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Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

my.opera.com

31–40 of 64 posts

Re: Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

#31
I guess you have to credit Opera for sticking it out this long, years after they dropped off the radar of basically everybody. I just checked for a few of my sites, and I'm seeing about 1.3% of my visitors using Opera. I keep hearing that their mobile browser is big, but it seems that nobody has ever visited any of my sites using it.

The one thing I always liked about Opera as a developer is that they used IE as their spec. That is, if a site rendered correctly in IE, chances are it would do the same in Opera. The upside is that you'd only ever need cross-check for Opera compatibility a couple times a month (versus several times per day for IE/FF/Chrome), and it would generally still be working.

The downside of course, since they have such a small installed base, is that if ever your thing stopped working on Opera, you didn't have much incentive to spend the time and effort do do anything about it.

Re: Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

#32
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that hiding information is counter-educational. But nothing exists in a vacuum. There are serious problems to deal with, too. I suspect the concern is phishing. Consider: hxxp://mc564.mail.yahooo.cz/mc/welcome?.gx=1&.tm=1290173262&.rand=8a8hcjme2nb60#_pg=showMessage& sMid=13&&filterBy=&.rand=1020435964&midIndex=13&mid=1_41637_AFNv%2FNgAARb0TMWfVwycxVDDYoo&fromId=sendreceive@iso50.com&m…

Enter the URL with two spaces before it please, to place it in a code box. It's changing the layout.

Sorry about that. But that's interesting, isn't it? The URL is so unwieldy that the site and/or the typical web browser cannot handle it properly. In fact, it's so long that most of it is already invisible on a typical screen anyway.

Re: Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

#33

I guess you have to credit Opera for sticking it out this long, years after they dropped off the radar of basically everybody. I just checked for a few of my sites, and I'm seeing about 1.3% of my visitors using Opera. I keep hearing that their mobile browser is big, but it seems that nobody has ever visited any of my sites using it. The one thing I always liked about Opera as a developer is that they used IE as thei…

Opera has decent market share in central and eastern Europe.

In Ukraine and Russia it's huge:

http://clear.com.ua/projects/ee_browsers/?ukraine

Re: Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

#34
I was excited to see they decided to add extension support. Unfortunately it seems quite limited for now. Essentially you have greasemonkey scripts plus a button on the toolbar. Also the extension API is extremely buggy at the moment, which makes it painful to write extension but its still a development build so it's ok.

Looking at the changelogs I'm surprised to see regressions in basic features of the browsers. I wonder if the firefox and chrome trunks have the same kinds of bugs.

Re: Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

#35
post #27
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way Opera hides http:// is a nice touch (edit: because they avoided copy&paste problem that Chrome has) , but such addressbar style has been pioneered by Firefox (extensions) and Chrome.

Dunno about Chrome but I don't have the copy and paste problem in Chromium 9.0.584.0 (66224) Ubuntu 10.10. Since Chrome is released from the same base, either it should already be there or would be there in the future releases.

The problem people complain about is that when you try to copy domain name alone (e.g. to ssh to it) http:// gets copied unexpectedly. It's a feature that for some is a bug.

Opera avoided the issue by showing full URL when you focus addressbar, so you see what you're copying and can edit protocol part.

Re: Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

#36
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what you find "cool": not showing protocol, not showing query parameters, or both? > Parameters at the end of web addresses are visually hidden when the address field is not focused I think those are terrible, terrible ideas; to the best of my knowledge this behavior was pioneered by Chrome and is now growing like a cancer, under the false premise that "non-technical users don't understand urls". H…

I'm sympathetic to the argument that hiding information is counter-educational. But nothing exists in a vacuum. There are serious problems to deal with, too. I suspect the concern is phishing. Consider: hxxp://mc564.mail.yahooo.cz/mc/welcome?.gx=1&.tm=1290173262&.rand=8a8hcjme2nb60#_pg=showMessage& sMid=13&&filterBy=&.rand=1020435964&midIndex=13&mid=1_41637_AFNv%2FNgAARb0TMWfVwycxVDDYoo&fromId=sendreceive@iso50.com&m…

All modern browsers deal with phising without destroying information; just alert the user that the site they're visiting is not what it claims to be.

If users don't look at the address bar and don't understand urls, how are they going to tell something is amiss when they visit the following domains (all available at the time of writing):

- gnail.fr - gnail.me - gmail.se.com - gmail.uk.net - yahooo.uk.com - yahooo.eu.com

Only showing the domain does not help the non-technical user: you can have a fake domain look quite legitimate to the non-technical eye.

Re: Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

#38
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me disagree here. Although Opera is positioned itself as standard compliant, it has many issues with javascript. Some functions are working incorrectly, some just not working, some events firing, some not. Right click is disabled too.. I'm not against Opera, but we should think about stuffs above. Regarding Google - google making their money from adverts, from people who using google. Do you really think that goo…

(disclaimer: Opera Employee, Core QA) If you are having problems with javascript in Opera, I would really like to hear about them so that they can be fixed. There is a bug report form at [1], or reply here. Obviously it is nice if you have a reduced testcase, but just knowing that a site fails is immensely useful. [1] https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/

http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3/browse_...

http://www.questionhub.com/StackOverflow/3899985

Aggressive opera caching and different behavior from others browsers is not what I like.

Re: Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

#39
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argumentation ignores that Google had to invest money to test for another browser, which may be more than the money they can make on adverts to Opera users. This has nothing to do with any supposed problems in Operas js handling (which I've never noted ... for me the js works just fine in Opera and disallowing js to handle the right mouse button is a great feature), but is a simple cost-benefit analysis.

Google preemptively tries to kick Opera out of the browser world. Many new services come up with dedicated code to block Opera claiming that this browser can't handle them. I can't tell you how many times I changed Opera's UA string to Firefox and those services start working. Magic! Not testing for a particular browser is fine (and truth be told Opera just works in 99.99% of the time). Blocking it just because one c…

Of course, Opera is the only browser that has challenged Chrome claims of the faster browser ever (in production builds, that's it).

> Blocking it just because one can is pure evil!

It means they value market share over standards. Very evil indeed.

Re: Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha)

#40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(disclaimer: Opera Employee, Core QA) If you are having problems with javascript in Opera, I would really like to hear about them so that they can be fixed. There is a bug report form at [1], or reply here. Obviously it is nice if you have a reduced testcase, but just knowing that a site fails is immensely useful. [1] https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/

http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3/browse_... http://www.questionhub.com/StackOverflow/3899985 Aggressive opera caching and different behavior from others browsers is not what I like.

Why the questionhub link? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3899985/opera-error-uncau...
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