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geekhack Community => Other Geeky Stuff => Topic started by: microsoft windows on Wed, 09 December 2009, 09:04:44
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I have started using Opera and it is a very good web browser. It's fast, it doesn't crash, and has a multitude of very convenient and customizable featrures, as well as compatibility with numerous systems. I'd recommend you guys here give it a shot.
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wow i expected none other than IE5
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Opera's old-school; seems logical. I was suprised he wasn't using Netscape or even Mosaic.
Anything's, OK, really. As long as he wasn't trying to dial into CompuServe.
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I am pretty sure the version of IE he has is IE5.
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I tried it for a bit. It was alright, but I preferred Chrome.
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I've found Chrome to be a little slow on my computers, especially when there are a lot of tabs open.
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I've been using Opera 10 for about a year now. It's sits in between Firefox and Chrome in terms of bloat & responsiveness so it's my primary browser.
I dislike how impossible it is for me to find things in its history, but I like its undo closed tabs feature the most, I guess.
Long ago, I installed Safari for Windows, too, but now its sweet font-smoothing is moot and rivaled by my installing GDI++ (http://thunderror.com/get-mac-osx-font-smoothing-in-windows/).
(http://geekhack.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=6247&stc=1&d=1260376863)
Speaking of Chrome, I should try its extensions soon...
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im going to have to try that, no matter how hard i want to believe otherwise, the mac fonts and smoothing look so great EDIT 404.5kb file on megaupload... wow, just wow...
does it HAVE to be run in the tray?
i used to use some other cleartype modifying program, forget what its called
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Opera's old-school; seems logical. I was suprised he wasn't using Netscape or even Mosaic.
Anything's, OK, really. As long as he wasn't trying to dial into CompuServe.
Compu$erve is too expensive... especially at 1200 baud! I'd recommend Delphi or GEnie instead.
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Does Opera have spell check built in?
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Compu$erve
And somebody, many years ago, thought "M$" was original.
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I use most of the commonly available browsers links, lynx, Seamonkey, Firebox, Opera, Exploder. There's something about almost all of them I like (guess which one I don't but have to use anyway) and lots I don't like. So far Seamonkey is the least offensive, I used to use Mozilla.
I have two different Operas on my phone also. They're amazingly good, even better than the desktop versions. Man do those guys know how to do GUI!
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To me, they all are equally good/****ty. Just like OSs. Find the one that offends you the least, and move on. For me, IE is simple, does exactly what I want, and gives me no problems. I've used the others, and while I think they are all good, there wasn't anything good enough to make me want to switch.
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For me, IE is simple, does exactly what I want, and gives me no problems.
I still hate you.
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Sorry.
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Hey Stalion, do you have Opera on your Pre?
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Nah, just what comes with it (I don't think Opera is available for the Pre, but I could be wrong). It's a Webkit-based browser, so it's pretty good rendering-wise. Basically, it's the same thing as the version of Safari that's on the iPhone. The same rendering, same strengths and weaknesses. I'm not really a browser-junkie, so unless there is a killer feature in a different browser or the current one is "broken," I'm probably not going to switch.
Now, SQL editors, on the other hand... I switch between those regularly. I am really happy with Toad for Data Analysts, though.
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Internet Explorer 8 is a great program. But on windows 2000, it only goes up to IE6. However, IE6 is a much smaller program and takes up less system resources so I tend to use it for playing games and such that take up more CPU and RAM. But with newer computers that are much more powerful than mine, that doesn't matter to many people anymore.
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Internet Explorer 8 is a great program.
No it's not. It's the slowest, and the least capable major browser.
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I wouldn't say that. It works great for me on my Windows XP machine. I've tried many other programs but IE8 has loaded pages and run applets faster than most the others for me (Opera's pretty fast too). But, nobody HAS to use it. If you like other browsers better, that's perfectly fine. It's just like saying PC or Mac.
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I wouldn't say that. It works great for me on my Windows XP machine. I've tried many other programs but IE8 has loaded pages and run applets faster than most the others for me (Opera's pretty fast too). But, nobody HAS to use it. If you like other browsers better, that's perfectly fine. It's just like saying PC or Mac.
No, it isn't. Because web development depends on the capabilities of web browsers. Having to deal with the downfalls of IE leads to larger, slower websites, because it's various html, css, and javascript deficiencies have to be coded around.
It's not a matter of preference, it's a matter of Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, et cetera all being better browsers because they work better at their primary purpose: rendering web pages.
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But what's wrong if other people like to use Internet Explorer? People make web pages slower to add in unnecessary effects (like the thing in Google where the rest of the page appaers after you move the mouse).
Personally, I use Opera the most but IE5.5 or IE6 are definitely the fastest.
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Yeah, even IE8, while considerably improved over previous versions, still lags behind other state-of-the-art browsers. It's about Gecko 1.8 level, with some more rendering quirks/bugs apparently. No CSS3 media queries yet (which have been working for a while on Gecko 1.9 based FF/SM, Opera and the Webkit crowd).
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But what's wrong if other people like to use Internet Explorer?
It's holding the web back. Web developers spend 2-3x time longer making a page IE compatible than they do actually designing a page.
And there's the usability issues...
People make web pages slower to add in unnecessary effects
No, that's just because IE can't handle them properly.
(like the thing in Google where the rest of the page appaers after you move the mouse).
If that slows you down, you need to toss the 14k baud dialup modem and get some broadband...
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Personally, I use Opera the most but IE5.5 or IE6 are definitely the fastest.
You'd be surprised if you knew how many workarounds for IE6 bugs are still in use. That always means extra work for the people behind the scenes. Usually these days one would create a design for modern standards compliant browsers and then include an extra stylesheet for IE6 and 7 via conditional comments that fixes the things that break.
It was a big mistake on part of Microsoft to let IE6 sit untouched for years. IE7 only was sort of a hotfix, and very slow in terms of scripting on top of that. Even now they haven't caught up entirely.
Incidentally, I like to use advanced features to make life on my pages easier. If you want more flexibility in terms of scaling to accomodate different viewport sizes, for example, CSS3 media queries are a godsend.
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I can't for the life of me understand why they didn't include IE7 as part of XP SP3. They could have at least done something to move the world on a little bit.
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IE7 is terrible. It is much slower than IE6 and IE8.
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IE7 is hell... it was the browser that came with Windows Vista, what do you expect?
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I've been through the browser gamut, and Opera is one of the best no question. Right now I'm using Safari because of the font rendering. When I get up in the mornign and read the news, I like Safari.
I just wish I could use safari's font rendering in opera or ff.
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I am not picky about my web browser. Any one works.
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If that slows you down, you need to toss the 14k baud dialup modem and get some broadband...
I was one of the first to get DSL in my area. And there still are lots of places in the USA where broadband and cable are not available.
But just little things like that thing on Google are just little inconveniences. The Web would be better with out them and those Flash ads that slow down my machine (I only have Flash Player installed in Opera so I can go on IE when I don't want to deal with stupid ads for scams).
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Similar policy here - SM as the primary browser is flashless (and with a minimum of plugins and Adblock Plus, of course), Opera is used for Youtube and stuff. That keeps risks fairly low. I ditched Flash in my main browser after version 6 or so due to much increased CPU usage on ads.
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But just little things like that thing on Google are just little inconveniences. The Web would be better with out them...
That thing on Google is an IE issue.
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It actually does that in Opera as well. I thought the same thing as you at first since it happened in IE5.0 and that was an old browser.
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It actually does that in Opera as well. I thought the same thing as you at first since it happened in IE5.0 and that was an old browser.
What version of Opera?
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The latest one. I think it's around version 10.
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im going to have to try that, no matter how hard i want to believe otherwise, the mac fonts and smoothing look so great EDIT 404.5kb file on megaupload... wow, just wow...
does it HAVE to be run in the tray?
i used to use some other cleartype modifying program, forget what its called
(now I wonder if I this should go in its own topic...)
There's also this Chinese version of GDI++ (http://www.fonlan.cn/post/64.html) which doesn't have a tray icon but installs and applies itself after a reboot; however, I did not bother trying different settings, or figuring out how to even change them since I can't read Chinese =D
It doesn't bother me since I can hide it using a filtering mechanism in Litestep, but the icon being an annoyance I could understand. Isn't vanilla Windows able to hide tray icons, though?
Anyhow, you could remove all of gditray.exe's icons from the executable with reshacker, then use Autohotkey scripts to control it after initial configuration. At least it works here, in Litestep; I'm too lazy to test it in explorer. I've attached an experimental proof of concept.
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Been using Opera since 2006, when Firefox was starting to royally piss me off (it started getting bloated, and would randomly delete half my bookmarks on Linux and Windows).
This is my ideal layout in Opera. The tabs on the left (hidden by F4), make Opera ultimate in my opinion. You can even drag multiple tags between windows (useful for multi-monitor). You can hide the File bar with Alt+F11 in Linux (Windows too if you enable the hotkey).
(http://geekhack.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=6266&stc=1&d=1260409500)
When I have to use Firefox, vimperator makes it at least bearable.
Still, I don't understand. Opera has a mail client, IRC client, web server (Unite, dunno if its out of beta yet), and Bittorrent client, but up firefox takes longer to start up (standard install).
I had the chance to write a patch for Firefox in Linux a while back (for work). Damn, the layout of the configuration files made my head spin. It was almost as bad as looking through the OpenOffice source...
Does Opera have spell check built in?
Latest version does.
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(http://geekhack.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=6267&stc=1&d=1260423946)
I've been using Opera since before I can remember. It used to be ahead in some features I liked, such as closed tabs and mouse gestures. These days all browsers have those features, and I'm now using global gestures anyway.
Now I use it because it's simple/minimalistic, yet extremely functional. One feature I absolutely love is Opera Sync. I can use Opera from any OS or computer I own and sync it with My Opera. I can then reach all of my bookmarks, searches, and notes. In the latest version of Opera, they've also released Opera Unite. It's pretty much a built-in file server that works around NAT issues. I haven't used it enough to comment too much, but it's pretty innovative.
The only thing I miss out on with Opera is the occasional lack of compatibility and a cool plugin here and there. But as itlnstln said, we all have to pick the browser that bothers us the least.
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those Flash ads that slow down my machine
Firefox + AdBlock Plus + NoScript = Win
For me using any other browser is a shock to the system.
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Do you have one of the less powerful systems in the world (like mine)?
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Opera + matching urlfilter.ini should work about the same. Ad blockers are the umbrellas of the interweb, which happens to be a fairly rainy sort of place...
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Do you have one of the less powerful systems in the world (like mine)?
No, it's the intrusive ads that cause me shock. Like the ones that cover what you want to read, and follow you as you scroll down the page. I wish the people behind them would realise that such things only piss people off.
I have a mental blacklist of products I won't buy because their adverts offend me. My pet peeve is TV ads that are badly dubbed into English. How offensive is that? They want me to buy their product but they won't make an advert in my language (or even make a half-assed effort to try to pretend it was.)
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"Congratulations, you just won a free I-Pod Nano because you're the 1000000th visitor!"
The flashing colors on ads like this aren't the only thing about them that annoys me when I see them more than once on the same site.
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(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/new_car.png)
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Hey, I'm a Opera user as well. So I'm gonna take Windows side on this (not talking about ie browser).
Firefox + AdBlock Plus + NoScript = Win
Installing 10+ extensions to a any app to have the most basic features which makes it slow and heavy as hell = FAIL
Opera is much responsive, less resource hungry, customizable and rich of features out of the box.
The only thing sometimes use iceweasel (that's like firefox) is firebug when I work with javascript, although Opera has DragonFly (a similar option) but it's not as good.
The key shortcuts' re the best I've seen in a browser and also there's a vimperator port (http://my.opera.com/Blazeix/blog/vimperator-for-opera) (vim like shutcuts) for Opera as well, I think this is an important point for this forum, that's why mention it.
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I use Opera 10 - it's great.I only use IE when I need to drag and drop web pictures - otherwise never.
Internet Explorer Index dat files need to be unlocked or shredded before windows boots in DOS mode or else they're always on your HDD.Deleting them does not get rid of them and 99% of TIF cleaners do not touch them - they simply delete the file headers.
If Opera had a built-in rtf editor it would be even better.
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I only use IE when I need to drag and drop web pictures - otherwise never.
I think Firefox supports that. Chrome too.
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I think Firefox supports that.
As do other Gecko-based browsers.
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I used Opera in pre-Firefox days, back when it had ads and all. Switched to Firefox for the last few years. Can't live without the holy trinity of NoScript, Adblock Plus and Greasemonkey. When Chrome plugins catch up to these three, though, I'll make the switch to that.
The new version of Opera looks interesting, but that's because it reminds me more of Chrome. I don't know if Opera could win me back at this point.
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Opera is my third favorite browser:
1. chrome
2. firefox (3.5+, latest dev is much better than 3.5)
3. opera 10+ (opera 9- are not as close)
Try chrome 4.x (dev versions), you won't be disappointed (much faster, more features, webkit, fastest javascript by far)
Chao,
it's not far away:
antiads (better than adblock+ for chrome), greasemetal (don't use it, but supposed to be the same thing as greasemonkey) - noscript = ehh, not yet
They aren't as mature or implemented yet because of a lack of chrome features yet, but i'd give it a month or two and probably see these limitations removed.
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I think Firefox supports that. Chrome too.
I like microbrowsers - less than 1 meg in size (eg Offbyone ) and Opera.
I don't use bloatware full stop and if Opera gets any bigger I'll just use an older version of it.
To me a more efficient better browser means smaller more agile more responsive.Why can't they be written in machine code?
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To me a more efficient better browser means smaller more agile more responsive.Why can't they be written in machine code?
Probably because machine code takes too long. Not to mention, machine code definitely isn't cross-platform. Assembly is probably too low-level.
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Last I checked, Chrome used less resources than Opera did.
And no one writes in machine code any more because modern compilers are approaching the handwritten machine code efficiency anyway. There's all sorts of other stuff too like portability and ease of debugging which make any speed advantage irrelevant.
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If you need a light browser, you need Internet Explorer 5.5. That's just about as fast as they get. But, of course, you get no tabs, no security, no nice-looking icon... But for playing games on the internet that are resource-intensive, you can't beat Internet Explorer 5.5. You just can't.
There's one slight problem with Chrome that makes me not have it on my machines (to try). It doesn't run in Windows 2000. But I've used it on work computers and it's definitely not as fast as Firefox or Opera (they're on the same machines). I don't really care what the computer magazine says. After all, about 67% of statistics are made-up anyway...
Overall, I like to use Opera on my computers for tabbed browsing. It loads pages faster on my machines with my internet, and has plenty of good features. That doesn't mean it's right for everyone though. People have their own tastes and I respect that.
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There's all sorts of other stuff too like portability and ease of debugging which make any speed advantage irrelevant.
I still hate running Java VM's...lol
But yeah, using machine code doesn't make sense unless it's something you want to run very fast, and are too cheap to buy better hardware.
Being able to share the code-base between platforms helps a lot in maintaining software.
Take a look at ZSnes. Its drifting into obscurity as it was written in x86 assembly. Whereas Snes9x is not.
This is coming from a person who plans on using OpenGL to make his terminal emulator scroll faster, and reduce vim lag...
Hell, I'd probably even think about using assembly if didn't want it to be portable as well.
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If anyone feels like trying something interesting but unstable, Opera 10.5 Pre-alpha (http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/12/22/) is out.
I have tried it a bit on 64bit Win 7 and was pleasantly surprised by how different it actually feels. It takes decent advantage of the Win 7 gui API. I found I could kill the tab bar completely and rely on RMB+wheel up/down and Aero Peek to flip through tabs. And the new javascript engine is pretty crazy compared to the old one.
I was routinely getting 8fps on JSNES (Javascript NES emulator) in Opera 10, and in the 10.5 pre-alpha I ran 2 instances side by side at 60fps.
Can't wait to see what the performance is like in a more stable release.
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I'm getting a problem with Firefox where the page doesn't update unless you move the mouse. I thought it might be my system, but googling found others have had the problem. Might be related to ABP or NoScript add-ins? Seems to be getting worse though. Maybe this is what people mean when they complain about FF being slow.
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I'm getting a problem with Firefox where the page doesn't update unless you move the mouse. I thought it might be my system, but googling found others have had the problem.
I've experienced that occasionally as well, seems to be a general Gecko thing. UI responsiveness has been a bigger issue for me ever since SM2 though (FF 3.x does the same), since apparently other tabs can "steal" computing time from the current open one. This is quite annoying as it means keyboard input stalls for a few seconds at times. Correcting tpyos blind isn't that much fun.
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Now you mention it, I do have a bad habit of keeping interesting pages open in tabs instead of making bookmarks.
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Now you mention it, I do have a bad habit of keeping interesting pages open in tabs instead of making bookmarks.
Same here, but that ended when my custom skin in Opera broke after upgrading from ver. 9 to 10a (I couldn't tell which tab was active for when tabs were vertical/docked to the left). It also ended when the Tree Style Tab extension one day disappeared after some Firefox update.
Go figure that when I tried Opera 10.5a the other day (overwriting ver. 10) it turns out it's too unstable to use, so now I'm using Chrome again. Browser devs always rip^H^H^H implement obviously useful, ideally-universal features, so it's fine just switching browsers from time to time, here. I'll try Firefox or Opera whichever next has a public release...
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I can't wait until web developers band together and 100% give up on providing IE compatibility, as a matter of principle.
I personally have, but the people who sign my paychecks still want that 9% of users to be able to view their websites (or at least, the important parts, shopping cart, checkout process, etc)
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Actually, lnternet Explorer still holds about 70% of the lnternet browsing market.
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Where can we find recent statistics? I'd heard Firefox has 35%, which doesn't let anyone have 70%.
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Opera has been rather unstable for me on OS X 10.4, at least for Opera version 10.10.
Sometimes things such as clicking on a textarea will crash the browser...it's actually quite irritating.
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Actually, lnternet Explorer still holds about 70% of the lnternet browsing market.
I think he was referring to IE6 users.
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I found that statistic in a computer magazine I was reading in the grocery store a few months ago in an article about Google Chrome.
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http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
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I think he was referring to IE6 users.
I was. At least with IE7 has CSS 2.1 selectors and 24-bit png support, but its still not very standard. I was basing the 9% off what the traffic we (Zappos.com) get from IE6 users.
Typically you run into a few situations why IE6 is still stuck around. Firstly is legacy software written for company use. To hire a developer to rewrite some software for another browser would cost money, so best to have the IT department keep everyone at IE6. Second, people just don't care. Until the cost of reformatting their machine from poor security becomes so much of an inconvenience, people will continue to use it. It's "good enough" for a lot of people, the same reason why most people can type on rubber dome keyboards with no problems whatsoever.
I really only see IE6 dying when enough people either switch over to Windows 7, switch to Mac, or when Microsoft stops patching the security holes (which is somewhere in 2014 or something like that). Until then, got to support those people using it.
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Myself, I've been (almost) exclusively an Opera user since 6.05. I've tried Firefox, didn't like it (but keep it around just in case,) I've tried Chrome, and didn't quite like it. Yes, Opera's a bit slower, but it just works for me, and I'm too used to it.
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The funny thing is I didn't like Opera when I tried it some time ago. It seemed too alien. When I tried Firefox much later I liked it and stuck with it. But I recently realised the things I like about Firefox were present in that old version of Opera I tried (tabbed browsing etc.) Now I feel a bit guilty for not giving Opera more of a chance.
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Opera's problem has been that it started up by default with some silly skin instead of looking like an app that follows the standards of the os it is run on.
Agreed: Just like Google Chrome. Except Opera didn't rewrite the window manager, so when you minimize all, Opera will minimize and Chrome won't always do so.