Shilling for Opera

[blow45]

I got to say, I am back on opera on sl on an older mac I had and I got back recently (because after an os update safari kept crashing on start up) and I have to say I am starting to realize again what a great browser it is and why I d fallen in love with it way back when. Opera has to be the single most underappreciated piece of commercial software. It's a testament to what a great team they have that having incomparably less resources than pretty much everyone from the other big players they have managed to keep up the quality for so long.

It's super stable, super fast, doesn't leak and makes safari 5 with its leaks look like a turd (not that it needed opera to look like one, but anyway).

Kudos to the devs, and heads up to anyone to give it a try.

Oh, and here's an idea for apple to steal, they are good at that with safari (speed dial from opera, reader from readability, integrated search from chrome, extensions from ff, separate processes per tab from chrome etc. etc.), a great feature the new opera has:

Click on a tab and move it on top of another tab (the other tab turns a deeper shade of gray).
Release click.
Now both tabs are in a group with a little right arrow next to them and a frame around. Actually it's a right arrow and it shows only one tab, when you click it shows all the tabs in the group and becomes a left arrow, if you click it again it's back to a right arrow and one tab only showing.

What a great way to group tabs together from related themes/activities then save space by concealing all but one of the tabs in the group.

It's such a pleasure to see opera brings another of this little brilliant details to the browsing experience.

 

[blomma]

I got to say, I am back on opera on sl on an older mac I had and I got back recently (because after an os update safari kept crashing on start up) and I have to say I am starting to realize again what a great browser it is and why I d fallen in love with it way back when. Opera has to be the single most underappreciated piece of commercial software. It's a testament to what a great team they have that having incomparably less resources than pretty much everyone from the other big players they have managed to keep up the quality for so long.

It's super stable, super fast, doesn't leak and makes safari 5 with its leaks look like a turd (not that it needed opera to look like one, but anyway).

Kudos to the devs, and heads up to anyone to give it a try.

Oh, and here's an idea for apple to steal, they are good at that with safari (speed dial from opera, reader from readability, integrated search from chrome, extensions from ff, separate processes per tab from chrome etc. etc.), a great feature the new opera has:

Click on a tab and move it on top of another tab (the other tab turns a deeper shade of gray).
Release click.
Now both tabs are in a group with a little right arrow next to them and a frame around. Actually it's a right arrow and it shows only one tab, when you click it shows all the tabs in the group and becomes a left arrow, if you click it again it's back to a right arrow and one tab only showing.

What a great way to group tabs together from related themes/activities then save space by concealing all but one of the tabs in the group.

It's such a pleasure to see opera brings another of this little brilliant details to the browsing experience.

And to think, you could have praised Opera for being an excellent browser without trash talking Safari, but i guess the temptation to take cheap shots was to big for you.

 

[blow45]

Do you like the grouping feature?

I am entitled to my opinion on safari you know, in previous versions when it was much better, or if it had evolved to what I expected it to be, I wouldn't have taken a shot at it. Now I think it's warranted.

 

[soloer]

I'm not seeing the advantage of the tab grouping. It doesn't seem like a productive way to use a browser if you have so many tabs open that you need to group them. It's as if Opera is saying there's no point in having bookmarks when you can just open up all your tabs and group them as desired.

 

[CoMoMacUser]

One reason why Opera is my primary browser is that it lets me lock in page magnification. With Safari, I have to hit the a/A button on every page.

The other reason is that Opera is more efficient. With Safari, I frequently get the beach ball.

That said, Opera does have its drawbacks. For example, it doesn't render some sites properly. Unfortunately one of them is my bank.

 

[blow45]

I'm not seeing the advantage of the tab grouping. It doesn't seem like a productive way to use a browser if you have so many tabs open that you need to group them. It's as if Opera is saying there's no point in having bookmarks when you can just open up all your tabs and group them as desired.

What do bookmarks have to do with anything here? The point of grouping tabs is that you can create subsections in your browsing experience on topics, themes, etc. from whatever you are doing, and that you can expand and collapse them so they don't take up space. Eg. I am doing research on a topic, I have subtopic a, subtopic b, subtopic c, I can work in c and collapse the rest, I can also have a group of tabs with tools tabs, I can have a group of unrelated to my research tabs such as a news page I check, weather, some blog, and group them together.


It didn't surprise me you don't get the usefulness, when tabbed browsing started becoming useful most people didn't "get it", hell microsoft didn't even think it would catch on (microsoft of course being the beacon of forward thinking in ui design...). Most users actually don't get the functionality of a useful ui idea, let alone are able to come up with one, that's why there's people that work for opera, and people that open and shut their macs.

One reason why Opera is my primary browser is that it lets me lock in page magnification. With Safari, I have to hit the a/A button on every page.

The other reason is that Opera is more efficient. With Safari, I frequently get the beach ball.

That said, Opera does have its drawbacks. For example, it doesn't render some sites properly. Unfortunately one of them is my bank.

Como, I hope you don't switch to safari with this tip, but you can:

Create a file (using a pure text editor) named defaultzoom.css, or any name you like -- just make sure it has a .css extension.
Copy and paste the following code into the file:
body {
zoom: 130%;
}
Change 130 to whatever number suits you. Anything greater than 100 means zoom in; less than 100 means zoom out. Don't forget the % percent sign!

If you're using TextEdit on a Mac, be sure to have it create .txt documents by default (not .rft) before copying and pasting the above text. You can set this by going to Preferences » New Document » Format. When you save the file, a warning will come up stating that .txt is the standard extension, but you will be given the option of .txt or .css.
Save your file and close the editor.
In Safari, go to Preferences » Advanced. Under Style Sheet, select Other, and point it to the file you created. You may need to restart Safari for the change to take effect.
Voila. Hope that helps someone. (Note that this should work on both OS X and Windows versions of Safari.



Opera does have a few problems with some websites (to be fair which browser doesn't? I find I occasionally switch back and forth from safari to chrome when a glitch comes up on a page) this is for sure. But some website also snob it purpose so it doesn't catch on.

Take for example icloud. Apple has no shame to say this website isn't compatible with this browser, period, you either use our safari (or ff or chrome) but not opera. But why? According to apple the web is about open standards when it comes to killing adobe's flash but it's not about open standards when it comes to their website? Icloud is built with html5, an open standard, why then shouldn't opera users be allowed to access it? If opera masks itself as chrome, they 'll grant access to icloud to it. But when they get that opera is trying to access icloud they refuse to return code from their servers. Anyone who 's not naive can clearly see that they can't get away with not supporting chrome or ff because of their user base, but because opera has a much much smaller user base and they don't want opera to take a cut from the people using safari, so they are not supporting it.

 

[soloer]

What do bookmarks have to do with anything here? The point of grouping tabs is that you can create subsections in your browsing experience on topics, themes, etc. from whatever you are doing, and that you can expand and collapse them so they don't take up space. Eg. I am doing research on a topic, I have subtopic a, subtopic b, subtopic c, I can work in c and collapse the rest, I can also have a group of tabs with tools tabs, I can have a group of unrelated to my research tabs such as a news page I check, weather, some blog, and group them together.


It didn't surprise me you don't get the usefulness, when tabbed browsing started becoming useful most people didn't "get it", hell microsoft didn't even think it would catch on (microsoft of course being the beacon of forward thinking in ui design...). Most users actually don't get the functionality of a useful ui idea, let alone are able to come up with one, that's why there's people that work for opera, and people that open and shut their macs.

I've been using tabbed browsing for a very long time. I was an Opera user at one point a long time ago. My point regarding bookmarks is that bookmarks are already grouped (if you're organized). Why not click a bookmark to open a new tab when you need it rather than having several (dozens?) open hogging up RAM?

 

[blow45]

I've been using tabbed browsing for a very long time. I was an Opera user at one point a long time ago. My point regarding bookmarks is that bookmarks are already grouped (if you're organized). Why not click a bookmark to open a new tab when you need it rather than having several (dozens?) open hogging up RAM?

I too use bookmarks a lot, very useful, we are in the minority I guess of catalogers!

Well some things you might not want to bookmark. For example I have right now a few apple related stuff, the forums here, a few others, some dev pages, that I check out every other hour or so, I ve grouped them and I can clearly see it's this group, I am working on something that requires a few tabs open (some from my bookmarks), these are again grouped in another batch, and I am also purchasing a few household items so I have grouped some tabs I have regarding these. I can condense two groups and focus on what I am doing with no clutter. Even if I expand all of them I can clearly see which tabs are within which group which neatly organizes my activity.

Maybe because you haven't used it, or maybe because it's not your cup of tea you don't think much of it, but I still maintain it's one of those little ingenious additions that made opera what it is. I would also like apple to shamelessly copy this feature as they did with the speed dial.