

Opera 11 - new and improved (Alpha) - yread
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/11/17/new-and-improved

======
jasonkester
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.

~~~
pornel
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>

~~~
27182818284
Wow! Thanks for that. I really need to break the habit of assuming the world
follows US patterns because Google, Silicon Valley, etc are in the US.

~~~
katovatzschyn
Also Germany, Scandinavia and parts of Japan I have found uses this browser.
Europe more in percent than America. I am not sure why this is. If any one
knows or guesses, I would be curious to find out.

~~~
lmkg
For one thing, it's a Norwegian company, which explains its popularity in
Scandinavia, and could mean more focus and expertise on internationalization.
Second, some of its features are more suited to Eastern European markets.
Computers tend to be older and cheaper, and Opera works well in low-CPU/low-
memory environments[1]. Many connections are still on dial-up, and many ISPs
charge by the megabyte, and Opera has a number of options for saving
bandwidth, like disabling images or using a proxy compression server. These
advantages are probably less important nowadays than 5 or 10 years ago, but by
now it's an established player, which helps.

[1] On machines with lots of RAM it tends to be a memory hog, but it works
perfectly fine in tighter environments. They claim their memory strategy
changes depending on local conditions.

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rimantas
I am a Mac user and I have a new wish: browser vendors releasing alpha and
beta versions named as such: so instead of Opera I would have Opera11a in
.dmg. Then I would simply drag it into my Application. Now I drag it on
desktop, rename, and drag into Applications…

~~~
JeffJenkins
They've previously done that with Opera alphas and betas. I don't know if
they're doing it consistently, though.

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xytop
Still waiting for news: Opera xx - now we support google services!

~~~
reitzensteinm
I dont know who downvoted you, but as an Opera user that uses Firefox to check
Gmail, I'm waiting for the same thing myself!

~~~
Tomek_
Huh? I don't have any problems with Gmail under Opera. As for the "who
downvoted" I guess it was someone who thinks that it's Google that should be
blamed for most of "the problems" with Google's services under Opera. It's a
browser that's very standard compliant and yet they don't even let you do such
silly thing as changing background image on Google's front page (and of course
it works fine if only you mask Opera as Firefox).

~~~
xytop
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 google could deliberately disable
Opera support due to some internal polytics and renounce from money of many
opera users? I think there were good reasons such as bad js support, because
javascript is widely used by google in their services.

~~~
hoppipolla
(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/>

~~~
xytop
[http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-
api-v3/browse_...](http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-
api-v3/browse_thread/thread/00e23c48e33f1702)

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

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

~~~
hoppipolla
<http://www.questionhub.com/StackOverflow/3899985>

This is a known issue. No promises, but it looks like a fix might be ready
sooner rather than later.

[http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-
api-v3/browse_...](http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-
api-v3/browse_thread/thread/00e23c48e33f1702)

It's not instantly obvious to me what the problem is here, so I will need to
investigate further.

Thanks for the bug reports!

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Tomek_
That address field feature is a cool idea. I'd expect other browsers "copying"
it soon, which would make it another item on a list entitled "Invented by
Opera, popularized by others".

~~~
bambax
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".

How are they going to ever understand them if browsers don't show it to
them??!? Hiding query parameters breaks the relation between a url and its
content; now all of Google is under the same "www.google.com" url: how is that
"better"?

By the same principle that "young people don't understand words" let's remove
all printed words and simply print books with the same cover and the same
title -- they're all "books" anyway.

~~~
Lagged2Death
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=1_45237_AFRv%2FNgAALZZTMxQEQbt1QDuB60,1_44482_AFRv%2FNgAAX6dTMscRg7DzmBp0%2BM,1_43847_AFRv%2FNgAAWU6TMoFPgz8kG1tlus,1_43135_AFVv%2FNgAAPHWTMixWAJSDRUfECQ,1_42368_AFNv%2FNgAAEUnTMcCHAZk2EsgYvc,1_41637_AFNv%2FNgAARb0TMWfVwycxVDDYoo,1_40918_AFdv%2FNgAAOo%2FTMMVTQtEN0nYhxw,1_40277_AFdv%2FNgAAK2ETMGqmwMZ%2Fm865vA,1_39560_AFdv%2FNgAAJLQTMBzaQzIs28a2Uc,1_38916_AFJv%2FNgAAGfRTL97CgGm0yp6dBs,1_38170_AFZv%2FNgAAAK%2BTL4DxwdptRQfn90,&sort=date&order=down&startMid=0&hash=30c49f5b9f61273beed1953ae7674c2f&.jsrand=5917415
    

How likely are you to notice the problems with this URL? I'm pretty sure I
wouldn't. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that non-technical users
consider the address field a sort of write-only space; they type something
comprehensible in there, and the browser destroys it. The simplified address
field with the bold domain name is a lot easier to read, and that probably
increases the chances that it will be read, rather than ignored. The full URL
is just one click away.

~~~
bambax
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.

~~~
Lagged2Death
Hiding part of the URL is what _every_ browser currently does, when the URL
gets long enough. Does that count as "destroying information?" The Opera alpha
shows the whole URL when you click on the address field.

I think I'd be more likely to notice typos like "yahooo" or "gnail" with the
new display method, without the noise of a thousand-character URL surrounding
them. That is by no means the be-all and end-all of anti-phishing technology.
It's just giving me one more chance to see something that might be amiss.

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Monkeyget
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.

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kooshball
title should be clear this build is a nightly build, not retail

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rimantas
Scores only 179 on html5test.com. Chrome dev: 241, Webkit nightly: 243,
Firefox 4 beta: 217

~~~
Indyan
HTML5Test doesn't pay too much attention to stuff like SVG, which is Opera's
strong point. One area where opera is lagging behind is webGL support and that
reflects on the tests.

~~~
rimantas
SVG is not HTML5…

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yread
I really like the way mouse gestures are shown and "taught" - feels almost
like a teaching game. But I had to disable the URL parameter hiding..

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lhnn
Immediately used 160MB upon starting the program. Firefox is lean compared to
that.

~~~
Osiris
You can manually set the memory cache in Preferences.

I figure that unused RAM is wasted RAM. If I've got 4GB of RAM and all that
caching allows to browse faster (going back a page in Opera is lightening
fast), then I applaud it.

~~~
lhnn
I like getting downvoted for not knowing the minutia of a program's memory
handling. Thanks, people.

To Osiris: Given I'm not aware of that 150+ MB being dynamic, I assume that's
150MB I'm not getting back if and when I need it. I play memory-eating video
games and use VMs; 150MB for a web browser looks like a lot when you've got to
trim the fat off your running processes.

Does Opera reduce its memory footprint when you are low on RAM?

