[NBLUG/talk] [Fwd: Opara 6.06 Released, Security-Hole Left]

troy fryman at sonic.net
Fri Mar 21 01:09:01 PST 2003


On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 04:02:33PM -0800, Eric Eisenhart wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 03:55:28PM -0800, ME wrote:
> > Some of you use Opera and might want to know about this.
> 
> Opera's also notorious in certain circles for being flagrantly bad about
> following the published standards.  Opera would probably be a much better
> browser if they used one of the existing rendering engines already out there
> and available with free (open source) licenses.  (Gecko or KHTML)

I don't believe that to be accurate any longer.  It was certainly true
of Opera 4.  The major problem with 6.x is an incomplete DOM, which is
really only an issue with Javascript stuff.  Opera 6 to my eye most
certainly renders pages faster and is all-around snappier than gecko.
Haven't used konq.  enough to compare.  Opera 7 which is out for windows
and in -pre3 for Linux is reportedly faster even than 6 (from regular
reading of news://opera.linux)  I believe 7 (which uses a largely new
engine) to have taken a more standards compliant aim[1] than 6, although
I really haven't had 6 piss me off all that often.  In any case, I'm a
regular user of Opera under Linux and consider its rendering engine to
be an *advantage* over other browsers.  As someone who makes a living
hacking PHP, (and thus spends a lot of time testing various browsers),
I'd know if it was fscked up terribly.

But here's why I prefer Opera:

Quick startup after which it's relatively light on RAM.
Doesn't seg. fault on me as often as Galeon or Moz. and when it does
crap out can start up remembering its previously opened windows.

Can be almost entirely keyboard driven.  
*Lots* of nifty features and opera.ini hacks.
Emacs-like shortcuts in form fields and location bar. 
Basically, a huge effort has been spent on the user-interface.

Text looks great.  Mozilla and galeon have finally caught up in this
regard but for a long time pages looked much sharper in O than in any
other Linux browser.

The Opera Linux team is very active, helpful and receptive in
opera.linux.

And I appreciate even relatively minor stuff like the quick menu for
such stuff as javascript and proxy server on-off toggles.

O.k. this is long enough now :)
Keep bitching at those IE-tunnel-vision web developers...

-troy (who's cheap but still shelled out 30 clams for Opera)

[1] Opera 6 still gets some (deserved) crap for rendering certain pages as
IE would, rather than as others agree they should be rendered.  I see
their reasoning considering how many sites are coded for IE., and the
dominance of IE's market share.  Like Chris Rock would say: "I don't
agree, but I unda'stand"




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