From testing out my demos in Opera Next over the past few months, I've been really impressed with the quality of their JS runtime and the UI. Unfortunately, their hardware-accelerated canvas support doesn't really keep up and their WebGL is outright broken - it looks like they went so far as to disable both by default in 12, a disappointment to be sure - and they still have serious issues with HTML5 audio (to the point of causing hangs/crashes).
Given that my only real exposure to Opera is from trying to ensure my stuff runs well in it, it's easy to get the impression that everything about Opera is broken. I wish they had a public bug tracker so it was easier to tell which things are known issues, which things have known workarounds, and which things I should file bugs about.
In particular, the audio issues are a point of frustration: At present, if you test the latest builds of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer, Firefox is the only one that actually has low-latency, functioning support for <audio> that doesn't crash or hang. It's ridiculous. Chrome at least has a custom webkit-only API you can use to get working audio, but the rest of the browsers are just flat out broken. And in each browser's case, they've had multiple versions to fix basic issues (limits on how many sounds you can load in a single page context; broken events and APIs; absurdly long playback delays, etc). Oh, and Firefox still doesn't support the loop attribute. :|
> I wish they had a public bug tracker so it was easier to tell which things are known issues, which things have known workarounds, and which things I should file bugs about.
While it's not possible to track the status of a bug, you can submit them:
I've submitted quite a few over the years. I've even gotten emails back asking for more information. For example, I submitted a report about an issue with their hardware acceleration detecting the wrong GPU in a multi-GPU system, which they fixed.
This is just an indicator that we need a proper native development environment. Devs who embrace new web technologies like WebGL, <audio> or <video> forget that those are just Javascript bindings to the technologies developed in C/C++. Can we please have native code instead, so developer controls the underlying system without having to rely on the wits of browser makers? Google Native Client is a step in the right direction.
> This is just an indicator that we need a proper native development environment. Devs who embrace new web technologies like WebGL, <audio> or <video> forget that those are just Javascript bindings to the technologies developed in C/C++.
That is technically true, but what is the point? The bindings can make things better, or they can make things worse. WebGL, for example, covers over a lot of issues with OpenGL (security and convenience), making the web version very nice to use.
> Can we please have native code instead, so developer controls the underlying system without having to rely on the wits of browser makers? Google Native Client is a step in the right direction.
Native code is by definition non-portable.
NaCl in a partial attempt at portability adds bindings of its own to native APIs. Ask people developing for it, like any environment it has bugs and issues.
> That is technically true, but what is the point? The bindings can make things better, or they can make things worse. WebGL, for example, covers over a lot of issues with OpenGL (security and convenience), making the web version very nice to use.
Last time I tried WebGL version of Quake3 on my machine which had the hi-end AMD graphics card at that time, it ran at less than 100FPS. For a game that's 10 years old that is a very poor result. The reason why I said bindings is because I want a language powerful enough to implement any technology I want in that language.
> There is no simple solution here.
Of course it's not simple. It doesn't mean it's not possible. Microsoft's WinRT is another example of coming closer to the native code apps.
> Last time I tried WebGL version of Quake3 on my machine which had the hi-end AMD graphics card at that time, it ran at less than 100FPS. For a game that's 10 years old that is a very poor result.
The Quake II port was extremely unoptimized in how it was performed. It's not a good benchmark of anything.
> Microsoft's WinRT is another example of coming closer to the native code apps.
What about just actual Android C++ apps, as an example of native code apps..?
What, wasn't the whole point of all web technologies to pile abstraction layers on top of abstraction layers so you never have to think about pointers ever again? :)
Native platforms and architectures were replaced by browser platforms, trading power and control for deployment headaches. And now you want to write for multiple browsers, multiple OSes and multiple architectures all at the same time while still battling heaps of restrictions any decent OS/antivirus would impose on binary blobs that can be run by a browser directly?
(disclaimer: I'm obviously biased towards native development :))
I don't see why more people don't realize, WebGL is a prime Microsoft threat and the key to moving away from the MS Windows monopoly. That's why Microsoft has done so much work to try to scare people away from WebGL (by sponsoring 'security research' and creating FUD content on Wikipedia (seriously, look at the history of that article, the person who created the whole 'security' section on WebGL has an ip that originates right next to Microsoft headquarters, and the 'security research' is done by a Microsoft shop)).
What the Opera, Webkit/Safari/Chrome, Mozilla teams should focus on is getting mouse capture and WebGL uniformly supported and turned on across browsers and one or two well-hyped and playable 3d first person games. Any industry player who has money and wants to oppose Microsoft should put money behind big WebGL game releases and hype for such.
You get that working across browsers and push that and things like Google Docs, EditGrid, ethercalc, Zoho Creator, LibreOffice etc. and you will see WebGL games starting to take down PC games sales and Office alternatives hurting Windows/Office sales.
Anyway, please give the people in charge of those programs and funds a link to this explanation if you know anyone like that.
"Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the NEXTSTEP operating system.[6] The Doom game engine was programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. The engine was first compiled with Intel's C compiler for DOS, but later Watcom's C/C++ compiler was used" [1]
John Carmack is nothing if non-partisan when it comes to tools and platforms. Most everything he wrote was reasonably cross-platform C until id Tech 4, released in 2004.
I'd say Carmack has zero years invested in C++ programming for Windows games. He instead has decades invested in making cross platform game engines written in a variety of C-based languages.
For background, I write a lot of WebGL demos, I work for Mozilla on gfx optimizations (WebGL and otherwise) for the Boot2Gecko project. I also worked at Matasano Security previously, doing WebGL security research. As such, I tend to think that I'm pretty unbiased in this regard -- or perhaps biased towards WebGL, since I love it and want to see it everywhere. So with all that said, your characterization of MS's security claims as "FUD" are complete and utter bullshit. WebGL has a substantial attack surface in the browser (large API dealing with many issues from cross-origin restrictions to handling buffer locking and texture sharing, shader verification and translation, not to mention all the code required to actually make this stuff fast, which is what I work on), and it's only the tip of the iceberg that is the 3d stack.
Below the browser you have the userland driver components, which do things like further shader verification and initial stages of the compilation, validating index buffers, and simplifying the command stream. Below that you have the kernel components, which largely trust the userspace to have done their job properly, then do things like compile shaders for the specific hardware and put things into the proper form to send it off to the GPU, as well as handling synchronization and locking and all that. Then below that, you have a massively complex piece of hardware that under most circumstances is fully able to touch every single bit of your system memory (thanks, DMA), and that doesn't care one bit about security; it assumes that everything coming from the kernel is 100% safe and intentional. If you tell it to copy memory from point A to B, it will do it without complaining. Meaning if you wanted to, say, write over kernel memory from a buffer in the browser...
So let's look at what needs to happen to get ring0 (kernel mode) access from WebGL: 1) get your payload through/around validation in the browser, using available APIs, 2) get through/around userland validation OR attack the optimization/compilation steps that occur at that layer, 3) potentially attack optimization/compilation steps that happen in the kernel component -- optional, since this layer may not be your target, 4) GPU does your work for you.
At most, you're talking 3 layers to compromise. Compare to real-world vulnerabilities against other parts of the browser (see also: Pinkie Pie) where you're involving dozens of steps, and suddenly this doesn't look too difficult. The tough part is that it requires a significant amount of domain specific knowledge, but I'm certainly not the only one with it.
WebGL, as awesome as it is, is a security risk. It's one caused primarily by the fact that GPU vendors have never had to care about security along these lines before. It will be solved eventually, but it's damn sure not solved now.
How many examples of this type of "just 3 layers" compromise have we actually ever seen being used as an "attack"? How many is that compared to the number of known attacks against browsers using non WebGL-related technologies?
Did you actually see the specific 'security' concerns that that MS shop put out? Part of it was a laughable demo of an 'attack' that actually did not compromise anything, and looked like a mock-up that would be used in a movie. Whether there are potential security concerns or not, the actual 'concerns' that MS and that company raised were definitely FUD.
I haven't seen any real-world attacks using WebGL yet; we probably won't for a couple years, since it's still very new technology and there's a lot to learn to be able to do even basic research there.
> Browser support for WebGL directly exposes hardware functionality to the web in a way that we consider to be overly permissive
The WebGL API -- outside of bounds checking and shader validation/translation -- is a direct conversion of the EGL API. This makes getting your data (legitimate or not) into the lower levels very easy. That cuts both ways, as I detailed.
> Browser support for WebGL security servicing responsibility relies too heavily on third parties to secure the web experience
Read: The security of WebGL depends on GPU driver vendors, who write terrible code. This point is well known by anyone who's worked on enough 3D code, or even just tried to fix graphics bugs in games by doing the driver update dance.
> Problematic system DoS scenarios
For the vast majority of GPUs, there's no way to set timeouts on rendering or shader execution, so DoSes are just downright trivial. This will be the first thing to get better, with the various robustness extensions that are coming.
All in all, I have absolutely no issues with what MS released on the subject.
"This makes getting your data (legitimate or not) into the lower levels very easy."
Bullshit. Completely unsubstantiated.
The browsers themselves are what are actually being compromised in reality, Microsoft by far more than others. The WebGL exploits are just theoretical. Every browser vendor is a third party.
Big fucking deal, somebody makes your browser or system freeze up.. like that is a new thing that you can't do with a browser or with Internet Explorer? Freezing the system isn't that easy to do with WebGL and depends on the specific setup of that machine. That's not a security concern, thats just a potential inconvenience.
I don't give a fuck what you dumbasses think, this is obviously Microsoft FUD. But its just another example of the sort of idiotic rationalizations that normally support the status quo.
Almost all of the iOS jailbreak vectors involve chaining together bugs and quirks in multiple different subsystems, to ultimately root the system.
These aren't theoretical concerns. Just because WebGL hasn't yet been exploited doesn't mean it'll never be exploited. And given the way WebGL works, a WebGL exploit may be a very serious problem.
Honestly, the problem is that there is no security model. These drivers were never supposed to be exposed to untrusted code. We have a long way to go before driver vendors pull their heads out of their collective asses and start producing good code, especially since it will most certainly come with steep performance penalties.
To give an example: On my home pc I have the snapshots of Opera running with hardware acceleration and WebGL enabled: No problems. A few minutes ago I've installed Opera 12 on my work pc and tried the same. Afterwards I couldn't start Opera anymore and had to reset the options in the config file (AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera\operaprefs.ini if anyone needs to do the same; EnableWebGL and HardwareAcceleration are the keys).
So: Yeah, it's still a bit buggy at the moment (probably hardware compability issues). I've already send my bug report, hope they fix it soon.
This is a real shame, especially for HTML5 games. What's even worse is hardware acceleration on the 2D canvas appears to be disabled by default too, so HTML5 games in Opera 12 on a powerful desktop will run slower than an iPad or iPhone, because they have hardware acceleration. Looks like Opera 12 is a no-go for gaming.
Opera 12 is the first third-party web browser for Windows to offer an official 64-bit version. (Neither Firefox nor Chrome have official 64-bit versions for Windows. And I think Safari for Windows doesn’t have one either.)
Does this translate to any substantial improvements in speed? Does anyone here know of any benchmarks?
Very unlikely. 64-bit is mostly an advantage if you have to use a lot of memory or are doing processing on actual 64-bit integers.
For the kind of software like Opera (and Firefox and Chrome), the additional registers in 64-bit mode help a little, but that tends to be offset by most pointers now being 64-bits and the L1/L2 caches hence being less effective.
Opera 12 uses a separate process for plugins like Flash and I believe it can actually use the 32-bit Flash within the external process while still displaying the content within the 64-bit browser.
64-bit is not really useful for browsers with multi-process architecture like Chrome. It is very unlikely that a single tab will need 64-bit address space.
Except once you have enought tabs Chrome starts putting multiple tabs in a single process. The cutoff seems to be somewhere in the low double digits. And at that point, you can in fact start running out of address space (not to be confused with running out of memory) without too much trouble, especially because system libraries on 64-bit OSes have a tendency to be mmap-happy, since they think they have lots of address space to work with.
64 bit address space significantly improves the effectiveness of ASLR, 64 bit tagged pointers can store way more data (7 byte strings, dunno if anyone actually does that, though).
I generally find Chrome likes to start falling over around the 3.5GB mark (as measured by chrome://memory) - larger images stop loading, pages stop rendering properly, and eventually it can end up crashing. Address space fragmentation I'm guessing.
This isn't helped much by Chrome's aggregate memory use being about 10x higher than other browsers. Takes a good 2-300 tabs in Opera to break 4GB, takes more like 20-30 in Chrome.
Kinda off topic, but Opera Mini and Opera Mobile for Android is vastly superior in terms of smoothness compare to all other available browsers. It is very noticeable especially if the page is heavy. A good test is to load this page http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowsers... on your Android in different browser and test the responsiveness.
I use Opera Mobile exclusively on Android. Pages load faster and zooming with fit text to screen works really well.
My one frustration is that when launching a web page from another app it always opens a new tab so I end up with 10 tabs open and have to close them all every so often.
I've been using Opera Mobile for a while now. IMO it does tabs best for tablet browsing - however I've had to switch to Maxthon as Opera was just too unstable on my android device.
I really like Opera. I've used it for months, but every time i just come back to Firefox.
One big problem (for me) it's their release cycle. I know that many people hate the fast releases of Firefox and Chrome, but this way i get new features sooner than Opera.
Another problem are addons. I'm an heavy Scriptish/Stylish user, and there aren't equivalents for those in Opera. I know that i can enable the userscript folder and copy scripts here, but I'm honestly too lazy to do it, and loading CSS through javascript is just not fast enough.
Then there are the nitpicks. For example, on Firefox/Chrome "right click > search on google" open a new tab, on Opera it load Google in the current tab. Or, on Firefox/Chrome middle-clicking on the back button open the previous page in a new tab. On Opera this just doesn't work (at least, until Opera 11.64 - I haven't tried Opera 12 yet).
And Opera is not opensource. While it's not a so big deal for me, i prefer to use opensource applications when i can.
There are also features that i would love to see on Firefox. Tab Stacking is awesome, way better than Panorama. I really like also how Opera put the tab bar on the left, I find it better than Tree Style Tab.
I'll try the new version later, but i doubt that the new features will be worth a switch for me.
Nice trick. I use Opera as well, and didn't know about this.
However, i can't think of any other software where modifier keys makes a difference in context-menus, so i really wouldn't blame people for not knowing.
I'm not blaming people for now knowing, Opera has so many cool features it's hard to become fully aware of them. To be honest I don't remember how I found out about this one. In Opera (and other browsers) you can use modifier keys when clicking links, so it kind of makes sense to use this in context menus as well.
Opera is always surprising. Did you know you have mouse gestures (such as 'close') in menus such as preferences? It blew my mind.
On windows right clicking on a file and selecting delete sends it to trash, right clicking, holding shift and selecting delete skips trash. This is at least windows xp old. On windows 7, don't remember the others, if you hold shift while right clicking more options appear (probably depends on the file).
In the "Advanced" tab in Opera's preferences it is possible to uncheck "Reuse current tab". In my opinion it would be a much better default to have this unchecked.
With this configuration change "Right click->Search" will open a new tab.
>For example, on Firefox/Chrome "right click > search on google" open a new tab, on Opera it load Google in the current tab.
Uncheck Preferences-Advanced-Tabs-"Reuse current tab".
>on Firefox/Chrome middle-clicking on the back button open the previous page in a new tab.
You can clone tab, so it's possible to implement clone tab and go back macros with custom button like opera:/button/Duplicate%20page,,,%22Back%20in%20background%22,Rewind%20&%20Back
Opera is still not getting some basic features right and that is costing them users.
I remember asking for a feature in forums in days of Opera 11.00. The feature was something that every browser has: "Remembering contents of a text field." For example, when I enter my email address once in a website and then come back another day and write first letter of my email id, it is displayed in a dropdown. But Opera outright refused to even consider.
Now, they lack a good full screen mode and drag and drop support in GMail, two real deal breakers for me. I tried Opera 12 for less than 12 min and sent it back to dark corners of my HD!
FWIW we have the "wand" feature which will fill in, and submit, a form for you with previously used values (it's the key icon on the toolbar or ctrl+enter).
I know this is not quite the same implementation that other browsers have.
Your "wand" feature also adds a terrifically ugly yellow border to remembered inputs which developers have no way to prevent (like you can with WebKit by using outline: 0). I'm all for a constant UI to create a good UX but not when it can make a site look bad.
Opera has an inbuilt IMAP client... which I admittedly never use, but between that and Thunderbird, why would you even want to use webmail? Of course it should still work, even though it's silly, but you also "should" not even notice that it doesn't, is what I'm saying. Certainly if you imply your time is so precious, heh.
I absolutely love the mail client in Opera. In fact, it's the primary reason I still use Opera as my main browser. At work I use Chrome because we use our own webmail client (same one we sell to customers).
I have six email accounts setup in my Opera, all using IMAP. There's a unified INBOX so I can check all my messages, but still be able to review each INBOX separately. Email search is BLAZING fast, the fastest search I have ever used, though it lacks advanced search options like searching only in the subject.
The contacts view is also awesome. Click on a contact and it'll show all the mail to and from that person, instantly. No searching.
The best part is that I never have to "check" my email. Opera notifies me as soon as I get an email (thanks to IMAP) and I keep open the sidebar on the right so I can always see the UNREAD counter to know if I have new messages or not.
Since reading email and browsing the web are things I do all the time, it really makes a lot of sense to me to have those two activities live in the same window and use the same tab navigation system. I love it.
You're right, that would be great... also, showing the sidebar panel when moving the cursor to the edge! I'm a total Opera fanboy, but yeah, this kinda sucks :)
No one has mentioned that Opera 12 is the first GA browser (I believe) to support WebRTC. Basically you don't need to flash anymore to access devices such as webcams and microphones.
I built a really simple site to see how this all works. It will fall back to flash if you don't have WebRTC support which includes Google Chrome Canary and now Opera 12.
I extensively test my webs manually on basically all relevant browsers, up to few old versions, and on different OS' and devices.
My conclusion is that Chrome on Windows 7 is by far the most 'snappy' and Firefox on any OS most 'dev friendly' (even though Chrome is coming along that way very nicely).
That being said, Opera on mobile is very fine, but I still prefer using whatever stock browser is on particular device. Everything else is a little buggy.
What I found lacking in any of the browsers is the developer friendliness on mobile devices. Anyone has any recommendations on that?
Unfortunately, I cannot claim that I have tried it, but I know Opera supports remote debugging. You get to run Dragonfly on your desktop and debug whatever's running in Opera Mobile on your device.
One reason this is a big deal: Opera now supports CORS [1]. Until now, it was the only significant browser that didn't. (Even IE did, albeit - of course - in its own special way.)
I don't know why I would ever switch from Chrome or Safari to Opera. On a Mac, Opera still has text rendering issues (http://imgur.com/a/9bK1j), scrolling stutters, and there's a noticeable difference in page load speed (Opera is much slower than Chrome, at least on my computer).
For me, it is because it simply works straight out of the box, with all the features I use all the time.
For me, it is several of the following reasons:
* mouse gestures.
* the speed dial.
* the ease to create custom url-bar searches.
* thumbnail images of tabs (to check a potentially nsfw link at work).
* in page link or text search using ',' or '.'
* the ability to search for links in the sidebar, and select all of them (e.g. to copy to a wget script, etc.)
* the ease to customize the content block.
... and probably other stuff, which doesn't come to mind.
Also, and this is important: I'm not trying to convince you here. Just pointing out that some will say the exact thing on the switch from Opera to Chrome, Firefox or Safari, with good reasons of their own. Whatever floats your boat.
Also, mind you, I have firefox and chrome installed. Firefox I almost never use, and chrome is useful to see shiny WebGL stuff, which has a lot more support. Sometimes also to see new CSS-demos that are broken in Opera (mostly because of lazy developers who don't include the -o- extensions).
Awesome feature. I hate that other browsers ask you to resubmit a form when navigating back. Opera just shows you the cached page that it bad before. Combining that with the mouse flip gesture, browsing is a breeze. In Chrome you have to click BACK or use BACKSPACE (or a mouse with a dedicated nav button). In Opera, I click the right then the left mouse buttons and I'm back at the previous page. Alternate to go back forward.
This might also be a font-issue. Most of the time websites embed different font-types like eot, ttf, woff and svg. But some types lack font-hinting. It depends on the order in the CSS file which supported font browsers will use.
Care to expand this? A quick look at the linked page shows a bunch of under the hood improvements that will appeal to web developers, but as a user I remain ignorant of why people use Opera.
To be clear I used to use Opera back when they where the only browser with tabs, but that was close to a decade ago.
Features that has been there for ages. It's not like they are essential to have in a good browser but once you get used to them it's painful to switch.
For me it is configurability (if that's a word). Primarily ability to configure controls out of the box. For keyboard, mouse and mouse gestures. This includes dozens of custom actions, even javascript, all of which can be combined using logical conjunctions. No other browser I tried allows you this, not even close.
Configuring the UI is pretty straight forward as well, and if there is anything not available through the UI you can always dig into config files.
Some other features it's hard to browse without: global and per-site configuration of: blocked content, pop-ups, javascript, cookies, plugins, on demand plugins, images, custom layouts, .... edit: and back button actually works as expected
That's just a small subset of dozens of features I miss in other browsers. I don't use any of those extra apps (reader, mail, torrent, irc, ...) but they don't bother me either.
And what I miss in Opera? Switching tabs by their position (alt/ctrl+number in many tabbed applications). That's it. What bothers me is that many sites do not work properly or are completely blocked in Opera. The former is due to low market share of Opera, the latter is because people are dicks (hi google). Just write that it's not supported and I won't call your support line, don't make me change my user agent all the time (luckily I can configure this per-site :P).
edit: Totally forgot this but other comment pointed it out: Opera can handle a lot of tabs, no other browser I tried could do this: memory, performance and UI wise.
Not really. I've told countless people about how Opera really is the best browser, by far, and how people using Chrome and Firefox are stuck in the stone-age of Internet Explorer 6. I'm getting tired to repeat it.
Screw it, I'll do a quick run. Depending on how good your computer is, Chrome will buckle (freeze your computer, in my case) sooner or later after you keep increasing the number of tabs, due to the one process per tab design flaw. That does not usually happen with Opera (unless you have some very demanding pages, which doesn't usually happen to me), it will keep going as long as you have the RAM to supply it. Right now opera:cpu shows me a round number of 115 tabs with 1.5 GB RAM usage, plus the plugin wrapper grabbing an additional 400 megs. Given that this particular computer has 12 GB of RAM I think it's very reasonable.
Of course, I don't have a rocket computer at home but the performance is very good as well on a mediocre laptop.
Now, what good does it do to have 115 tabs if you can't see them or switch between them at your wish? In Chrome you have one line of tabs that keep pushing against another, and at 115 tabs you could not select your tab properly, nevermind reading the tab title.
In Opera I just configured my tab bar to wrap to multiple lines and aligned it vertically on the left side. I also have tab groups that work very nicely to minimize unnecessary clutter.
I can also turn the tab bar off altogether and move between tabs with ctrl + tab or right mouse button + wheel, or hold ctrl + tab + mouse click.
The possibilities for customization are so numerous I can't be bothered to describe them all. Opera is a true browser and it has all these features out of the box without getting in your way.
You're a hacker? Where's your curiosity? Explore Opera's features (like mouse gestures, keyboard navigation, and so on) and see for yourself.
And by the way, one last thing. The default option for Opera is to restore your tabs from your last browsing session, which was not the case for Chrome and Firefox last time I checked (and if that didn't change it's retarded, although I would understand the reasoning, they don't want to encourage you to keep your tabs open because the browser might buckle under the pressure of 10 open tabs). So really, feel free to keep open as many tabs as you like.
You can also use ghostery (an extension) to block all these resource-consuming background scripts, just in case you have reached the limits of your hardware.
I have enable 'plugins only on demand', so no Flash player will be loaded without my explicit consent. Again, this is out of the box. Also, content blocker. And so on and so forth.
Apparently my Firefox looks very similar to your Opera, everything from left-handed tab bar with groups and plugins on demand to scrolling through tabs with RMB+mouse wheel. I'm literally using all of the features you mention. I think you can set up Chrome in mostly the same way.
Of course you need to use extensions while Opera does it all out of the box. I prefer being able to pick-and-choose features and I appreciate the rich playground for ideas of the Firefox extension ecosystem. If anything I wish Firefox did less out of the box.
I think I usually use only between 30 and 60 tabs, though it's easy to lose count with tree style tabs and I've certainly never hit a ceiling where things seemed to slow down. But maybe Opera really shines in super-heavy browsing loads. Even if that's true, "stuck in the stone-age" is just flamebait rhetoric.
> Even if that's true, "stuck in the stone-age" is just flamebait rhetoric.
Not so. Firefox and Chrome come out of the box with more or less the same features as Internet Explorer 6, which is stone-age browsing for me. Sure, you can add extensions and add-ons but they (at least for Firefox) slow down your browser, take time to set up (unless you use a portable version you carry everywhere with you), may be a security risk (as history has shown) and are nowhere near as refined as what Opera provides (I really disliked the All-in-one gestures add-on in Firefox, although you can still customize it until it somehow behaves like Opera's implementation, sort of). And really, Opera has so many features that I like it would take a very long time to have an identical setup for Firefox. Maybe someone should develop an 'Opera' extension.
> I prefer being able to pick-and-choose features
What does it matter if you don't use those features and they don't get in the way? For instance you have a torrent downloader embedded in Opera. I don't use it, I never see it, it does not slow down my browser. What is the problem?
> If anything I wish Firefox did less out of the box.
Chrome and Firefox have the option option to sync your extensions, as well as bookmarks etc. and settings. I just have to login to Chrome or Firefox on a new computer and it's pretty much identical.
Contrast that to Opera Link, which as far as I can find doesn't sync extensions or settings, so I'd have to configure it and change all the default settings I don't like.
I'm pretty darned sure IE6 doesn't have the ability to sync settings.
Can Chrome display your bookmarks at the side in "split view", with bookmark folders and bookmark folder contents in their own pane? Really? Thought so...
> "I prefer being able to pick-and-choose features and I appreciate the rich playground for ideas of the Firefox extension ecosystem."
Well sure, and Opera has extensions, too. It just does some things out of the box that you can't even do with extensions for other browsers, OR for which you have to pay the prices of longer startup and constantly checking for extension updates before starting up.
FF (and Opera, and all browser) extensions are great; as long as you don't have many dozens of them. Then you really really want those features done in core code, not in Javascript and what have you.
Depending on how good your computer is, Opera will buckle sooner or later if you have very demanding pages. That does not usually happen with Chrome (unless you have a huge number of tabs, which doesn't usually happen to me).
Our usages differ quite significantly. Why does that make Chrome stone-age?
"You can also use ghostery (an extension) to block all these resource-consuming background scripts, just in case you have reached the limits of your hardware."
Plugins that are available to pretty much every browser aren't a compelling argument for superiority (http://www.ghostery.com/download), just developer awesomeness. I notice that under Opera it says "/Almost/ full detection", so it's not even as fully featured as on other browsers.
If you're allowing plugins, I'm not sure I can think of a feature in Opera that you can't acheive in Firefox. But of course the argument is that Opera gives you all of them out of the box (whether you need them or not), in which case you can't use widely cross-browser plugins to try and bolster your argument.
"And by the way, one last thing. The default option for Opera is to restore your tabs from your last browsing session, which was not the case for Chrome and Firefox last time I checked"
I almost never want to restore the last session, and when I do Firefox and Chrome (and Opera if you change the default settings) give me the option to without forcing it upon me.
A lot of the defaults in Opera seem to be geared around managing a large number of tabs. I don't have a large number of tabs. I have a few windows with max. a dozen tabs each and I use bookmarks and other tools to manage things I want to keep around long term. I know lots of people who do the same. Yours and my use cases differ. That doesn't make Opera or Chrome or Firefox poorer, it just means different design trade-offs have been made.
I used Opera almost exclusively from version 5 up to around version 11. Now I switch between the Opera Next preview builds and Chromium nightly builds.
As a heavy user of both browsers, I can say for sure that all of the things you mention work as well or better in Chromium.
It's also funny to me that you tout Opera's customization ability, then deride the other browsers for having plugins. What's a plugin if not a convenient form of customization? It's even more funny because Chrome can be customized so much better than Opera. There's no Opera equivalent of Vimium, for example.
And "You're a hacker?" Well, Chromium is open source, it doesn't get more hacker friendly than that. Not that I care.
I switched to Firefox a year or so ago, because Opera (both on Windows and Mac) became too unstable for me with 150+ tabs open. Since then, I have become accustomed to some Firefox extensions, mainly NoScript and RequestPolicy. Also, Firefox has an option to only load tabs when they are clicked on, which makes startup a lot faster (and more stable). If Opera has such an option now, I might switch back.
> And by the way, one last thing. The default option for Opera is to restore your tabs from your last browsing session, which was not the case for Chrome and Firefox last time I checked
Chrome's shortcut for 'reopen recently closed tab' is ctrl-shift-t. If you open a fresh browser window and do that, you get your tabs from the last session.
I use tabs instead of bookmarks. Opera also has tab groups, so I can drag one tab to another to create a collapsible group of tabs related to a particular project. It's not unusual for me to have a handful of tab groups with a dozen of tabs in each, plus half a dozen of regular tabs for what I'm currently reading. The only down side with this is that browsing is slower when I just have started my browser and I'm waiting for all the tabs to load, but I don't close my browser that often. [Edit: apparently there are startup speed improvements in Opera 12 specifically for the many-tabs-open use case]
I also use the tab stacking feature, so many related tabs are grouped together. Right now I have 2 full column of tabs and groups on the left side of my screen. It's actually very comfortable, although sometimes I clean up a lot of them. Like another user said here, I use them as bookmarks, or in my case as "read-later" lists, so I never completely forget about something I want to do or read.
I think it's a matter of habit. You can't use so many tabs if you don't have (at least) a multiline tab bar, preferably one aligned vertically.
Download manager, BitTorrent support, very good email application included, feed reader, Opera Turbo speeds up browsing if you are on a slow connection by compressing everything on Opera's servers (optional), integrated IRC client.
The bookmark management, hands down. Other browsers are for testing and sites that don't work well in Opera; while Opera is for organizing all of the things, especially with things like nicknames for bookmarks and created searches. It also has plenty of themes which actually change how much space stuff takes up... hmm, it's kinda like KDE versus Gnome, with Opera being KDE ^^ There may be apps for Gnome to make it more configurable, but that's just not the same...
A word of warning: this update erased the persistent storage data for all sites. So if you're using plugins or if a particular site is using persistent storage, this will cause issues.
I'm a opera user and I was excited to see this news! So I've downloaded the 12th version and went on to test it in the shining page. But it says that my browser is not supported? http://www.shinydemos.com/touch-tracker/ -- Your browser doesn’t support all required features: Touch Events.
Anyone else having issues with iGoogle? I had it working in 11.6 by identifying as IE, since it would just show a blank page when identifying as Opera/Firefox.
Now, with 12.0, identifying as Opera/Firefox still shows a blank page and identifying as IE just shows the widget headers and no feeds.
I just wish they'd forgo the use of that cramped sans-serif header typeface. It looks like somebody just outlined and compressed it horizontally in Illustrator—awful.
But it does not look checked, right? One should be checked. Also, clicking it has no (visual) effect (though it will toggle the checked attribute in the DOM). It’s a truly terrible bug, and a strong argument that Opera should not use -webkit- properties like transform until it can actually handle them.
I reported it a couple months ago and have not received any follow-up at all.
It is checked and checking it works as well (11.64 at home now). But as other comment pointed out, it looks ugly. I tried FF 9 - same as Opera - works and is ugly. In Chrome 19 it does not work at all (i.e. the checkbox is small).
So it got fixed. And I don't think they do follow-up unless they need you to reproduce the bug or something.
I only use about hundred tabs (not hundreds) but I find Opera best in this regard - mostly because memory usage, stability (as opposed to chrome) and capability of the UI to handle that many tabs while being usable. The thing is, I don't turn the browser off. Maybe once a month to install Windows updates.
There's an ugly workaround though - start Opera without internet connection and then reload tabs as needed.
This is a pity. I have a really nice and unobtrusive SVG Opera clock widget in the corner of my screen, which starts and runs completely separately from Opera. I understand that this is not possible anymore with extensions. I really hope I can keep it after upgrading.
Given that my only real exposure to Opera is from trying to ensure my stuff runs well in it, it's easy to get the impression that everything about Opera is broken. I wish they had a public bug tracker so it was easier to tell which things are known issues, which things have known workarounds, and which things I should file bugs about.
In particular, the audio issues are a point of frustration: At present, if you test the latest builds of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer, Firefox is the only one that actually has low-latency, functioning support for <audio> that doesn't crash or hang. It's ridiculous. Chrome at least has a custom webkit-only API you can use to get working audio, but the rest of the browsers are just flat out broken. And in each browser's case, they've had multiple versions to fix basic issues (limits on how many sounds you can load in a single page context; broken events and APIs; absurdly long playback delays, etc). Oh, and Firefox still doesn't support the loop attribute. :|