I have been using Opera for the last 3 months (vented some of my frustration of FF/Chrome in this article: Firefox is the new IE, Chrome is the new Firefox and Opera is still Opera ) and must say that the experience, so far has been a lot better than what I expected of Opera.
And today, Opera has launched the next version of it’s browse, Opera 10 – here are some of the features that makes Opera10 worth a try:
- Opera Turbo : uses compression technology that provides significant improvements in browsing speeds over limited-bandwidth connections.
- Sleek and beautiful interface, Web Integrations, Mouse Gestures etc just add to the usefulness of the browser.
- 40% faster engine and Web standards support – Opera Presto 2.2 engine in Opera 10 is designed to be much faster on resource-intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook (with an Acid3 100/100 score, Web Fonts support, RGBA/HSLA color and SVG improvements).
Remember, these are the same guys who first launched ‘tabbed browsing’ and ‘speed dial’ which has been copied by their peers – so even though Opera doesn’t have a significant market share in desktop browsing, these features will make Opera a preferred way to browse heavy pages (and of course, Opera can do wonders with Opera Unite service).
Having said that, Opera still has a long way to go when it comes to closing the loop in feature set.
For instance:
- Ctrl + Tab doesn’t open the link in a new tab
- Address book is not a search bar (so web1.0)
- The Firebug alternative, DragonFly is anything but useful.
What’s your take on Opera? Too many features – too many open ended loops?
What’s your fav browser? FF? Chrome, Opera or IE?
I’m guessing you already know how Opera Turbo works, and it’s scary. Firstly, all your requests and responses are channeled through their “Turbo server”, which means that they can watch what you are doing, and can control what you see.
Secondly, afaik, the response stream is not HTML anymore, but is actually a binary stream. This is afaik, so I might be wrong, but I understand this is what happens with Opera Mini. This is tolerable – even desirable – with Mini, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for a regular desktop browser.
So, faster? Yes. Respects privacy? No. Respects HTTP itself? Not sure. Excited? No.
So do you have a direct link to all the websites you visit or you use one of the ISPs network for that?
Just kidding.
Privacy concerns are some time blown out of proportion.
And the response stream is encoded HTML which is converted back to HTML when you have it on your browser. Nothing that I would care about. If I see the source, it is not different than without turbo on. Should one care?
I disagree with both points.
1. Just because my traffic is routed through an ISP doesn’t mean that I should now be ok with any company/app routing all my traffic through their servers as well.
2. To give you an example, if in the regular response stream the server wants a proxy to cache certain page assets, so that other requests can be served straight from the proxy. These kind of things are defined in core http semantics, and already exists as our Internet infrastructure. If this “encoded HTML” thing is a single stream, can anybody take advantage of proxy caching? This is just one example, of course. What happens to edge caching, ip detection, geo-location, DNS resolution, etc., which are http infrastructure things?
Anyone who disrespects http will fail, even if they think it’s better than http. Look at what’s happening to SOAP.
1. I trust Opera (who doesn’t even know who I am to begin with) more than my ISP who exactly knows who I am, where I stay, has met me in person and other details about me. He would be better interested in profiling me.
2. There’s lot of mix in here. Let me clear the clouds.
a) SOAP, in most cases, USES HTTP as a transport protocol, and is aimed towards web services. They are not competing I believe.
b) What turbo does is something similar to SSL. When you are using SSL doesn’t mean that HTTP is not respected at all. A typical use case would be when you use SOAP over SSL, here SOAP, HTTP, SSL, TCP and IP, these 5 protocols are simultaneously working. With turbo, you add one more to the mix.
c) Caching in this case is duly taken care by Turbo servers. If we see the basic aim of caching, it is aimed towards making browsing faster and turbo does that albeit in its own way.
d) IP location, GeoLocation, DNS resolution have nothing to do with HTTP protocol.
Turbo comes with its advantages and compromises, when you don’t need it, just turn it off with one click. i have been using it since launch and it has been doing great so far.
Hmmm…because I am still looking for a perfect browser, let me give Opera 10 a try. Last time I used Opera was when they released Opera 7 and a couple of issues that bugged me a lot were:
1. Rendering of HTML was different from Mozilla/IE and most of the websites were distorted/displayed in a different manner.
2. Just too many shortcuts! There should have been an option — advanced mode when all of them would get activated
BTW one suggestion to Ashish (@sinha) — It would be a good idea to provide the download link for products you are recommending
Opera Rocks!!
Inbuilt Mail client,
Very usable RSS reader,
IRC client,
Notes,
Turbo
All these features make it Super Cool. Million tiny things done right
@Ashish
1. Ctrl + T will open a new tab
2. Shift + Click will open link in a new tab
3. Shift + Ctrl + Click will open a link in new background tab
I agree for the Dragon Fly, it appears very sluggish. Firefox+firebug for dev
@Anshul – I am completely aware of the shortcuts
But the real problem here is that Opera unnecessarily wants to move away from industry standards – these small things just does not matter as a differentiator.
Look at Chrome – they have copied everything beautiful in FF and have created their own niche.
I understand what you feel as a switch from Firefox. Opera is just sticking to what it started with so that its regular users don’t feel awkward with a new update. At that time, way back in 2000, no other popular browser of 2009 had tabbed browsing feature.
So when new browsers are getting inspired, there was no reason for them to change the shortcut keys. Now that it has already been done and FF has become popular, doesn’t mean Opera should change their shortcuts.
Anyways, unlike FF, you can so very easily customize the shortcuts as per your wish. Even users can share their shortcuts settings with each other easily.
Here is the deal – if you (as a tech co.) aren’t able to make a mark and consumers start embracing your competitive products, make it easy for them to switch back – the reality is that they anyways didn’t like your product anyways and if you increase the switching cost, you will keep losing the battle.
May be they can offer people to select a keyboard setup on first use of Opera. They anyways offer you to import bookmarks.
@Anshul
Ashish seems to be a Mac and not a bloody PC
1.Cmnd + T
2.Cmnd + Click
3.Cmnd + Shift + Click
Been using opera since FF started giving problems. those regular updates, incompatible plugins, Memory leaks . better than all these, takes up lesser memory space ( VM is bigger than all of them but tht is ok by me) , lot of integrated helpful stuff. notes and other features have become indispensible for me, also i agree that privacy concern is blown outof proportion. the distortion occurs if u keep turbo on, bcuz it reduces content quality and hence size ..so better browsing speed for dialups and slow connections, we might not see a use to it, but on the mobile, opera is the clear winner bcuz of these features.
One advantage I found with Opera with turbo is that – you can hide your IP Address. This is required in some cases.