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Opera, Totally Screwed?

joshua — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 06:46:24 +0000

I’ve got a feeling that the biggest loser from Google releasing Chrome is going to be Opera. I saw a lot of reviews comparing Chrome to Firefox, Safari and IE, but almost none which mentioned the fact that many of Opera’s design choices and features are part of Google’s Chrome.

Dragging a tab into a new window? Wonderful, but Opera had this first. Admittedly Chrome does it with a tiny bit more style but the fact remains.

Tabs above the address bar? Opera also had this, in fact it’s been a longstanding Opera design feature for years. After using Chrome however Opera’s top menu bar starts feeling a little superfluous.

Home screen? Opera introduced the great Speed Dial feature which I think just about everyone loves. Chrome has a similar home screen, however instead of 9 user-selected sites it displays the 9 most visited websites. Personally I get the feeling that this wasn’t a decision made because this is more functional, but because Google wanted to differentiate themselves from Opera slightly. I would be willing to bet that in future updates Chrome will introduce the option to manually set websites on the ‘speed-dial’.

Omni-bar? Opera has an address bar from which you can search directly (type g for google for example), search through your history (all visited pages are indexed) and favourites. These kind of features are found in most browser now, but Opera (and Flock) was one of the innovators in this space.

Opera has always made a name for itself in simplicity, speed and innovation. Unfortunately for them an incredible amount of development has been going on in the browser space and they’ve been somewhat knocked off their throne when it comes to performance and even innovation.

Google has already equalled Opera’s share of the market and while I don’t think it’ll be going anywhere fast (an extra 1 or 2 percent over the next year) Opera has it’s work cut out in maintaining and growing its user base. The number 2 alternative browser objective also seems just that much further away now.

Opera 9.5 beta is out

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:51:00 +0000

Opera fans rejoice. The very first beta of Opera 9.5 codename Kestrel has been released to the public. The biggest change is a new feature called Opera Link which offers a way to access all of your bookmarks and Speed Dial picks from one place. It does not matter if you access the Internet with Opera 9.5, with Opera mini or another browser, the bookmarks are always available.

If you do use Opera Link with Opera you can synchronize all bookmarks with Opera while other browsers obviously only have access to the web version. The changelog lists a lot of changes since Opera 9.5 Alpha including heaps of changes to the Rendering Engine and JavaScript / DOM.

Opera 9.5 beta seems to render websites faster than Firefox and Internet Explorer. I could make another performance test to see if the tests show that my subjective feelings are right.

Read More:

Opera 9.5 beta
Opera Link

Firefox still on the rise in Europe

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 07:33:23 +0000

Firefox is still on the rise in Europe where it reached an impressive overall 27.8% market share in June 2007. Finland, Slovakia and Slovenia lead the pack with 45.4%, 40.4% and 47.9% market share while Great Britain, Spain and Italy still linger at the bottom with a market share below 20%.

Mozilla Firefox gained 3.4% market share over the course of the last four months in Europe and it does not seem that an end is in sight. The global level is also seeing an increase with Oceania still leading the field with a market share of 28.9%, North America with 18.7% and Asia with a disappointing 14.3%.

If the trend continues Firefox will most likely break the 30% barrier in Europe this year. The release of Firefox 3 could also drive even more users away from Internet Explorer who is still having the unfair advantage of being shipped with every Microsoft operating system.

41.21% of the users here at Ghacks are already using Firefox to visit my site with Internet Explorer still leading by about 10% and Opera in third place with 3.93%.

Running different browsers

Dearon — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 15:58:24 +0000

If you are playing around with websites then the whole browser thing can be quite irritating. On the Windows OS there are currently 5 big browser active. Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 2.x, Firefox 1.x and Opera 9. Of course you have to make sure your site works on all these browsers. Or sometimes you need a different browser because certain sites don’t work well with your standard one.

The beginning is simple, you just download the latest version of Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer. But once you have these three installed you still have two to go, which isn’t as simple as it seems.

For Firefox you can simply get the Firefox Portable version, which can be found here (if that links stops working you can go directly to the project following this link)
Once you have unpacked the file you can then navigate to the map, and open the FirefoxPortable file (make sure you don’t have 2.x open tho)

Internet Explorer is a different story. Once you have installed Internet Explorer you’ll have to search for a Internet Explorer “portable” version. Thanks to the people at evolt.org there is an Internet Explorer 6 standalone version.

The downside to this is that (unlike with the Firefox portable version) the system still thinks the browser is Internet Explorer 7, so if you are using Conditional comments you’ll temporarly have to change the comment to Internet Explorer 7 instead of 6.

I hope this is useful to some of you, seeing how web design can already be a nightmare with all the different browsers (more specific, the mess that is called IE ;))