Opera 9 officially released!

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Roja
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Opera 9 officially released!

Post by Roja »

http://www.opera.com/download/

New features include:

Widgets
BitTorrent support
Correct ACID2 rendering
Native support for the SVG Basic profile
Content blocking
Support for Microsoft's designmode and contenteditable extensions
Atom support
Web Forms 2.0 support
Source viewer
Canvas support (and some Opera-specific extensions)
NTLM authentication
Tab preview
Some support of parts of CSS3
And more..

Discuss. :)
Grim...
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Post by Grim... »

I'd like a light version with a bit less bloat, and it still does some crazy CSS things.

Still, it's quick.
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Weirdan
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Post by Weirdan »

Is there full Web Forms 2.0 support?
Roja
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Post by Roja »

Grim... wrote:I'd like a light version with a bit less bloat, and it still does some crazy CSS things.

Still, it's quick.
Yeah, its status as the most lightweight browser might not last much longer.

I had a bare-metal machine with no new browsers installed, and took the time to install FF-1.5.04, and Opera9. FF=17.1 mb in memory, Opera9=14.9mb in memory.

I configured both with a blank screen for startup, and the measurements were with no plugins, addons, or userjs.

Notably, FF 2's latest beta (Bon Echo) is even lower in memory use than 1.5.04.

Opera still starts incredibly fast, but I wonder if the next version will retain the title of lowest memory use browser.
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AKA Panama Jack
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Post by AKA Panama Jack »

Grim... wrote:I'd like a light version with a bit less bloat, and it still does some crazy CSS things.

Still, it's quick.
A little less bloat?

It is smaller than Firefox and does a whole host of things you need extensions for in Firefox which bloats Firefox quite a bit when you include the size of Firefox with extensions. Opera definitely comes out smaller.

People who equate more features with bloat are being confused. Bloat is when a program is HUGE in size and consuming resources with little in the way of features to justify the code size.

Opera is one of the few applications that keeps the footprint very, very small while packing in many features. Most other browsers end up being huge in resource usage when you try to add in similar features using extensions compared to Opera.

I think you will find the resource usage and file size of Opera with all of those built in extras is very close to plain vanilla Firefox with no extensions. :)
Last edited by AKA Panama Jack on Tue Jun 20, 2006 3:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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AKA Panama Jack
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Post by AKA Panama Jack »

Roja wrote:I had a bare-metal machine with no new browsers installed, and took the time to install FF-1.5.04, and Opera9. FF=17.1 mb in memory, Opera9=14.9mb in memory.
Once you start adding in the extensions to try and get Firefox to do what Opera does built in you will find Firefox uses a lot more resources. It's going to take a long time for Firefox to match Opera in features and resource usage. :D

Man I love the spell checking in Opera. :D
Last edited by AKA Panama Jack on Tue Jun 20, 2006 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Benjamin
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Post by Benjamin »

Back in the old days my favorite browser was netcape 4.0, as far as I can remember, it was pretty lean. Talk about bloat though, what was it, Netscape 7.0?

That was insane.

I like Opera a lot, but there a few, very minor issues that keep me using firefox. Not sure what they are off the top of my head.
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AKA Panama Jack
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Post by AKA Panama Jack »

astions wrote:Back in the old days my favorite browser was netcape 4.0, as far as I can remember, it was pretty lean. Talk about bloat though, what was it, Netscape 7.0?

That was insane.

I like Opera a lot, but there a few, very minor issues that keep me using firefox. Not sure what they are off the top of my head.
Yeah, everything from Netscape after version 4 was major bloat. It was like they hired former Microsoft programmers to create those versions. ;)
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Chris Corbyn
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Post by Chris Corbyn »

astions wrote:I like Opera a lot, but there a few, very minor issues that keep me using firefox. Not sure what they are off the top of my head.
I don't like the way it screws with my CSS in forms (at least on Linux). It adds borders even when I tell it not to. It adds scrollbars to text areas even when I turn them off. It doesn't seem to offer any way of handling an opacity filter. I'm aware that some of these things are not implemented in terms of w3 standards however.

I use Opera occassionally but I still prefer FF. Opera definitely did themselves a big favour when they dropped the ads in the free version.
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AKA Panama Jack
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Post by AKA Panama Jack »

If you are going to talk about Opera you should always talk about the latest version and not about something that may be true on older versions. The same is true for any browser when you are making comparisons.

And Opera 9 is about the most W3C compliant browser availible right now. Plus I think Opera 9 and Safari are the only browsers that pass the ACID2 CSS test.

http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/

See how well your browser performs the test. :) Opera 9 nails it perfectly. :D
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Post by neophyte »

I used opera when version 8 came out. It wasn't bad. I liked the built in email. Anything to consolidate apps and cut down on open windows. I'm a big tab user. I like opera's speed. The fact is most designers design for IE and FF in that order. ( I do.) They hold the market share. Lately I've been using Konqueror - cuts down on open applications. It's not a memory thing it's a window management thing for me. I've always got a file browser open. But I'll probably give Opera a test drive anyway.

Ya'll gotta agree Opera is cool for the soul fact that they make distribution specific packages! :)

I'm on Kubuntu 5.1 tonight. :P
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AKA Panama Jack
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Post by AKA Panama Jack »

Actually we have been designing everything in Opera for quite some time and as long as they work in Opera they tend to always work in other browsers. Opera supports a lot of the quirk mode displays for IE. For the most part if you stick with W3C standards on coding your site it will look the same in Opera and usually any other browser.
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neophyte
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Post by neophyte »

Thanks for the tip! That's cool. I'll give it ago. Anything to cut down on my development time. The acid test was pretty revealing. Konq and FF on my system failed miserably.
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s.dot
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Post by s.dot »

the html rendering engine has been redone (or at least modified) since opera 8.x. Some images on a few websites i had were not stretched properly (probably cellpadding or some other issue). It appears though, that the new way its rendered is correct. Its the way firefox (on linux, not windows) rendered my website. All in all I like opera 9, soon i'm going to play with the widgets.
Set Search Time - A google chrome extension. When you search only results from the past year (or set time period) are displayed. Helps tremendously when using new technologies to avoid outdated results.
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Post by Roja »

AKA Panama Jack wrote:It is smaller than Firefox and does a whole host of things you need extensions for in Firefox which bloats Firefox quite a bit when you include the size of Firefox with extensions. Opera definitely comes out smaller.
The difference is down from 8mb to 2mb in less than a year. When its flip-flopped, what then?

I'm not going down the path of beating a drum for a particular browser. I use the best tool for the job. For WhatWG implementation testing, Opera is the clear choice, so I use that. But for my day to day browsing, it doesn't hold a candle to the functionality available for Firefox.

Thankfully, it seems that the memory use in Firefox continues to decrease, the memory use in Opera continues to increase, and best of all, Firefox has extensions to keep the bloat out of the main browser code. Sure, if I enable the features I want, it grows. But thats what extensions enable. You can't really disable the BitTorrent browser in Opera to gain back the memory it takes up to bring it back to its Opera 8 size.

Perhaps soon, Opera will learn from its competition.

In the meantime, I mentioned Opera 9's on the forums because it is worthwhile. I continue to use it, because the CTO for Opera is the man behind CSS, and much of the WhatWG work.

Its important to note that in previous posts, I maintained that 8mb was trivial, and laughable, and now that its 2mb, I continue to hold that position. When Firefox is ahead, I'll still hold that position.

For me, its about functionality. Opera still rocks the cutting edge hardcore, and until that changes, it will continue to be installed on my box.
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