

Opera 11 Alpha is out, brings plugin support - bsk
http://www.opera.com/browser/next/

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justlearning
"An option has now been added to have plug-ins such as Flash content load only
when clicked on.."

nice feature there!. no more of pretty-woman-greeting me on page load.

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raquo
I wonder if they will ever make their Mac version more native (e.g. standard
OSX shortcuts would work in text fields). It's really strange that having a
lot of stuff well polished, and releasing a lot of new features, simple things
like that are forgotten about. Kind of like OSX not letting you select an
_arbitrary_ solid color as your background (that may be intentional though).

~~~
r4ps
Well Opera has gone Cocoa since 10.5 and feels much more native than it used
to.

Still, I wish it had the same level of polish as Chrome does on OS X.

~~~
SkyMarshal
They've been more focused on 'Macification' since 10.50 apparently. There's
some discussion of this over on the Opera engineer AMA Reddit thread:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dtbcz/hey_reddit_join_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dtbcz/hey_reddit_join_the_opera_browser_team_for_an/c12qxqo)

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sirn
Extension support is nice, but I'm disappointed by lack of CSS Flexible Box
Model[1] support in this release. It is available in WebKit and Gecko for over
a year. Only if Opera supports it…

[1]: [http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/the-css-3-flexible-box-
mode...](http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/the-css-3-flexible-box-model/)

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alexknight
Going to give this a whirl. Heard about extensions support when they were
chatting with Reddit users the other day.

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opiuygtfrtghyju
The thing I liked about Opera was the lack of plugins.

No waiting for 10 add0-ins you've never heard of to update themsleves and ask
you to restart your computer.

No having to search the net for add-ins to do things like toggle image loading
or prevent popups.

~~~
aaront
These aren't Firefox add-ins. These are small pieces of JavaScript and
HTML/CSS. Probably won't bog down your browser any more than UserJS scripts.

~~~
Pistos2
According to them, these new extensions will also have [more?] control over
tabs and windows, which plain JS (like their existing Widgets) cannot do.

[http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/getting-started-with-
oper...](http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/getting-started-with-opera-
extensions/)

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starrwarrior
I'm very glad opera will finally support extensions. Hopefully it will provide
a better interface for tackling ad blocking than the built in blacklist
feature or doing it elsewhere(proxy,dns,etc.).

~~~
Pistos2
Personally, I've never found the built in ad blocking lacking. Where it missed
anything (which is rare), blocking a specific ad is two clicks or so away. In
what ways would you like things improved?

~~~
raquo
For me most useful would be subscription to some EasyList or whatever it's
called to block 90% of the ads.

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macco
Alpha feels quite stable. Stumbleupon-Addon works great.

Whished the would made the addon-system compatible to Chrome's

~~~
aaront
Technically, it should be. They're using W3C Widget specifications, an open
standard, to do extensions.

EDIT: But I don't think they're compatible out of the box, unfortunately.

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sushi
Gave it a try on Ubuntu. Extensions are very alpha but nevertheless a welcome
move.

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whalesalad
Honestly, does anyone use Opera?

~~~
raquo
Something like 20% of Russia (yeah, I know, we're kind of an exception :)

~~~
lelele
Do you have any explanation for this? Thanks.

~~~
raquo
There are several components:

1\. Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines. I mean
faster in application tasks (launch/switch tabs/go back/etc.), not executing
JS.

2\. Opera is easy for normal people – it has a ton of features like built in
mail reader, etc. but they don't get in your way, it is easy to ignore them if
you don't need them. Also, you can't accidentally download a ton of useless
Opera toolbars.

3\. Opera is free, independent, standards-compliant, secure, etc. - a lot of
things that we geeks love.

4\. A lot of normal people ask some geek they know to set up their new
computer - and we remove the bloat that comes with it and install the basic
apps (often including Opera, Avast, ImgBurn, 7zip, etc.). Surprisingly I often
hear these normal people saying they actually like Opera way more than IE. I
thought they would not care.

~~~
GHFigs
_Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines._

I strongly second this. I recently tried Opera for the first time in ages on
an old ThinkPad ca. 2001 and it's astonishing what it can do with as little as
128MB of RAM and a Pentium 3. Where Firefox and Chrome struggle with even one
tab and no extensions, I routinely find myself with a dozen or more open in
Opera without it becoming even slightly sluggish. Whatever its faults, I'm
extremely impressed.

~~~
lelele
> Opera works incredibly faster than Firefox on low-memory machines.

Just tried it. Indeed it does!

So sad it allows for very little customization and has different shortcuts
than other browsers, otherwise I would have jumped on it right away.
Hopefully, the next version will fix this.

