, not just the next one that happens to be in the list.
Naming no names.
posted by NinjaPirate at 4:24 AM on September 20, 2005

One of my most common things to do in opera is to click "Open all folder items" in, say, my Webcomics bookmark folder. All the comics cascade open in windows, and I can view, shut, view, shut. Or skip ahead to ones I can see are downloading faster than others. The windows are especially handy when reading crossovers and such, as you can have comics tiled next to one another, or what have you. That ability is also good when comparing documents.
Anyway, I like Opera. If you like something else, that's cool.
As long as you don't like IE.
posted by nightchrome at 4:28 AM on September 20, 2005

Firefox on the Mac. Ugh. Sucks compared to Safari.
posted by snoktruix at 4:56 AM on September 20, 2005

i've been using opera since 2.5 and you couldn't pay me to use anything else. it's like having the features of tomorrow's firefox, today! (and it's a whole lot faster)
posted by lotsofno at 5:05 AM on September 20, 2005

Firefox on the Mac. Ugh. Sucks compared to Safari

1.5 beta is better - I've noticed some spead and reliability improvements. If you've got loads of extensions you may find that a lot of them currently don't work with 1.5. Safari is good but also has some really annoying things (no focus on form elements when clicking on a <label> tag for instance). And Safari's bookmark management sucks beyond all belief.
posted by TheDonF at 5:06 AM on September 20, 2005

This makes my day.

I prefer Opera to Firefox: like the page zoom, the crisp mouse gestures that don't make you waggle across half the screen, the CTRL-Z to un-close a tab, CTRL-H to hide, the keyboard-only CTRL-cursor-key navigation (great if you get wrist pain from excessive mouse use), etc etc.

Most of those can be duplicated with the right Firefox plugins... but then you have to hunt down, install and configure them; then do the same again for every fresh computer, install and version you use.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 5:22 AM on September 20, 2005

I've got to say that at first, I loved Firefox, but it's gotten so buggy at this point that I've had to keep an IE window open just in case. Chances are 50/50 that I'll click a link that FF doesn't like and after much huffing and puffing, will shut itself away without a chance to save work. I've gone through the Mozilla boards for help, and the fixes, if they work at all, are far from simple. I'm too busy to spend hours under my browser's hood looking for an errant nut or bolt. So, I welcome browser competition, cuz I really really hate having to rely on IE as a backup.
posted by moonbird at 5:23 AM on September 20, 2005

Once, after serious frustration with Firefox, I switched to Opera. It was very fast and cool and I really didn't mind it except for the ad -- and even that wasn't too horrible. But there were just so many things that "oh you can't use this site we don't support Opera." Gmail, for one. I think some of that might have been fixed -- it took Google a while to get around to making Gmail accept Opera users.
I might try it again. I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 Beta to defeat the (massive!) memory leak problems in 1, and I still get a little mad at it sometimes. For some work-related stuff I'm dealing with a lot of crazy asynchronous javascript stuff, though, and I don't know if Opera can deal with it. Firefox can't, really, without crashing every so often.
posted by blacklite at 5:25 AM on September 20, 2005

I do remember loving the mouse gestures. ... Okay, I'm downloading it.
posted by blacklite at 5:26 AM on September 20, 2005

honestly the one thing that bugs the hell out of me about firefox is that, unless you've opened the browser within the past 10-20 minutes or so, it takes FOREVER for the app to load.

So if you go to lunch and come back, you have to waaaaiiiiiit for the bastard to open. same with thunderbird. and I've barely even installed any plugins.
posted by shmegegge at 5:31 AM on September 20, 2005

oh, and to whoever asked I believe (though my italian is rusty) that la nozze di figaro means "The Marriage of Figaro," which is a famous opera.

speaking of opera, how is the web site compatibility with opera nowadays? Would you say that more or fewer web sites work with Opera than with Firefox?
posted by shmegegge at 5:33 AM on September 20, 2005

Apparently now Opera defaults to reporting to websites that it's "MSIE 6.0". Sneaky. (But it's a changeable option, of course.)

Okay, if there are any Opera people reading this thread, I just switched over (for now, anyway), and I suddenly remember one of the things that made me a little unhappy. The toolbars at the top of the page... I know how to customize them, i.e., delete and add buttons I want, and I know how to turn them off and on, but:
How the hell do I get the toolbars in the order that I want? Currently the address bar is furthest down, and the 'personal bar' is furthest up, and the, um, 'page bar', is in the middle. And I don't want any of those to be in those locations. But I don't seem to be able to drag them into a different location. ... This isn't a really esoteric feature, I don't think. I just want my layout to make me happy.
posted by blacklite at 5:42 AM on September 20, 2005

Apparently now Opera defaults to reporting to websites that it's "MSIE 6.0". Sneaky. (But it's a changeable option, of course.)

Okay, if there are any Opera people reading this thread, I just switched over (for now, anyway), and I suddenly remember one of the things that made me a little unhappy. The toolbars at the top of the page... I know how to customize them, i.e., delete and add buttons I want, and I know how to turn them off and on, but:
How the hell do I get the toolbars in the order that I want? Currently the address bar is furthest down, and the 'personal bar' is furthest up, and the, um, 'page bar', is in the middle. And I don't want any of those to be in those locations. But I don't seem to be able to drag them into a different location. ... This isn't a really esoteric feature, I don't think. I just want my layout to make me happy.
posted by blacklite at 5:45 AM on September 20, 2005

Oh, and it just kind of becomes unresponsive after you hit 'Post Comment' on this weird Metafilter site that I like.

... Switching back now. Apologies for the double comment.
posted by blacklite at 5:46 AM on September 20, 2005

The Opera fix for Metafilter: preview, then post.
posted by Hogshead at 6:08 AM on September 20, 2005

Out of interest - what does the title of this thread mean?

Here's a hint: what's the name of the browser that just went free?
posted by Robot Johnny at 6:09 AM on September 20, 2005

blacklite, if you click the preview button first and then the post button it will work. Also, you can switch the toolbar positioning by rightclicking on the bar, which will bring up the customization dialog.

As a general point, and one I made before in the 'party' thread: I like Opera because of its integration of many features from the start - you'd have to install extensions to get the functionality in Firefox. I like the middle-click to open a link in a new tab. I like M2, the integrated email app. I like the RSS handling. I'm looking forward to the torrent capability. I'm too ungeeky to like all the coding and customisation flexibility, but I'm sure if I knew that stuff, I'd find it useful.

A niggle about the software - it still won't install plugins seamlessly. You need to manually move .dll files.

A niggle about the user experience, which is a coding problem - sites incompatible with Opera. But in 3 years of pretty varied surfing, I have to say I've only encountered a handful of sites I'd return to where this is the case.

Firefox is a nice enough browser - just isn't the first choice. I use it mostly when I have to use hotmail.
posted by paperpete at 6:17 AM on September 20, 2005

TBH, I like the speed of Opera. But until it has decent adblocking, flashblocking, and bugmenot then I simply won't use it.
posted by salmacis at 6:23 AM on September 20, 2005

Everyone here is a serious internet surfer.

If you're going to want to 'try' a browser...try it for a month.

I like safari. But then it became horribly slow due to a filling out forms bug (that still seems to be there.)

Firefox eats ram like chips. Sure it has some neat extensions (and I miss right now Metafilthy).

But I've been on opera now for 20 days. I don't think I'll switch back.

P.S. MEFI OPERA USERS - hit preview...then post.
posted by filmgeek at 6:33 AM on September 20, 2005

For those of you who dislike the MDI, you can disable it and make it do SDI, though heaven knows why you'd want to.

I think opera was planning to stop setting the default user agent to MSIE, but I might be misremembering.

You can disable/enable flash easily from the quick preferences, which isn't quite as pretty as mozilla's click-to-load-flash but gets the job done. Bugmenot or more generally, a decent "extension" mechanism for opera would be cool though.
posted by fvw at 6:34 AM on September 20, 2005

Just FYI, Firefox does do the middle-click-new-tab thing out of the box, no plugin required. You can also middle click a tab to close it.

It also has RSS support out of the box, but it seems a bit rudimentary to me. For instance, if I RSS-link Ars Technica, there's no spot in the toolbar to just go to the main site directly... only to the article links. It's a good idea, and I do use it, but the implementation feels uninspired. The feature is called "Live Bookmarks", if you're interested.

Firefox definitely doesn't do email. The birth of FF from Mozilla was, in essence, tearing the mail client out! Thunderbird is a separate product, which I use and like. It's no Evolution, my overall favorite client, but it'll do.

Out of interest, howcome you'd want torrent handling directly in the browser? Wouldn't you want to pass those to an external 'real' BT client? Those things run for hours or days... would you want your browser open that long?
posted by Malor at 6:39 AM on September 20, 2005

I thought this was always Opera's model. I've looked at it from time to time but for some reason it has never tripped my trigger. I love Firefox and the extensions (some of them are unbelieveably useful) but I still find myself using Safari the majority of the time. Firefox on the Mac is a huge resource hog and I hate spinning beachballs. (This coming from a guy with a dual-g5 and 2-1/2G of RAM). Granted, I haven't tried FF 1.5 yet.

Opera still drives CSS designers nuts, too. They really need to address that because if designers say "poop on Opera" then the user isn't going to have an optimal browsing experience on their sites.
posted by spock at 6:46 AM on September 20, 2005

I used Opera pretty heavily for a few weeks after the 10th anniversary thing. Now I feel like I can commit to it as a cross-platform app (I only registered two serial numbers).

Firefox was always a playground for the beta-geeks of the Mozilla bazaar -- always "trying harder", which usually meant "making stuff that breaks easily." Their extension system is PROFOUNDLY exploitable via elementary social engineering, not to mention prone to severe breakage. The app ends up using as much RAM as (often more than) it's "bigger" cousin, Mozilla (and no, I'm not talking about memory leaks), and launches MUCH more slowly because the FF team to date hasn't deigned to include pre-loading.

And now it turns out that Firefox is actually less secure than Internet Explorer. Well, I'll be... (To be fair, the exploits are of a different order: IE exploits tend to expose the entire system, whereas FF exploits only expose your personal financial and security data....)

All of that wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't built expectations so outrageously high. They're now beginning to experience the rebound effect, and in the process they'll be said to have demonstrated that the "bazaar-model" can't work for large projects.

Firefox, in short, is a disaster for the free software movement, in much the same way that Pearl Harbor was a disaster for Japan.

Also, don't forget this one very very important thing: Opera still still be selling their browser to companies like Archos, Motorola, Nokia, etc., for use in small-footprint devices. Right now, they have a very strong footprint in that space -- one that Mozilla stuff isn't likely to challenge any time soon. (KHTML will challenge Opera sooner than Mozilla will.)
posted by lodurr at 6:55 AM on September 20, 2005

And Safari's bookmark management sucks beyond all belief.
Going to have to disagree with you there. Safari is the first browser to encourage me to make extensive use of bookmarks. Hit the little bookmark button, drag the url to the folder I want. Simple.
posted by Popular Ethics at 6:56 AM on September 20, 2005

... oh, yeah, obligatory browser callout: I mostly use Safari because I haven't bothered to change default browsers yet. I like Safari. A lot. It's what Firefox is trying to be. (Mostly.)

But Opera just does stuff Safari can't. And it doesn't have runaway RAM problems like Safari does. (It eats more RAM to start with, but doesn't seem to swallow as much more as safari does.)

Problems: Opera crashes, about once in every 20 hours of browsing. But nicely enough, it autosaves its sessions so you can get back all the tabs you were browsing before the crash...
posted by lodurr at 6:59 AM on September 20, 2005

Since del.icio.us, who in the hell screws with bookmarks?
posted by spock at 6:59 AM on September 20, 2005

Thanks for the heads up, raaka. I've always wanted to give Opera a try but didn't like the ads. I really like Firefox but it's been a bit buggy recently and I hate the way it eats memory. I'm on Opera now and getting used to the interface is going to take a little time but it does seem pretty darn fast.
posted by LeeJay at 7:04 AM on September 20, 2005

Since del.icio.us, who in the hell screws with bookmarks?

Who? People who haven't bought the hype on "tagging" -- or who actually want a usable way of seeing hierarchical bookmark trees.

del.icio.us is great, fascinating, interesting, but in its current form, it in no way replaces a hierarchical bookmark list. The fact that tags are useful does not invalidate the taxonomic approach.
posted by lodurr at 7:08 AM on September 20, 2005

I gave Opera a try for a month and couldn't stand it. Have had none of problems with Firefox that others have listed above. The new JVM download from SUN tends to cause it to crash now however.

Now that's it's free, perhaps wider adoption will make it better. Good on them.

But why this "preview" then "post" nonsense?
posted by juiceCake at 7:13 AM on September 20, 2005

I've never used del.icio.us and I have no intention of doing so. I simply cannot see the point of it.

lodurr, I'm amazed that you think Firefox is a disaster for the open source movement. It's still by far the best browser out there. Safari's bookmarking drives me mad as well, and like Opera, suffers from a lack of adblocking. The ability to enable/disable flash in Opera is not the same as flashblock: I need the ability to selectively activate flash.
posted by salmacis at 7:15 AM on September 20, 2005

I'm amazed that you think Firefox is a disaster for the open source movement. It's still by far the best browser out there.

Such nonsense. By far? Maybe for you. On a mac, safari please.
posted by justgary at 7:46 AM on September 20, 2005

del.icio.us is great, fascinating, interesting, but in its current form, it in no way replaces a hierarchical bookmark list. The fact that tags are useful does not invalidate the taxonomic approach.

Tagging gives you this as well, at least the was del.icio.us implements it. If you can't think of the best tag to access a bookmark by immediately, you can drill down from a more general one. Unfortunately, the way the del.icio.us interface works means that you can't have a set of 5 or 6 primary tags that you use for basic categorization (all tags are visible, although you can use the new bundles to achieve some of this), but if you use del.icio.us primarily through firefox's live bookmarks feature, as I do, you can just pick 5 or 6 for live bookmarks instead, and have something virtually identical to a conventional hierarchical system.

I'm a CS guy, and one of my great hopes for technology in 2005 is that we're seeing a broad shift from organizing stuff in trees (which we've been locked into purely due to the inertia of Unix for 40 years) to sets (which is conceptually how tags, GMail labels, and Google itself work). If we do, people are going to suddenly see their computers magically become much easier to use.
posted by gsteff at 7:46 AM on September 20, 2005

I love Opera, and I haven't had any major CSS issues with it since Opera 8. Probably my favorite feature is the ability to toggle images and CSS on/off with just one key (Shift-G for CSS, Shift-I for images), which is valuable for me, as a designer, in quickly figuring out the structure and hierarchy of a page without having to View Source. Also pretty cool is the quick popup menu to turn off Javascript, Java, Flash, and popups in individual tabs. When I was a dialup user, it was crucial to be able to quickly cut page load time by turning off all the rich media to get straight to the text when needed.
posted by brownpau at 7:51 AM on September 20, 2005

Bookmarks are specific to ONE browser on ONE computer. del.icio.us makes your bookmarks are available from anywhere. They are bookmarks in the sky (ignoring all the other great things that are being done with it). If you don't get it, fine. You don't get it - your loss. Tagging has problems in a social environment (what you tag "humor" I may tag "funny") but from a personal standpoint your tagging system can be whatever makes sense to you.
posted by spock at 8:27 AM on September 20, 2005

nightchrome: One of my most common things to do in opera is to click "Open all folder items" in, say, my Webcomics bookmark folder. All the comics cascade open in windows, and I can view, shut, view, shut.

Since nobody seems to have addressed it, this same feature is available by default in Firefox, except it uses tabs instead of windows (which seems to be the same thing in Opera parlance). Every folder in your bookmarks has "Open in Tabs" at the bottom. I use it for the sites that I visit every morning, one click opens about 10 sites at once, from Dilbert to AskMe.
posted by Who_Am_I at 8:30 AM on September 20, 2005

brownpau, if you want to see the CSS structure of a page you have GOT to try the Aardvark FF extension. Unbelievably cool.
posted by spock at 8:37 AM on September 20, 2005

spock - I have Aardvark. It's cool, but it needs to be installed, and isn't a one-key toggle deal. Again, what I like about Opera is that the features I specifically need are available out of the box. That's just me. Different tools for different people.
posted by brownpau at 8:59 AM on September 20, 2005

I am a "power user", for whatever value that phrase has. In short, I browse nearly 100 sites each and every day; and from those sites, open about another 100 links.

My collection of daily sites is arranged in a half-dozen folders (news, geek, once-a-day, comics, blogs, stocks, weekly, and a few scraps).

I open each of these folder en masse, so that sites are downloading even as I read the first site and start opening links. I open links in a background window. Over the course of a few minutes I can skim a dozen regular sites, open a dozen links from those sites, skim those, email links to friends, and drag-n-drop the more interesting stuff into a folder.

I hardly have to lift my hands from the keyboard: almost everything I could want to do is easily accessed without using a mouse, which saves considerable time.

I spent the time to learn how to customise the panels and toolbars, and have done so in a manner to maximize my screen real estate, place all the commonly-used controls where I need them, and tweaked a few settings that speed things up for me.

I do not believe any other browser would be more efficient and more useful to me. I rather suspect that any other power user who, having taken the time to learn to use Opera, would settle for any other browser. It is, in a word, the *best* browser out there, bar none.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:24 AM on September 20, 2005

re: firefox - Every folder in your bookmarks has "Open in Tabs" at the bottom.

In Opera, one merely cursors to the folder and taps enter. Faster and more accurate. One of about a bijillion small ways that Opera performs better. It has been very carefully designed by power web users who have a distinct advantage over Firefox developers: a financial incentive to do things right. That makes a large difference in attitude toward design, implementation, and attention to user feedback.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:27 AM on September 20, 2005

OK. You've definitely given me the incentive to give Opera a longer look-see.
posted by spock at 11:55 AM on September 20, 2005

Cool. Search for "30 Days Opera Lover", and feel free to email me.

Neat thing about Opera is that they're typically quite responsive. I've come up with ideas that I've passed on to them, and actually seen those ideas get implemented. Very cool, that. Ditto for the bugs I've reported.

There's nothing quite so wonderful as programmers who have a financial interest in making their product kick ass. I've actually been to the Opera HQ/programming office, and the guys there were incredibly friendly, open, and interested in what I had to say. Hell, I've even corresponded directly with the CEO, knocked heads with Håkon, and got drunk with a gang of programmers.

If it weren't for the long winter, I'd do anything to move to Oslo and work with them... the whole company just impressed hell outta me.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:18 PM on September 20, 2005

fff: a distinct advantage over Firefox developers: a financial incentive to do things right.

Good point, but I think there's more to it than that. I think it's exacerbated by a weakness in the Bazaar model.

Bazaaaar-model (sorry, day late, I know) F/OSS projects get the features they get not because they're demanded by users, but rather becaue they're championed by developers. That those developers are also users is practically irrelevant: Firefox through version 1.0.1 was riddled with features that were clearly designed by people who did not think like end-users and had no interest in learning how to do so.

So you've got the Opera team's financial incentive to do better (which you could plot as a vector of a**), working orthogonally to the Firefox teams labor-power incentive to do geekier (which yields an orthogonal vector of b**), and you end up with c** distance... or am I working my metaphors way too hard again? (hint: you're looking for "yes"...)
posted by lodurr at 3:52 PM on September 20, 2005

people are going to suddenly see their computers magically become much easier to use.

This sentence scares the hell out of me, for some reason. Unless perhaps keyboards are replaced by a single, big, red button. That would be neat.

Also, Brownpau, the web developer extension for firefox has ctrl+shift+d to turn off css & ctrl +shift + l to validate your HTML. Rocks like a, erm, rock.
posted by Sparx at 4:26 PM on September 20, 2005

Sorry. Nobody has yet given any substantial reason why either Opera or Safari is better than Firefox. I guess it comes down to personal taste, but as far as I'm concerned, Firefox is easier to use, has more power through the extensions, and can do everything the other browsers can do and more.
posted by salmacis at 4:29 PM on September 20, 2005

salmacis, I fail to see how you can say that without having tried alternatives.

Also, the mefi "bug" is tedious but tolerable.
posted by nightchrome at 6:11 PM on September 20, 2005

This is wonderful news. I used Opera from 3.62 until they added the banner ad (what was that, 6.0?). And now, I'm finally going back. The only downside is that I'll have to go back to using adblocking proxies instead of the Adblock extension.

(I'll keep using Firefox on my work computer, though. I'm not trying to make any enemies.)
posted by box at 7:45 PM on September 20, 2005

Uh, my question always was: "if the majors are giving it away, where exactly is this browser 'market' everyone seems so concerned about?" I mean, I recognise MS' inherent interest in controlling every piece of software we use, but where's anyone else's? What's in it for Mozilla, Opera, etc.?

Other than opensource ideology or niche marketing, that is.

Why not spend time on something that'll actually make them some money?
posted by converge at 10:18 PM on September 20, 2005

Why not spend time on something that'll actually make them some money?

Note that Opera is only giving their desktop browsers away, but not their mobile browsers, which is really the market they're known for. By maintaining a desktop browser using the same core technologies, it probably allows them to better innovate on the mobile platform.
posted by gyc at 11:31 PM on September 20, 2005

salmacis, I fail to see how you can say that without having tried alternatives.

Who said I hadn't tried alternatives? I've tried Konqueror, Opera, Safari but none of them work as well for me as Firefox.
posted by salmacis at 1:06 AM on September 21, 2005

salmacis, okay that's cool then.
posted by nightchrome at 2:36 AM on September 21, 2005

After a day and a half of using Opera and working my way through the excellent tutorial that five fresh fish suggested, I have to say that I have developed a serious crush on Opera. I never thought it would be able to tear me away from using Firefox but haven't opened FF once since downloading Opera.

My only complaint about Opera is that when I close a tab (sorry, page) I can't make it go to the tab immediately to the left (or right). It always goes back to the last tab visited. If I could figure out how to change this one little thing I'd be completely sold on Opera.
posted by LeeJay at 3:38 AM on September 22, 2005

I think there's a preferences setting for that, LeeJay. Prefs>Advanced>Browsing>Cycle Order, IIRC.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:13 AM on September 22, 2005

Thanks, fff. I've changed it there and since I am becoming completely hooked on Opera's mouse gestures I managed to change it so it behaves that way when I use a gesture to close a page. Now it works exactly as I want it to. I just demoted Firefox and made Opera my default browser. I really do love it.
posted by LeeJay at 10:56 AM on September 22, 2005

I wish mouse gestures worked well with laptop touchpads. But, afaik, they don't. otoh, this has forced me to use the keyboard, which is about 10x more efficient.

I like the BreezeII icon pack, and I prefer to simplify my screen: eliminate the main toolbar, put the panel selector above the panels, eliminate all but three or four of the panels, and add a couple extra close-window buttons (http://nontroppo.org/wiki/CustomButtons) so that I can click the top-right corner of any panel, or top-right corner of any window, to close the front window. Less mouse movement that way. I also remove the search bar ('cause I type my searches into the addressbar) and move all but the "Go" and "X" buttons from the right of the address bar to its left.

Check out the cookie handling. Very nice.

There are a ton of commands missing from the menubar. I have not found a replacement that I'm really happy with. Google "Rijk opera page" for some hints on that, though.

You'll have a helluva lotta fun if you make a half-dozen folksonomic-category folders, and file your regular web pages accordingly. With a single press of "Enter", I can open dozens of pages simultaneously. This makes reading my morning news and comics *much* more pleasurable than selecting each site individually. Combined with opening links in background pages, it lets me really whip through sites.

And because page tabbing can be controlled by 1=left, 2=right, and the Cmd+Tab/Cmd+` (Mac OS) keys are right beside those numbers, a whole lotta my page control is handled entirely by my left hand/keyboard. Very sweet.
posted by five fresh fish at 2:58 PM on September 22, 2005