The browser whores

[xEik]

Altough this is a community that is based on WipEout games, it is also known that a good bunch of fellow wipers are graphic and web designers.

Since AOL has recently dismantled Netscape and IE6 SP1 is said to be the last standalone version of Explorer, I think many things may change in the following months or years.

The intention of this thread is to provide a place where fellow wipers can share impressions or news on the various browsers that one can find out there. IE, MyIE2, Netcaptor, Mozilla, Firebird, Camino, Netscape, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, OB1, lynx...
Feel free to comment on important news or releases of these (or other browsers you know, I must have forgotten many). Please don't simply list the browsers you have installed in your computer, that would be irrelevant to others.

Whenever you want to comment on an article, a link is appreciated. Don't copy-paste entire articles.

I hope this thread will be informative for everyone. Obviously no flaming will be tolerated. Every browser has its pros and cons. Bashing one of them isn't what you are supposed to do here.

I hereby announce that I'm a browser whore (that is, I have more than one browser installed in my computer). :D

[AmishRobot]

i've been consistently impressed by Opera. It has some minor bugs and occasionally hits pages it doesn't like (mostly IE only sites), but IMO it has the best user interface of any browser out there. Mouse Gestures area a godsend, and as far as I know, Opera is the only one that has them "out of the box", so to speak.

Mozilla's been improving greatly and has a potentially great future. The only real problems I've found are the lack of simple easy to read documentation, and that their web site sucks. If they want to start getting average users, they need to make it a lot easier to download, install and find support than they do now. That's another thing Opera does well. With things like one-click skining and their forums, they make it very simple for novices. Mozilla's breakout branding strategy was needlessly confusing as well, and I personally can't stand the names Phoenix or Firebird.

What Microsoft is doing is pretty scary. They were convicted of monopolistic practices for using their power in the desktop market to force their way into browsers, and now they're doing the exact reverse. When it comes time where the critical security upgrade people need for IE is only available in the $98 upgrade for Windows, they're going to be pissed. Mac users are going to have problems too, as the internet gets increasingly IE-centric. As it is now, as a Linux user, I have to rely on a combination of Opera, Mozilla & Konquerer to be abe to view every site. No one browser works for everything for me. And even with that, sometimes I'm just SOL. I've never used Safari, but I've heard both good and bad about it.

It's a shame that AOL dissolved Netscape. The prospect of using Mozilla in AOL was the best hope for fighting the IE domination. I'm guessing that the 7 year free license they got for IE as a result of that lawsuit means that's what will be in the next version of AOL. They're going to regret that when those 7 years run out.

[Roger]

I hereby announce that I'm a browser whore (that is, I have more than one browser installed in my computer). :D
OK, let's see... Mozilla, Opera, Camino, iCab, Internet Explorer, Safari. That makes six browsers. I guess you can count me in, xEik :roll:

BTW, I use Safari as my main browser, the others are just for show...

[jmoid]

I use Opera. Multiple broswer windows inside one main window, being able to switch off pop-ups, choosing whether or not to download pictures... the features make a far preferable choice over IE for me, plus pages genuinely load quicker than IE when using dial-up. I havn't tried any of the others.

[Lance]

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Re: the MicroSoft/AOL contract: yes, gates is putting fences around the watering trough again. i understand why AOL in its current weakness went for the deal, but when they were riding high, they could have made Netscape their official ISP browser. after all, they've owned it since about 1997. they are still giving financial support to the Mozilla open source project, but that will go away in no more than 2 years. one thing that offers hope for non-monopoly is that Mitch Kapor, the still wealthy originator of the Lotus 1 2 3 spreadsheet, is also supporting open source with cash.

our hopes for openness of the net are still mostly limited to operating within the ms windows os. however, there is some strength in Linux at last. and eventually salvation, one hopes. Apple has become almost a non-competitor, dammit. their insistence on beautiful design, high end price structuring, and proprietary hardware exclusivity of the operating systems has resulted in a decline to substantially less than 3 percent of the world market. browsers developed exclusively for apple OSs are unlikely to be influential. Apple is already diversifying into the music business to stay financially afloat. i would not be surprised to find them leaving the desktop computer industry in the next 5 years.

as for IE, MSs abandonment of development currently means that only with one of the shells that add MDI and other functionality to it can IE function at even 60 percent of the level of something like Opera7, or for that matter, Opera 5. it remains to be seen if the upcoming MS OS will in any way be able to block the use of browsers other than IE [under whatever name] that will contrary to court order still actually be integrated into the OS. as long as XP and the earlier MS Windows versions remain in the majority of installed systems, we will probably still have some choices in browsers. after the new os obtains a majority, if it does, who knows?
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[FoxZero]

before i begin, this is all IMHO, my experience is of one individual whos been using browsers since lynx. i know what i know, so i will speak from that. id like to note that my computer is a dell optiplex gx110 ( pentium 3 667mhz [note: not a celeron], 512 mb ram running winxp professional). i write all my html and javascript by hand in notepad.

opera: i would say my browser of preference at the moment would be opera. i used to only use netscape back when 4 was first released, then i switched to ie at version 5 and then finally opera at version 6. as far as being a whore, theres rarely ever a time that only one browser is installed on my system. :roll:

i test my web sites in opera because if i write it properly in opera it almost always works in all the other browsers without any other tweaking. it also has an incredible user interface with not only mouse gestures but tabbed windows, which is something that neither firebird nor ie can match.

at the same time, however, operas code compatability is a draw back since its not very tolerant of bad code. for example opera really doesnt like it when someone does comments inside of a style tag and forgets to end the comment. it dislikes it so much in fact that it displays nothing but a white page and a single greater than sign. in addition, opera doesnt have full DOM support so things like the javascript layer interface in cgi irc arent fully functional. theres also no way to vertically and horizontally center images at the same time without it being a giant javascript hassle, because % isnt supported for table dimensions. there are also some other bugs with the actual program user interface like alt-tabbing with drop-down boxes still open and not being able to remove some of the searches in the search bar, but just having those customizable functions is something i appreciate. of the browsers i own, opera is the one by which all others are judged.

firebird: firebird has served me well as an alternative to opera, it displays web sites almost identically to ie which is good from a web design standpoint (dont have to open 3 browsers to check!). its also faster at displaying pages than opera. the browser doesnt crash as much as ive been able to crash opera, but note that ive never had the browser open for very long.

unfortunately the tabbed window support is not as well implemented as opera though. not only that but i had a bitch of a time trying to get shockwave to install when i first got firebird. i eventually figured out i had to download an installer (which isnt officially supported by the firebird developers) instead of the zip thats on the firebird page, because otherwise the shockwave installer wouldnt detect a netscape-compatible browser. this was after about an hour of bitching, moaning, and cussing. once i got it working, however, ive never had a problem.

mozilla: i got mozilla by mistake because i thought it was firebird, which i had heard good things about. then i used mozilla for about five minutes before i uninstalled it. its basically netscape 4 and 6 with all the same bugs that have existed for the 3 years or whatever those browsers have been around for and barely any new changes or functions.

navigator/communicator 4/6: not very customizable, and really really unstable. as typical with netscape products, its really picky about code that works and sometimes you have to do weird run-arounds just to get the page to display (one time i had to end font tag 3 times to get a table working even though i didnt have a font tag in my code. wtf?????). these browsers eventually crashed themselves out of existance and i uninstalled them thusly.

internet explorer: probably the best thing about this browser is the pure speed, and i imagine this is mostly due to the fact that its built so deeply into windows xp. ie is also very tolerant of bad code. you can be a very bad html programmer and not end a single tag and the page will still work fine in this browser. 99% of internet web sites work properly in ie. it also has extra code functions like scrollbar color changes and javascript filters for added customizability.

sadly i could write a book about the drawbacks of ie. its terribly unstable (see recently found single line of code that always crashes it), if uninstalled it has tremendous side effects, theres not nearly enough interface and function customization options, theres no pop-up control whatsoever, and active-x is a backdoor waiting to happen. thats just the tip of the iceberg, too. not only all that, code tested in ie also doesnt get along with other browsers, because its so tolerant of faults and because it supports so many of its own functions, lots of people are excluded when a page is written based around it. on older operating systems, random crashes of ie could freeze your whole system, something that no other browser ive used can even attempt to compete with. crappy browsers like this one are the reasons why we have to have more than one.

anyway, thats what i think. ive never used safari because i dont own a mac and ive never tried kompressor because i dont have the patience to wait for my dialup to get it. personally, with opera ie and firebird all on one machine, i think ive had enough moody browser that i can take. :-?

[Thruster2097]

heh, so many people with massive posts about browsers! Whats wrong with good'ol Microsoft Explorer, eh? :wink:

[Lance]

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merely counting its flaws would be more massive than any post so far.

background for the browser opinions i express here: i am definitely a browser maven [nOt a synonym for ''whore''], but i want you to know that i have made an effort to cut back. since offloading or at least backing up nearly everything on my harddrive, i now have only 15 versions of Opera 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7. i used to have about 38 installed. not to mention ie, currently only 5 ie shells, cut back to only the latest version of OB1, eliminated K-Meleon entirely, eliminated all versions of pure Mozilla, kept only my original Netscape 4.08, having eliminated 122, 304, 476, 479, 600, 610, and 702. however, just added Netscape 7.10 [probably the best Netscape ever, by my standards], have Firebird Glendale [0.6] release, plus last Friday's nightly build of same. i also eliminated a few versions of Mosaic, the predecessor and basecode of both Netscape and IE [so i've read].
i have never had the opportunity to use a Mac or Linux or any browser for them. i have used two browsers on BeOs, and have another which i've not installed. Altogether i have had more than 80 versions of various browsers, and used all but 3 of them.

the results of my experience? apart from a few small flaws, some of which were not in its predecessor series, Opera 7.11b, build 2887, is the best browser i've seen. in terms of throughput, the amount of work that can be done in any given time period, there is nothing else that can come even remotely close. as both a functional browsing experience, and an aesthetic experience, it is the best. from within the browser's own do-it-while-it's-active preferences controls, it can be altered to suit you more than any other browser. for those of us who are desirous of even more customisation, the ini files of Opera allow you to change pretty much everything in menu choices, sizes, and arrangements. colour choices for the skins can also be altered and added to. keyboard shortcuts can be added and/or changed. i have done all of those. there is nothing else like it that i have seen on the internet. nothing.

i'd like to comment on the goodnesses and otherwise of other browsers, and i probably will at some other time, but this post is already quite long enough
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[xEik]

heh, so many people with massive posts about browsers! Whats wrong with good'ol Microsoft Explorer, eh? :wink:
You wrote the answer yourself. ;) It is between good and Microsoft.
The render engine hasn't been improved since god knows when. I'm sure it was an impressive engine when it was out. But the flaws that were forgivable then, haven't been adressed for a long time, causing many people to get pissed. No native alpha transparency in PNG images and poor CSS2 support are the most known ones.

[Bob Todd]

Why does Opera not support Javascript that opens pop-up windows (not the advertising ones that we all hate - I mean ones that pop up when you click on something, like I have on my site)? I visited the W3's (www.w3schools.com) tutorial site and looked at their code for opening a new window with controlled appearance, and it's the same as what I have on my site. If it's the 'officially approved' code, why, then, does Opera not support it?

I downloaded Opera today, and while it looks lovely and has many groovy features, I honestly prefer the AOL browser even though it looks like arse (although you can get rid of most of its images and it does block advert pop-ups), because there's no webpage I've yet found that it can't execute.

[Lance]

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when i browse your site with ie5, the hyena industries page is accessible, but i'm curious as to why you want to display it in that tiny little 640 x 400 pop-up, particularly since you state that your site is ''evil for small monitors''.

if the javascriptvoid script for the pop-up is exactly the same as the W3C standard, then i can offer no answer as to why Opera7 is not working with it. it would take someone with more knowledge of that subject than i have.

i have found sites that IE cannot display properly due usually to problems with insufficient support of current CSS standards, but i'm using 5, not 6. but even 6 is old; there's been a lot of development of page code since it was made. [ the reason i don't have 6 is that i simply would not download it or any other MS application to MY, repeat, MY computer. it isn't MS's computer, and i don't wish them to do things their way on it. ] [i'm a cranky surfer, aren't i?]

[further cranky note :)
since i'm on a dial-up, i disable java applets and flash animations. who knows how long it will be before i die? i don't want to waste my remaining time in waiting for applets and flash to load through a 56k modem. my primary interest is data, whether textual or pictorial or musical, but i can appreciate that applets and flash can be used to make an aesthetic contribution to a site. it's a pity that almost none of the examples of this that i've seen are good enough to be worth the time and trouble of experiencing them. it wouldn't be quite such a pain on broadband, but there are still few animated site-graphic works of artistic intent that really add to my day. and anyway, i only have narrowband, which, oddly enough, seems to be pretty effective for my uses of the net. {now if we could just stop idiots from using 150 KB pics as thumbnails, and the ones who create sites that can only be accessed by downloading a non-bypassable multi-hundred kilobyte flash animation. i pretty much close those sites and move on to those whose webmasters have more respect for other people and less egotism for themselves}]

[come to think of it, even if knew for certain that i would live another entire century, i still wouldn't allow my time to be wasted that way. maybe if i were immortal like the 'people' of the Q continuum, and i were really desperate for a time-passer]

well, that wandered pretty far afield. [*tries unconvincingly to look repentant*]

back more specifically to topic, in light of what i've said in this post, it is very good that Opera7 lets me easily switch all plug-ins and scripting languages on or off. the key words are 'switch' and 'easily'. :D
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[xEik]

there's no webpage I've yet found that it can't execute.
Browsers don't execute pages. They render them.
Although you code websites, you are not programming. HTML and its variants are markup languages, not programming languages.
When you program something there is usually a compiler or an interpreter that will yell at you whenever they find an error in your syntax.
On the other hand, HTML documents can have bad syntax and the browser won't obviously yell at the happy user but try to do its best to display what the author intended to be there.
Every browser has flaws but it is also true that many sites have bad syntax due to browsers being too forgiving.
If the webdesigner had known he/she had coded it badly, he/she would have simply corrected it. But too many of them think that their site is well written just because it displays as he/she wants in the browser he/she happens to be using.
I bet you'd also be pissed if someone coded a site checking it with Safari while commtting errors that allow it to still look good in Safari but completely screw it in AOL browser.

That's why validation services exist nowadays. http://validator.w3.org/ validates your pages for free as many times as you want. A validated page is more likely to display consistently among browsers (although I won't try to fool you saying that it is the Ultimate Solution for a site displaying correctly in every browser).

[Neo-phyte A10]

Getting a 100% compliance validation from W3 is nearly impossible, anyhow. ;)

As for browsers - I test in two, primarily. IE and NN. There is a lot to take into consideration especially with NN4 versions. IE 6 is very stable, I've found. The reason being that if any of my web stats are to be believed, 90% of the browsing public is using one of those two, and most of them have the latest versions.

The biggest problems I come across tend to involve the rendering of layers, nested layers, and complex layered functions such as a pop-up menu behavior or scroller. Those are the things which seem to show the greatest amount of "this will work here but not here" factor. :)

Sorry I can't post a link or something more informative than this. Maybe in the future.

A10

[xEik]

A page that validates isn' really that difficult. Some people get overwhelmed at the big amount of errors in their sites but the most common errors are, first, forgetting to put a declaration (saying in which HTML version your page is written) and forgetting things like ALT attributes for images.
Often a single error is repeated in dozens of lines but it is always the same error, so it is easy to fix.
Another key is separating content from visuals with CSS. Layouts made with tables should be avoided in any newly made site.

As for NN4. I'm no pro webdevelopper but I've heard that many of them have come to the consensus to stop coding workarounds for it and just let the page degrade gracefully. That is, if you are still using NN4 you'll have to see a poorer version of the site (although you should still be able to see the content).

[FoxZero]

anna: maybe opera is blocking the popups? if you hit f12 you can set it to accept all, refuse all, open in background, or open only selected. maybe thats the problem?

[jmoid]

Yeah I had the same problem for a while, make sure you've selected "Open requested pop-up windows only"

[Bob Todd]

Oh, excellent, that worked.
The text on my site isn't displaying properly - it's way bigger than it should be. that's probably my fault, though - I was fiddling with the display fonts earlier.

[FoxZero]

glad i could help! :)

yea i always use css style tags for font sizes because it gives me more control over the fonts. anyone remember when the standards folk promised web-based font support so you could use any font you wanted for web sites? haha. and remember that time they said they would make html more stable then abandoned it? :(

[RJ O'Connell]

I like my good old IE best however. :D

[Lance]

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i had already tried using different pop-up settings on Anna's [interesting middle name, Ghislaine] site using Opera 711b. it still wouldn't open the pop-up, even when set to accept all. i usually run through the Proxomitron. so i experimented by turning it off, then reloading the page. in that configuration of opening requested pop-ups and connecting directly to the net without the protection of a proxy filter, the hyena industries pop-up worked. i am generally unwilling to surf without a proxy, so it's good that you added the alternate method of normal window access. it's clear from your statement on the page about the relative desirability of the pop-up versus the normal window that you and i have different aesthetic and functional standards. :)
[did i mention that i find inline frames to be functionally inferior? :D]
but that's what keeps things interesting. no worries
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[Lance]

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Mr. O'Connell, why? it would be more interesting if you explain the reasons for your preference.

and by the way, do you read the private messages sent to you on this forum? at least two of the moderators have sent you one each that i know of
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[rejj]

Opera is perhaps the least standards-compliant of all browsers currently available. It has the worst HTML and CSS rendering I have seen. It often breaks on trivial pages.

summary: useless.

[xEik]

I'm sorry to tell you that you've showed how much you know about webstandards. :roll:
However, I won't deny that it breaks in some simple pages. The true reason, though, is that it is unforgiving, not that it isn't standard-compliant.

It is almost as good as Mozilla when it comes to standards but whenever your code is broken, it will uglily throw it to your face. A decission that some criticize but others praise.

God forgive them, the latest beta displays the blink tag as well as the marquee one. Both as ugly as non-compliant. :P

[Lance]

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i concur with xEik's statement about compliance. it is the non-standard sites that break, not Opera. when running Opera, i find only 1 or 2 percent of sites that i visit do not function correctly, usually because the site was written using MS FrontPage specifically for the non-compliant Internet Explorer.

i like Opera's nice rigid enforcement of standards. if only all browsers rejected bad code, we would be better off.

i hope they don't slack the standards too much; luckily, i've not seen any blinks or marquees using 720beta2, but maybe that's due to my running through Proxomitron
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[rejj]

I'm sorry to tell you that you've showed how much you know about webstandards. :roll:

Rather, you've just shown how much you know about CSS :roll: :roll:

[infoxicated]

erm... WTF is this flame BS all about? :-?

FFS, xEik & Rejj - can we have a discussion without the egos please? (missing rolling eyes smiley)

It's Opera's inability to fail gracefully that makes me side with Firebird / Moz instead. On a dialu-up you occasionally get the situation where a page times out before it's fully downloaded (not all forums are as clever as to disallow avatars and sig images as this one!). Sure, Opera has a ton of cool features, but at least with Firebird I can choose the features I want and not be subjected to a bloatware download.

It's really pointless to create bleeding edge standards when your target audience is made up of over 90% Missy Six users anyhow. You go with what works until it doesn't - creating specific code just for specific browsers is something I gave up on two years ago. And coding with CSS hacks so that it fails gracefully is doing just that.

At the moment I'm happy that the code I write will render as planned in Missy Six and Firebird / Moz - if it looks reasonably close in Opera then that's a bonus. I tend to use Missy Six because of force of habbit and all my favourites are neatly laid out for me, although I am working on making them the same in Firebird to make the transition easier.

Around six months ago it became obvious that Macromedia was abandoning Homesite - a development tool I've used since 1998. I'm not going to cling on to an ageing version of Homesite for dear life just because I'm used to it - I moved on to Dreamweaver MX and with a bit of tweaking I've gotten it to work in a similar way to Homesite. Same with Firebird/whatever it ends up being called. I'm moving onto that as Missy Six becomes older, crankier and more of a bitch!

I'm prepared to take the hit now rather than later, but the mass take-up of new browsers is very slow for the rest of the world, so I don't expect things to change vastly any time soon.

I find it commendable that guys like Lance and xEik care enough to have multiple versions of various browsers. You must be a hard drive salesman's wet dream!! For me, filling up my hard drive with anything other than the necessary is just not a clever thing to do. I can surf and develop with only two or three browsers on my system - and I wish it was only one browser... that's the way it should be.

[xEik]

I admit I've been a bit harsh with rejj but it wouldn't be the first time I saw people go from saying "Opera is the least compliant browser I know, so I don't care what it does when coding a site" to "I now code and check my sites in Opera because I know that what looks good there will most probably look good in all the others" in a couple of months.
The first sentence is usually said by people who haven't given Opera the benefit of the doubt for at least a week.
Opera has known bugs that violate some of the W3C recommendations but it is also true that they are as devoted to standards as the Mozilla organization (although the last have achieved a greater degree of compliance).

As I said in the first topic, no browser bashing and no flaming, and it does apply to me as well. :oops:

I won't say IE6 is a bad browser, it simply suffers from lack of render engine updates. In two years time there will be plenty of people still using Win98, Me, 2000, XP... and they won't be getting any improved IE version. This may make IE6 a dead weight for the web, the same thing that has happened with NN4.

As for the number of browsers I have installed, I only have IE6, the latest Opera and the latest Firebird (the stable release, not the nightlies). The first one can't reallly be uninstalled on XP, the second and the third don't really take much diskspace (just for comparisons a clean install of those browsers takes less than 10 MB for Opera and less than 20 Mb for Firebird while my CounterStrike install took as much as 1 GB) So the space those two take isn't that important.

About bleeding edge standards, there are things like alpha transparency for PNG that aren't really bleeding edge. IE for Mac has it. If designers used PNG more, maybe Microsoft (notice I didn't use $, I despise this kind of bashing) would consider providing it natively. But we are still using crappy antialiased gifs that only look good in a range of similar background colours.
We are not talking CSS3 here. I know it is still in draft satus. We are talking about things that have been a recommedation for a long time.

On bloatware, I admit there are many features in Opera that I don't use like the wand, but Opera still is a smaller download than Firebird so bloat isn't the exact word. Maybe we could call it overfeatured.
However, for me Opera and Firebird are really on par when speaking of rendering pages, the reason I use Opera as my main browser is that it is more customizable and easier to customize.

[AmishRobot]

For the record, Wipeoutzone looks great in Opera 7.11, but sometimes gets a bit wonky when the browser window's too small. ;)

So much hostility...

Screw it, I'm D/Ling a copy of Mosaic. Back to the roots. See you on the BBS's.

[infoxicated]

I guess I was confusing the size of the Opera download with the last version of NN that I downloaded.... :oops:

By bleeding edge I meant using barely supported CSS level 2 selectors and stuff like the "after tag" rules. As for PNG Alpha - yeah, that was getting implemented everywhere else around about the same time as IE development ground to a halt.

[xEik]

I think this is the right moment for plugging this link here.
Has anyone visited www.csszengarden.com ?
It shows you what can be achieved with a fully compliant website where content has been separated from appearance by applying different stylesheets to the same XHTML page. It is truly awesome. :o
Amazingly-looking while keeping good syntax. Admitedly, the HTML is overcrowded with classes and ids but this is just to allow extreme flexibility for those who submit their designs.

On a side note, all is done with CSS1 and only commonly used CSS2

We would like to see as much CSS1 as possible. CSS2 should be limited to widely?supported elements only. The css Zen Garden is about functional, practical CSS and not the latest bleeding?edge tricks viewable by 2% of the browsing public. The only real requirement we have is that your CSS validates.

[infoxicated]

Yeah, been through all the Zen Garden sites. A few of them are nicely done, but in general stuff like this just ticks me off due to the cookie cutter culture it creates.

Your 15 year old wannabe web designer just loves that kind of thing on tap - view source, change some images and your uncles landscape gardening business has a brand new website... :evil:

I like sites done with CSS which are more like the official Firebird Support Site (http://texturizer.net/firebird/index.html) (keeping it on topic there!), for example, than those found in the CSS Zen Garden.

Validation isn't everything, though - there are some really wanky rules for validation. Like the target attribute for links being invalid for XHTML transitional. It actually pisses me off when a link opens in the same window. I like to continue looking at the current site while the new one loads, yet to validate (without tricking the validator) you cant have a target attribute.

There are loads of stupid little validation rules which border on personal preferance rather than a hard and fast rule.

[xEik]

Well, my point was that, contrary to what most people thimk, you can make a site look as "good" as you want (you can change "good" for "baroque", "minimalistic", etc) while using correct markup and a CSS.
Sites with clean code are accused of being plain. The Zen Garden totally destroys such claim.
I also prefer those designs in the Garden that focus in usability and readability while still looking nice.

I also see your point in the target thing. However, what I appreciate from validators is that they'll show errors in my markup that a browser will hide by trying to render them as well as it is capable to.
I'm human and committing errors while coding is something I expect. Validators are there to make my life easier, not to piss me. If your page has a couple of errors but you are conscious of why they are there it isn't that big problem. The problem are usually the errors the webdesigner isn't aware of.

I believe that a thing like the target attribute isn't allowed because they think it should be the user who decides opening a new page or not. In Firebird it is as easy as clicking with the middle button in a link to make the page load in the background. This way it is you who decides what windows are open, not the author.
Obviously the convinience of this, as you said, is arguable.

[xEik]

Just not to appear as a blinded Opera zealot.
I know that bugs in CSS implementation exist in Opera. This test page shows some of them
http://geocities.com/csssite/operabugs/bugs.xml

For those not knowing what Infoxicated is talking about when speaking of CSS2 bleeding edge, take a look at this other site.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/css2tests/
Some interesting comparison tables and tests as well.

For those who suspect the last site could belong to some other Opera zealot, I found the link in this page
http://www.webstandards.org/learn/resources/css/index.html
The page belongs to The Web Standards Project site which is quite respected.

EDIT: first link edited since the guy mainatining it has changed the location of his site and the old link shows outdated information.

[Lance]

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it's only been very recently that i decided that i want everything to open in a new window of its own. i can force them to do that with Opera regardless of the code, but i do like to have the choice rather than to have the website attempt to make my choices for me. that goes for webdesign tools, too.

i visited the zengarden css demo site a couple of months ago; many of the designs are very good whilst others are just lonely onanistic extravaganzas. i agree with Rob that the site design should be code-individualised instead of cookie-cutter mass produced, but zengarden itself is just intended as a demonstrator of the power of css, and probably doesn't intend to promote mindless base-level commercialism by hacks.

Rob, i like the mozdev site, which i find, on its surface, to be neat, simple and effective; what do you think of it? any coding issues or excesses of cookie-cutter generalisation there?

oh, man, Rob. accusing Opera's little 3.3 meg files of download bloat relative to moz? !! :)
yeah, the current moz-firebird nightly build dl is about 6.8 megs, and moz 1.4 is about 13 or 14. the base level Netscape 7.1 is about 9 or 10, i think. OB1 34a is about 600 KILObytes! but of course no javascript or css. still renders pages readably for the most part, though. i love efficiency.
.

[infoxicated]

I guess I was confusing the size of the Opera download with the last version of NN that I downloaded....
I already put my hands up for that mistake, Lance - got my downloads confused. ;)

[xEik]

OB1 34a is about 600 KILObytes!
:o I've seen sites with bigger images (usually a 1600x1200 scanned JPEG image compressed at the highest quality shrinked to 400x300 in a site created with the good ol' Frontpage). :roll:

[Lance]

.
Rob: yeah, i know, but i just hAd to take note. had to. :)

about those harddrive salesman, currently i only have 4.22 gigs on my hd, despite having 19[?] browsers and 17 versions of winamp, each with its own distinct [and large] collection of skins. i collect winamp skins like artworks. Opera7 skins, too.
[I'm not crazy, just enthusiastic.] [suuuuuuuuuure. no da]
almost all of my music collection is offloaded onto CDs, as is my collection of game and application installation exes. this makes frequent defragmentation a brief process. even quite substantial collections of browsers and other applications don't at all stretch harddrive capacity. i'm beginning to think that huge hds are almost a liability instead of an asset. having two small ones might be better.

infoxicated said:
'' - and I wish it was only one browser... that's the way it should be''
bill gates would agree with that ;) , but i prefer more than one way of doing things. but i think you mean that you should be able to view any site with your preferred browser, no matter what browser you chose. i am all for that
.

[xEik]

Even if it was Mozilla/Firebird (an opensource project) or Opera, I wouldn't like it if the changes that may come in the future leaded to a new browser monopoly situation.
I prefer even fields where every competitor has to do its best not to lose its position.

Wouldn't it be great if in, say 10 years time, both, major browsers and authoring tools, reached a level of compliance with standards where you can forget about coding for a given browser quirks and using workarounds?
I'm not saying that every page should look the same in every browser, I mean that you should be able to fully enjoy the experience no matter what browser you are seeing the site with.

[FoxZero]

For the record, Wipeoutzone looks great in Opera 7.11, but sometimes gets a bit wonky when the browser window's too small.

thank you! i thought i was the only one noticing this! this happens in both opera and firebird in 800x600 and it really bothers me because i have to scroll more pages just to look at the tables and news (no scroll wheel). what bothers me most about it is that it only needs literally 2 or 3 table tr trs to make everything look alright like in ie ( i downloaded the source and tried it out myself, it took me less than 5 minutes to correct it ). :cry:

no bother though, i know you guys are too busy arguing about standards anyway. :P

[xEik]

Tables ar evil :evil:
Well, no. :P
Tables are not evil but their purpose is tabulate data. Like the records in WipEoutZone.
The layout of a site should be done with CSS, not using tables.

[FoxZero]

whatever, the point is your css doesnt work right in 800x600 so you might want to do something about it.

[infoxicated]

The site templates will be re-done in time for the third anniversary, so rest assured it'll look right in all the major browsers at that point.

That's January, by the way! 8)

In all seriousness, I do intend to get round to it - back when I done this design, around 20 months ago now, I had to dumb it down to quite an extent. But now that I've improved with my css designs (http://www.infoxicated.com) and non-IE browsers are ahead of the game, I'll be able to make a better effort. Promise.

And Lance, yeah - I did mean "I wish it was just one" in the sense that I wish I could just choose my prefered browser, kick back and forget all about how sites might look better/different in competing browsers.

[rejj]

A quick note on usability - I absolutely despise links that open in new windows. I'm not living in 1998, my browser supports tabbed browsing. If I want to continue reading the page I am on while following a link, I will open it in a new tab.

[infoxicated]

Guess that's the thing with freedom of speech on the internet. Everybody has an opinion, everybody can voice it... and maybe everybody is right too :)

Having spent the last two days forcing myself to use Firebird, I can see the advantages. But I can also see that by holding CTRL before I click gives me a tab anyway. :)

[xEik]

I was wondering, are there browser statistics available for WipEoutZone.com?

Just curious. :P

[Lance]

.
rejj, when i was talking about opening links in new windows, i mean what in any other browser but Opera, would be called tabs. Opera opens multiple true independently resizable windows within an MDI frame. in other tabbed browsers such as mozilla and mozilla firebird [ex phoenix], the tabs are always maximised in any one MDI frame, so they aren't true windows since they can only be resized all at the same time by resizing that outer frame. even though we're in 2003, we're still working with a nomenclature from an earlier time; we need a new term for the MDI frame, a browser construct that didn't exist in the major browsers of about 1997 when all they had was windows and pages within windows. a two-level structure. now with Opera and moz we have a three-level structure of page, window/tab, and hyperwindow. the only one that still means the same thing as it used to for modern browser users is 'page', and even that may sometimes be doubtful :)
even the Opera software company is confused; in the current beta of the next release version, the context menus call a new window/tab a 'page' and call a new MDI frame a 'window'.
.

[infoxicated]

I was wondering, are there browser statistics available for WipEoutZone.com?

Just curious. :P

http://www.wipeoutzone.com/stats/

[rejj]

Having spent the last two days forcing myself to use Firebird, I can see the advantages. But I can also see that by holding CTRL before I click gives me a tab anyway. :)

Yeah .. I just believe that it is better to give the user the choice, instead of forcing it upon them. I enabled middle-click to open in a new tab, and I find it frustrating when I didn't want to stay on the same page (so left clicked) and end up getting a new mozilla (or firebird, depending on how I feel on the day) window instead.

Lance, by "new window" I mean just that.. a full, new window. New hwnd handle, the works. I find it annoying enough that Firebird creates new windows for file downloads.. the one thing I think it is sorely missing from Mozilla is the download manager.


http://www.wipeoutzone.com/stats/
I think he means useragent stats, not hits/volume.

[infoxicated]

The browser stats are in there too - if a little vague, but it's the best we've got.

I take it where you live this is "International be a nit-picking f*cker week"? :evil:

[xEik]

I think he means useragent stats, not hits/volume.
In the link Infoxicated gave for statistics, the name of the months are links to more detailed information like referrers, agents, countries, etc. ;)

It is a shame that the tables aren't wide enough to display the full user agent string. :(

Hey, and I can easily locate my stats because I'm probably probably the only one posting from proxies named something.enst-bretagne.fr (for example matell or maisel-gw). :D
An average of 5 visits a day :o I'd better get a life. :lol:

[Lance]

.
i... um... no. i've done all the exposition on the windows that i'm going to do.

xEik, only five? i am not even going to look at my 'daily number of visits' stat. i'm on the computer all effin day and its so easy to pop in and have a look at the current number of posts to see if there's been any new ones, although if i forgot to look on the last visit, i may have to log in to check for new stuff. for some reason, even a fresh load of the page while one is not logged in may not always show the most recent posts in the top box. not in my browser, anyway. [tries to pretend that the last bit brings me back to topic]
i use a separate browser to access wz and have it empty caches when it's closed, as it is after each visit
.

[Lance]

.
just in case all of you browser fanatics haven't had time to check for the latest versions recently, Opera made 7.20beta5 available earlier today. 4 and 5 have added features and also fixed most of the obscure and pretty much minor issues brought up by the large corps of beta testers. i have had pretty much no problems with any of the 7.20 betas, but i don't use the e-mail client, which is what so many of the wonky items were part of. [many of the new features that testers request pertain to the mail client also]. the download is still at approximately 3.3 megabytes.

___

also released in the last month or so is Firebird 0.6.1, a further refinement of the .6 release [called Glendale] with a few new features.

the latest nightly build has added a couple more features and revamped the menus. the toolbar customisation window has had the old problem of the missing or nearly missing close button fixed, but is not entirely perfect yet, though fully functional. [also it gives me the message that the alternate skins cannot be used because they are from an older version of the browser] this system falls far short of the freedom and convenience of alteration Opera has, but it is pretty good.
the online help pages are now giving instructions and code for modifying the 'chrome' files to further customise the user interface. these things should be capable of being controlled from within the browser while it's active, but they're only at a 0.6 development version, and still improving, so i can't complain too much. the download of the latest nightly has dropped back down to 6.7 megs from a previous high of 6.8

the separate mail client is still in its infancy. i have not used this as i don't need it, but also because it is bigger than the browser! i had thought to download it and give it a try, but currently the dl for the standalone client was stated to be about 8.9 megs!
surely that number was an error?
.

[AmishRobot]

I'm using the latest nightly build of Firebird right now.

After a few weeks of trying it out, this browser has pretty much become my default. My only issues are the lack of AA fonts in the stable (the reason I'm using a nightly build) and some minor UI issues. My biggest gripe was the lack of mouse gestures, and with the addition of the radial context extention (nice job on the extentions setup, BTW) that's a thing of the past. Dare I say, I think I like this context menu even better than the Opera mouse gestures!

Lance: I can believe the email client is that big. With the increaing use of broadband, software bloat is increasingly becoming less of a priority. Sad, but true. But a simple email client that big, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

Wow, I did a full re-install on my machine, and I'm already back online! And I'm also 100% Microsoft free! Linux rocks. :)

[Lance]

ne long enough to install it

.
where does one find the 'radial context' extension? it sure as hell isn't on the official page at texturizer.net/firebird/extensions/. there are zero extensions available on that page just as there are zero skins/themes available on the themes page. please tell me more about it, where to get it, and how to install it.

i try to like firebird; i really do, but it still feels slow, unresponsive, primitive. this is true for me with every browser but Opera as a result of clumsy user interaction. firebird, mozilla, et al, lack the keyboard shortcuts and the instant back and forward page navigation of O. and for the most part they have so few ways to do any particular function, and even lack several functions. even Opera 3.62 still feels co-operative and slick compared to the very latest firebird releases and nightlies. it's as though every browser but Opera drags its heels when i try to get them to perform their functions. why do i have to move the cursor up to the back and forward arrows just to switch between pages in a tab? there are alternatives, but they are likewise slow and clumsy. one can use both the mouse AND the keyboard in combination to do this [firebird has no true mouse gestures in its unextended default form]. or one can use the context menu and click on 'back'. all 3 of these ways to do it are slow as crap from a constipated rhinoceros. in Opera, you can simultaneously click and move the mouse a quarter of an inch. or just press one key. either way takes only one hand, and uses one half to one third of the time required by firebird or any other browser i've used except for the tiny OffByOne [OB1]. i run into this for pretty much every action i need to perform on a browser. all those little saved seconds and fractions of seconds add up to a bunch. not to mention the reduced frustration. once i used Opera, i knew everything could be done faster and better. it's tremendously frustrating to me to work with anything else. that's why i can rarely force myself to use any other browser for even an hour. i know that at least 15 to 20 minutes of that time is being wasted.
since Firebird has fewer features and modes of feature access than Opera, but is twice as large, i wonder what all that extra code is being used for; it isn't all due to lack of compression. damn, this has turned into a rant again. inefficiency and clumsiness in a browser really does piss me off. sorry about that.

Firebird really is a good effort, particularly considering that it is being developed by widely separated volunteer individuals who tend to have a rather narrow focus on their particular interest. it seems as though it lacks an overall vision of what a browser should do, of how it should interact with the user at every level and action. at Opera, they have the advantage of having worked from the very beginning under a single and excellent vision of what should be done, how it should work, and constantly thinking ahead of what can be done in a different and better way. and what new things can be done. they've been the innovators in the field for several years. the others just mostly copy Opera's new and distinctive features, but don't understand the importance of integrated usability. i really hope the others can eventually grasp this. there is supposedly an instance where Opera has recently adopted an idea from another browser [Konqueror?]. a definite rarity. but a hopeful sign
.

[AmishRobot]

In the bookmarks, there is a folder named "Mozilla Firebird & Mozilla extentions". In there, you'll find links to extensions as well as themes. Or just follow the links named "Extensions" and "Themes" from the official site. ;) They automatically download to where they should be, and then are turned on in the options. There is a mouse gestures extension, but I found that it didn't work with a damn, and was horribly tedious to set up. The radial context was much better. It replaces the normal right-click menu with an eight way pie chart that performs actions or leads to further options. It''s set up very smoothly, so that a mouse over selects the option and a button release activates it. As a result, a simple 'click-left-release' pages back, and a 'click-up/left-down-release' closes the tab. It's just as quick as Opera, but with some visual feedback as well. The regular context menu can still be forced with the Ctlrl key.

I think the fact that these aren't available by default is part of the point. It keeps the install small, and allows you to only use what you want. There are really probably more options overall than in Opera, though some key ones are missing. The ability to turn off all animations, the one key shortcuts, and especially the quick preferences menu so I can turn off Flash and java at will are things I really appreciate. But I found mouse gestures to be the most useful, and that (along with it's speed) keeping me in Opera. Mouse gestures area easily the greatest UI innovation I've seen in a long time, and all future OS's should include them as an option for a global feature. I can't tell you how many times I'll be in a file manager window and gesture to open a folder in a new window. :)

[Lance]

.
that was the page where i went yesterday and found nothing. wondering why you found extensions there and i didn't, i tried other browsers. none worked until i bypassed my proxy, then voila. a list of 99 extensions plus code and install. at the moment, i don't feel like investigating the pagecode to see why it denied access to the proxy, but sometime today, probably, i'll try one or more of the feature extensions, starting with the one you suggest. that clicking pattern for context menus is my favourite, press the alternate mouse button, hover choice, and release. very smooth and quick. this is the way some old browsers worked; both Opera 3.62 and Netscape 4.08 do this, but modern browsers have not had that feature as default or as alternate. i still use those two on rare occasions partly for the pleasure of using that context menu action. thanks for the info, James


edit: i've tried it. pretty slick. the best non-Opera browser invention i've seen. the menu is a little slow to appear, but i only have a 500MHz processor. and possibly the slowness results from it being an add-on, possibly an extra repeated access layer in running code? even so, it makes Firebird much more smoothly responsive than it was. i'll continue playing with it to how much effect it has on total functionality. a definite improvement in any case

edit 2: i've also added a plug in that duplicates Opera's paste-and-go feature, and the plug-in for editing 'userChrome.CSS' and two other profile files the radial context menu plug-in seems to have a small bug which occasionally prints one bit of text over another in the menu, but its occurrence is a bit spotty and ive not seen it the last few times

edit 3: added another plug-in, also created and added to a user pref file to make the browser start rendering received data right away instead of my having to sit and wait for such a long time before it shows me anything new. the mod worked fairly well. and the radial context menu gets quicker and easier to use with practice. just as i am getting to think better of the browser [even though it's twice as big as, but less powerful than Opera ;) ] i saved an html page with 6 images on it. instead of simply writing the already loaded files to the harddrive the way Opera does, which is virtually instant, it downloaded the entire page from the webserver all over again and wrote it to the disc as it came in. this of course was done on my dial-up connection. [vent vent] what a frustrating and angering experience. what a stUpid way to do things. what an incredible waste of time. what an extra load on the net. i see no preference settings that will make it behave in another way. aNd it separates images into a separate folder while leaving the html file outside of it so that i end up with an extra layer of folders in each group of similar pages that i should just be able to save together in one, which for one thing, means that [vent some more] i can't just go into one folder with an image viewer and view all the images from the group of pages in a rapid fire sequence. if i move the files into one folder, then they can no longer be opened in any browser. dumb dumb dumb. yet more frustration and waste of time.

the browser has considerable potential, and i like the ability to add plug-ins, and i like its being opensource, but it sure has a long way to go. so many inefficiencies to weed out

currently i'm using it for news sites like wired and ars technica; it works okay there, and i can use it for other sites where i don't need to save webpages [oh how i wish i'd saved the entire ''the great ocean liners'' site. it's gone now] or zoom in on historical photos or pictures or cars, aircraft, etc. i should use it enough so that its controls will be as familiar to me as Opera's so that i can more fairly judge its ease of use
.

[Lance]

.
btw, James, i tried to install ChatZilla with the nightly, but it didn't work, even though the other four extensions did. have you added that one to yours? if so, any suggestions? might be just a flaw in the nightly build, i guess, or CZ isn't written for the 1.5 trunk
.

[AmishRobot]

True story: I first got online in the early 90's, just after AOL first started up. Of course, I had to check out the much talked about AOL chatrooms, after constatnly hearing how fun it was. The thing that nobody told me was that AOL chatrooms in the first couple years were a haven for child pornography traders. They moved files around like there was nothing in the world wrong with it, and all it took was entering the wrong room at the wrong time, and you were automaticaly put into a mailing list. I haven't tried online chatting since.

So sorry Lance, but I can't help you out with the Chatzilla. I'd be willing to check it out for you, but I'd just install it and then stare at it for a while. I doubt that would answer any questions.

It's probably a bug with the nightly builds. I've noticed a few others as well. I guess that's what I get for needing anti-aliased fonts. :)

Another thing Opera definitely has over other browsers is the user forums, and the overall sense of community over there.

[infoxicated]

The current nightly build (the one I'm using right now) seems to have a weird prefs menu problem, in that it doesn't close when you click OK after you've changed something.

Only happens occasionally, but maybe that's a symptom of something deeper which is amiss in this build.

[AmishRobot]

Might be a sign of a biger problem. I'm using a build from over the weekend and while I don't have any issues with the preferences, when I try to log into this site I get a password manager dialog that's all sorts of messed up. Won't accept passwords, doesn't want to close, etc...

[Lance]

.
the most recent nightly i got was from the night of the 21st/22nd. while i don't use passwords, i notice that the preferences menu closes, but the skin customisation menu box is still very slow and reluctant to close. and there is a more basic problem with the skins. the default skin does not work very well; the dialog boxes often have parts missing or are incorrectly sized. this is almost entirely cured by the NautiPolis skin. i've tried more than half a dozen of the newer 1.5 series skins, and NautiPolis is the only one that works properly and consistently. i highly recommend not mucking around switching skins once you've installed that one because the skinning system usually crashes/corrupts itself so that you lose the forward and back buttons. this may also affect other controls such as the context menus, but i don't know that to definitely be the case, since i focussed on correcting the skin problem first.

in other news, the Opera beta 5 of version 7.20 is causing me no problems at all, though some users do have the occasional rendering problem with certain websites [a very small percentage] that don't happen to be among those i visit.

i downloaded the newest nightly today, and it will not access an already installed shared radial context menu plug-in, nor can a new version be installed in this nightly alone. a message pops up saying that the browser is incompatible and shows a user ID string saying 'ShonenScape'! where do i find the user ID string so i can change it? i took a quick look about in the build's files, but so far, don't know where it is. windows application data maybe? but that's shared, and the earlier builds do access the plug-in, so it would seem that the ID string wouldn't be there
.

[xEik]

Although only six hours have passed since Lance's post, 7.20 beta 6 has already been released (beta 5 was released on Friday).

And I said that I didn't download Firebird nightlies because of the hassle of frequent installations. :roll:

[Lance]

.
yep, i already have Opera 720 beta6 installed and customised.
it has a new feature or 2 that i don't need, but somebody probably does.
.

[infoxicated]

And I said that I didn't download Firebird nightlies because of the hassle of frequent installations. :roll:
Installations?

What is there to install... just unzip it into a directory and you're good to go... you can always delete the previous one and it wont mess up the registry since there was no install.

Each new version picks up your profile from before and you're good to go - don't see what the problem is.

[xEik]

I must confess that, right now, I'm not sure where skins, extensions and that kind of things are stored. But in case they aren't in the profile folder, the true hassle is not the download (at least not in my present connection) or the installation process, but setting everything up to fit my needs.

Sure my settings for cookies, proxy, allowed pop-ups, etc. must be in my profile but in the end I have to admit that Firebird not being my main browser is what truly keeps me from downloading nightlies, otherwise I wouldn't be downloading all that many betas. ;)

I even downloaded the Catalan version of 7.11 (that I never use) to help the community of Catalan translations of software by trying to spot any loose ends, etc. :o

[Lance]

.
your profile data, preferences and skins and such, are stored in 'Windows xxx>Application Data>Phoenix [or Firebird, depending on when you started installing this line of development]>Profile

if you're using XP, i think such things are stored in 'Documents and Settings', but i am not certain since i've barely used XP, and am not currently sitting in front of an XP running comp.

this practice of using shared components amongst all versions of the browser is convenient if you only use final releases, but if you test betas, it causes problems
.

[xEik]

And O7.20 beta7 is now out. A day later. Aaaaargh.
I don't like it when, in beta periods, there is no new beta release for weeks but this is getting a bit too fast for my taste. :o

Specially since I haven't had any big gripe with 7.20b4+ (appart from maybe a link-clicking detection that is sometimes a bit lacking).

[Lance]

.
i haven't had anything to gripe about in the 7.20 betas at all except the earlier intentional page-painting delay. but the last few versions allow the user to set zero delay so that the old *beginphrase>hesitate to draw pictures when they had been offscreen <endphrase* delay can be eliminated if desired. and i get to click on links before the page is even finished, just like i useta. yay.

Opera seems to be moving to a 'nightlies' concept. as a non-open source development team, they shouldn't need quite such frequent feedback, though they will certainly get it on the forum.

firebird news: the newest beta dated august 27 still does not recognise the radial context menu/control device
.

[infoxicated]

I don't like it when, in beta periods, there is no new beta release for weeks but this is getting a bit too fast for my taste. :o

Agreed - I dislike the way the devs are behaving with Firebird right now. They know they're riding a wave of interest at the moment and they're trying to rush 0.7 out any time soon, just for the sake of having another milestone, I believe.

I don't understand what the rush is - they're skirting round bugs like they don't really matter, or trivialising them just so they don't count against them releasing another milestone.

It's only going to end up in them releasing something unstable which may shake people's confidence in the whole thing. I'm at the point where I only opened IE once today to check my bank account (they sniff for IE for some reason, so Firebird doesn't get a secure connection) and I used Firebird for the whole day. If I come to count on it and they hose all over the project with an unstable release then I'll be sorely disappointed. :-?

[xEik]

Umh, although Firebird is not my main browser, I hope it will be the one that will show people that there is life beyond IE6

If people get concerned with writting non-browser-specific sites, I'll already be satisfied.

On a side note, very little feedback has been given on Safari. Can one assume that if your site looks good in Konqueror, it will look good in Safari?

[Lance]

.
and omniweb, too, yes? aren't they all built on the same codebase?

i find that i can browse the wz with just about anything, it just looks a bit different in each, but the data are all still there, and that is by far the most important thing
.

[xEik]

Yep, I once had to browse the forums using Netscape4- /shivers/ when in a lab at university with really old PCs and it still looked good.

[Lance]

.
hey now, i liKe netscape 4. it still has my favourite bookmarking system. and it's the only browser i've used that has independent display control of background images.

so 'modern' pages ''degrade'' gracefully. so what?

no pagezoom, though. oh, well
.

[xEik]

Just to keep in the line, I'll post that Opera 7.20b8 is out. :D

Has anyone noticed that Mozilla 1.5 went from alpha to beta last week? I don't use Mozilla, tough. :-?

/patiently waits for Firebird 0.7/

[xEik]

For the interested Mozilla user, Mozilla 1.5 went from Beta to Release Candidate 1 on Wednesday. Just in case you can't wait until the final is released. ;)

*me still patiently waits for Firebird 0.7*

In the meantime, Opera 7.20 is now on beta12

[Lance]

.
i downloaded the most recent available Windows version Firebird nightly yesterday [which was dated Sept 17]. thus far noticed little difference between it and the August 27 build, except that it only recognises 5 of the 8 extensions i've installed, which are supposed to be universally shared amongst all versions and automatically recognised by new versions. unfortunately this includes the 2 most important [to me] ones, the radial context menus and the tab tools extension. there may be more differences, but i've not had time to experiment.

-----------------

for those who do not follow the development closely, Opera 7.20 beta 12 is a considerable improvement over all previous 7.20s, though it does continue to have one regression which disturbs me, making it inconvenient to open a series of local harddrive files. important to some people, but not to others. this regression appeared in beta 10; is still with us, though many other specific misbehaviours have been fixed. we are probably getting very close to the actual release of 7.20

beta 12 is available for Windows and for Linux, BSD, etc. Solaris, too, i think, but i'd have to check
.

[AmishRobot]

Hey Lance, have you checked out Firebird again lately? They recently released v. 0.7. While I can't say anything definitive about the Windows version, the Linux version is fantastic. All the annoying bugs I've encountered before are gone (with no new ones yet), it's really fast, and I have yet to come across a page that doesn't display as intended. Definitely worth checking out. It's replaced Opera as my default.

*If you do try it, replace the Radial Context extention with Simple Gestures. It's much easier to use. The Tabbrowser and Session Saver extentions are great ones to have, as well.

[Lance]

.
i dled it about as soon as it came out, and got a few themes from a private page. i cut my extensions back from 9 to 4 as 1 was essentially a less powerful duplicate of one i got later, and i didn't use the others. i took a gaze at SimpleGestures, but still use radialcontext. the more complex one uploaded by the author on oct 14 did not work, though i don't know why.

my current default browser is Opera721 [RC6]; it is near perfect. only need i have to use another was that the moz group were the only ones to work with a flawed microcar website. Opera detected a flaw in the javascript and would not overlook it, nor would IE, but moz does.
.

[Lance]

.
i don't know if there are any BeOs fans here, but if so, there is also a version of firebird .7 for it. it is almost identical to the one for Windows, though, if i remember correctly, the gui for the preferences box is more like the earlier Windows versions of 2 or 3 months ago instead of like the current win32 version. definitely an improvement over NetPositive when you want to browse current CSS sites. it works very well
.

[infoxicated]

Good call, Lance. :)

I'm using one of the optimised Win32 builds that some guy puts together, and it seems very fast and stable. I also found an extension or two I really dig - the "remember all the pages I had open" one is super cool... although I just noticed it's gone this morning because I upgraded again yesterday. Doh.

[Lance]

.
if you were using Opera, and for some reason your system crashed, Opera would remember all the pages you had open. when you restored the system, got back online again, and restarted Opera, the browser would show a start-up screen on which you could choose to fire it up with all the pages you were looking at when the system crashed. no extensions necessary. you can also intentionally save sessions before closing, again no extensions necessary. and it is barely over half the download size of firebird and only about one third the installed size. firebird is good and getting better, but it is still short of excellent. yes, i'm a damned perfectionist picky son of a bitch, not to malign my mom or anything, just a convention of speech. ;)

and you guys probably thought i was going soft on my Opera fanaticism just cos i was sayin that firebird has some good qualities. ha. :D
.

[FoxZero]

one complaint lance.. in opera, how do you clear cookies?? i tried to empty all caches and then i disabled cookies and restarted, then enabled again, and they still didnt delete (i tested with wipeoutzone forums, i was still logged in when i re-enabled). when i closed the program and removed the cookies file, it got rid of all the cookies but it also got rid of my cookie server filters! is there a way to clean out set cookies without losing the filters? this is the first time i havent figured out something in opera.

[Lance]

.
hm... well, i'm not sure i can help because i don't allow permanent cookies, and hence have no need for filters. before ever going on the net with a newly installed version of Opera, i configure everything, including setting cookies to 'empty new cookies on exit' so all new cookies disappear as soon as the browser is shut down. i set prefs to allow all cookies, refuse third party cookies, empty on exit, show no illegal path or domain messages. on all sites that i don't need cookies to access, which is almost all sites but 3 or 4, i can use 'quick preferences' [F12 key] to enable or disable. i don't actually need to do this much as i mostly use one version of Opera for all cookie-needing sites that i want to use cookie-enabled features of. so i use another version of the browser to access all others, and therefore never even need to use quick prefs! on a restart of my cookie-enabled versions of Opera, the cookie editor will show no cookies at all. on each visit to wipeoutzone, for example, a new cookie will be written, thus allowing full access to the site, and this new cookie will be eliminated when i close the browser. so far, i have not used any sites that require a permanently stored cookie. so i'm not sure that filters are even needed.

as far as i know, the history and ram caches will not affect the cookies at all.

you may find this site useful:
http://nontroppo.org/wiki/Opera7
it offers a fairly comprehensive set of tips, hints, FAQs, customisation methods, etc.

FYI: and for whatever use you may or may not find for the data, my set-up of the checkboxes and textboxes on the privacy page of the preferences dialogue [accessed from the menu bar by clicking 'File'>'Preferences'>'Privacy'] in Opera 7.xx is:

check
check
check

check [to enable cookies] or blank
accept all without question
refuse all without question


check
blank
blank
blank



in this list, the fourth item is 'enable cookies' box, and the only difference between my settings for the two basic Opera browser configurations i use is this box, which is checked for access to wz and other password requiring sites, or blank for the Opera version i use for all others. if you choose to use only one version, then using quick preferences and toggling the line for cookies enabled will change this box without the need to bring up the main preferences dialogue. i realise that you probably don't need this long winded explanation, but there may be some of our members reading this who don't even have Opera, [those poor deprived beings! ;) ], or at least are still unfamiliar with its details of configuration.

.

[infoxicated]

you guys probably thought i was going soft on my Opera fanaticism just cos i was sayin that firebird has some good qualities. ha. :D.

Not at all Lance - I just prefer the fact that Firebird is cost-free and exceptionally customisable. Agreed, it's not quite "there" yet, but for an 0.7 piece of software it's doing very well indeed. :)

[Lance]

.
''exceptionally customisable''
Opera is not only at least as customisable as Firebird, but much more easily so. some of the customisations in Firebird have to really be heavily laboured for.

as for ''free'', Opera is also free, except for the advert box, which disappears in fullscreen mode. If you use Proxomitron [or some other security-oriented web filter] you never see the the ads themselves at all, though occasionally you see the default Opera banner in the box.. this banner is stored in the 'images' folder in the Opera directory and can be replaced with your own image. i have made several of my own images for this purpose. it might be regarded as cheating to use a program that happens to block their adverts [and Opera is a company worthy of support], but my security concerns override that particular twinge of conscience. and in any case, i participate in Opera's beta testing and i am responsible for the presence in the most recent versions of the browser of a couple of its features, so i feel that i pay for it in that way.

if anyone feels that seeing adverts or even the advert box is too high a price to pay for a free Opera, i certainly understand their viewpoint. of course my opinion is that settling for any browser other than Opera is too high a price to pay, no matter how free they are. it is that good. since they first offered a usage-time unlimited ad supported version starting with 5.0beta, it has been my number one browser. i rarely ever use anything else except to just try every browser and see what value it has. all the others just require too much work to accomplish anything. and they waste too much time.

thus endeth this particular polemic. :)
.

[Lance]

.
here is something probably helpful to try. click 'File' on the menu bar, and in the dropdown menu you will see the line 'Delete private data'. when you click this, Opera will show you a window with a series of checkboxes for what you want to delete. your choices are remembered and held till you change them. the choices include separate control for temporary and longterm cookies. of course the window also includes choices for history, typed in sites, sites visited by link, memory cache, files transferred, password data, etc. when you set your standard choices, then each time you exit Opera and want to excise such data, you just click File>Delete private data>okay. when you combine this with the settings i mentioned earlier for cookie aquisition, you have very complete control of what's happening. btw, the 'delete private data' window also includes buttons to go to the cookie manager and the password manager where you can list specific sites for exemption or blocking
.

[rhys]

Well, I'm now using firebird and loving it :) Havnt tried opera but dont like the sound of ads, and well.... ie is just silly :D

[xEik]

Mozilla FireFox 0.8 is out. So far so good. But again a change of name :P (Firebird was already used by another opensource project).

Maybe Mozilla InFox for the final release? ;)

[Lance]

.
i'd heard that it was coming out today, but not that they were going to alter the name yet again. now if they would spend as much energy making keyboard shortcuts and image zoom as they do on name changes, we'd really have ourselves another excellent browser to go along with Opera
.

[Roger]

I've been using Opera as my main browser at work (Windows NT4 environment) for about two years. Yesterday, I suddenly got the urge to install Mozilla Firebird. So I went over to mozilla.org and was greeted by the news about Firefox! :o

Anyway, I installed the new browser and I'm performing "test runs" of it now. I do miss Opera's mouse gestures, but as soon as the texturizer.net server is reachable again I'll download assorted plug-ins to remedy that!

As for the ever changing name, it seems that they've found one that they can stick with now... "Mozilla Pirhana" or Mozilla Icaras" would have rocked, though! 8)

[infoxicated]

Maybe Mozilla InFox for the final release? ;)
:)

Looks like they're sticking to Firefox now, which is a good thing. :D

[Lance]

.
i hope they get texturizer to run more efficiently than it used to, it was always slow, or so i thought. however, the irony was that when i tried Opera 7.xx to access the site, it loaded at a normal speed [for a dial-up access]; it was only Firebird that loaded it so slowly.

Roger, i don't know about extension availability because i didn't look for new ones yesterday, but some new themes for Windows version are available linked from the firefox product page on mozillazine, so possibly extensions are, too
.

[AmishRobot]

The texturizer site's still getting pretty well hammered, but extentions are now available at the extention room (http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/).

I'm using firefox right now and while I'm still not sure about the new moniker the browser is running very nicely. It's noticably faster and has a great new icon! :)

Lance: Did you catch the news about the planned Opera IPO?

[Lance]

.
nope. hadn't heard the news, James. veeerry interesting. there was an unacknowledged rumour several weeks ago, but i hadn't seen anything about it since. i've spent very little time on their forums lately, so i'm a bit out of the loop. thanks for the news
.

[AmishRobot]

Here is the link I should have given to begin with, in case you haven't found it yet: http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2004/02/09/

Personally I believe that going public equals the death of innovation for any company, but I thought you'd be interested nontheless. I don't view it as good news, but at least I still have mozilla! :).

[Lance]

.
sometimes the death takes awhile. i certainly hope that is the case here. von Tetzchner stands to make a considerable expansion of his personal financial wealth by doing this, but public offerings almost always result in the all too soon loss of control of the company one has founded
.

[Lance]

.
i downloaded FireFox 0.9rc earlier today. end result was that i had to reinstall my operating system. all seemed to be well until i tried to install an extension [QuickPrefs] that may or may not exist any longer. after the first click on the online install button failed to produce a dialog box, i impatiently clicked it again a time or two. all keyboard input became impossible and the cursor drifted down and to the left unstoppably. i had to manually shut off the computer with the power button on the tower. it would not restart to the point where i could operate the computer again beyond the initial appearance of the desktop at which point a message box appeared which could not be closed nor was any control input of any kind possible. a key dll was compromised. my os is Millennium installed as an upgrade to 98SE. a similar thing happened on one occasion while still using 98SE when i decided to try a different firewall, namely a version of Agnitum Outpost. the restart was disastrous. no amount of mucking about on either occasion would produce a functioning system again. but then i don't know DOS enough to find and cure the problem even if it were actually possible at that point.
anyway, just a warning to be careful. i've done probably more than two hundred browser installations and till now had never run into a system incapacitation. it may not have been the fault of FireFox or the extension online install, but be careful
.

[infoxicated]

That's bad news Lance - the first version of the installer on nightlies would actually erase everything in the directory you placed it in. So if you chose d:, or even worse c: - the next thing you'd know was that it had deleted everything on that drive - unless it threw back an error while deleting a system file, you were screwed.

I'm not going to be trying any more nightlies or RC's of Firefox - I'm content with 0.8 for the moment and I'll wait until the actual 0.9 release comes out before upgrading.

After the way they treated the guy who done the Qute theme recently, I'm a little non-plussed at the whole Mozilla empire at the moment. The leads on the project have gradually become a bunch of arrogant pricks. For my money it's actually ego that's driving the releases rather than bug fixes.

Every time they come up to a new milestone they waiver all these bugs that have been around for two or three milestones previously, simply so they can churn out another release. It seems stupid to me - I believe open source projects should always put bug fixing before feature bloat, and Firefox has fallen into the latter category since 0.6. :|

Knowing that and the way that Arvid was treated (they guy who done the old default theme), it's kind of hard to get excited about future releases of the browser. I'm not at the "shelling out for Opera" stage yet, though. ;)

[G'Kyl]

This same kind of annoyance has happened to me several times, all with Win95 and 98 (let`s hope for better times with WinXP...). Suddenly missing files is a delight of its own - I never succeeded in trying to fix either the respective win.ini entries (plural since there will be other files missing as soon as one problem gets solved) or reclaiming any of the files Windows is looking for. By the way, your mentioning of the problem occuring after the install of a firewall reminds me to never try that again either, because I had the same trouble, twice, when I attempted to increase system security that way... I'd certainly wanna know what the hell these programs are doing. :|
Anyway, thanks for the warning. I don't use FireFox, or any other Mozialla browser for that matter, but at least I won`t start doing so at this moment. ;)

Ben

[Lance]

.
i've successfully used TinyPersonalFirewall for a couple of years, a free version 2.0.15

i've used several builds of Mozilla and phoenixfirebirdfirefox; while clean separate installations of a new version are not possible, i had at least never suffered anything like this. 0.9 rc made it impossible to use 0.8 at all. once i got back the OS and deleted the folder of 0.9, 0.8 then functioned again normally. the problem is that firefox and its predecessors all use a common file that hold 'profile' chrome data and extensions; often incompatibility between builds causes crashes or non-startups when attempting to use the old version, as anything done to the new one affects the old as well. stupid way to do things; it should always allow independent installs as Opera does

[note: the installer file download of 0.8 was about 6.3 megs, for 0.9 it was reduced to 4.8, the first time they've really delivered on their stated intent more than a year ago to reduce it below 5. it had dropped to 5.7 from the 6.7 or so of .5, but rose back again until this new build. the final of 0.9 is supposed to be released on Monday. the same stupid problem with the customise box being too small to show needed data and controls and being not resizable is still there. it has been there since 0.6.0]
.

[faB]

That's bad news Lance - the first version of the installer on nightlies would actually erase everything in the directory you placed it in. So if you chose d:, or even worse c: - the next thing you'd know was that it had deleted everything on that drive - unless it threw back an error while deleting a system file, you were screwed.

Damn, that's pretty bad :(

I used Mozilla, and now I use FireBird version 0.7. I tried 0.8 but it broke my preferred theme Luna XP (http://www.intraplanar.net/projects/luna/). Luna XP is great after a bit of customizing the toolbar I have it almost exactly like Internet Explorer.

Mozilla itself was too heavy imho, too slow to start up. So I'm using ThunderBird for the email instead.

Otherwise, you may wanna try Crazy Browser (http://www.crazybrowser.com/). It's entirely compatible with IE, it's basically a modified IE so IE lovers will feel at home.

I'll stick to FireBird because of this ad blocking extension (http://texturizer.net/firefox/adblock.html). There's also a plugin now that can be installed and you right click on ads to block their source, I havent tried that one. Modifying usercontent.css is easy but you have to locate it I think it's c:\document and settings\your-login-here\application data\phoenix\zprofiles\default\xyzxyz.slt\chrome\u sercontent.css

[G'Kyl]

Since there are a few people around here using FireBird: How does the PopUp-lock work? Does it block all Javascript PopUps or just the pages you haven't clicked deliberately, as does Opera?
Oh, and since it's been mentioned by faB, here's another IE-alternative, which also uses the original IE code: http://www.myie2.com/html_en/home.htm.

Ben

[faB]

It blocks just the pages you haven't clicked deliberately.

I rarely used the lock so I dont remember exactly but I used it maybe twice on one of those stupid commercial sites which wants to open a new window of a specific size, and are poorly coded so you click and nothing comes. In that case I think clicking the lock lets the window open.

ps: also I love it for those stupid sites that want to open their own window how you can just middle click and the website opens into a new tab :)

ps2: something I use a lot in FireBird is Find As You Type (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/typeaheadfind.html) Luv it!

[G'Kyl]

Find As You Type is an extremely cool feature indeed. Need that in Opera! :)

[Lance]

.
Opera already has find-as-you-type

Myie2 and Avant are superior IE shells to Crazy Browser. i've used all three of those. and more :)

modifying user CSS is easy [if you know what you're doing, which of course applies to all CSS work] in Opera. the address of user CSS is already visible in Opera preferences which allows you to modify your file in that location or to place it somewhere else or to select from any of a series of CSS templates you want to use. Opera also has a set of predefined CSSs which can be selected on-the-fly as you surf the web.

[G'Kyl]

Opera already has find-as-you-type

Whoops. ;-)
Since which version can opera do fayt?

[Lance]

.
at least since 7.23, maybe earlier. may have been there in 7.20, but i don't remember since i pretty much don't use it; i tend to use the find dialogue instead because of quick repeat search for other instances. newest releases 7.50 and 7.51 also have the now traditional ;) find as you type technique as well as the find dialogue. take your pick to fit your character and that of the situation. access of the box can be through keyboard shortcut or pop-up menus
.

[G'Kyl]

Thanks for the insight and advice.:) I just realized (and remembered) I already have version 7.50 :oops:, but I hardly ever look for what is new when downloading a new installment. By the way, one of the coolest new features in Opera 7 was the wand. I would never want to live without it anymore!

[faB]

of quick repeat search for other instan..

In FireBird you use F3 after the first succesful find to repeat the search , then it loops back up the page.

[Lance]

.
ah, yes, i forgot about that one, which on Opera will also bring up the original find dialogue as well as do repeats. FireFox actually has copied or attempted to copy many Opera features. tabbed browsing being one of the most copied by other browsers and shells. [Opera had multiple window-in-window browsing on version 1.0, though the first publicly available version was 2.1 ] also mouse gestures which Opera invented on version 5.10, but which others have never successfully imitated. their copies are weak and clumsy. Opera also has by far the most complete set of keyboard shortcuts; it's possible to use Opera almost completely without the use of a mouse. and maybe i shouldn't even say 'almost'.

[basks in fanboy glow]
.

[faB]

[basks in fanboy glow]

See that :) But Opera is not a free browser :-?

[G'Kyl]

It is. If you accept an add bar as small as any of the toolbars. Well, at least on a 1600x1200 desktop this is hardly an annoyance... :)

[Lance]

.
it is free to use forever. if you go fullscreen you don't even see the ad. if you use Proxomitron, only the space shows, or occasionally the plain Opera banner. if you elect to have it show google relevant ads, the adspace is a narrow strip. you can also cheat and not allow adverts at all if your ethics allow this.

but in any case, i've never understood that so many people are hung up on Opera not being free [particularly when it's the only browser truly worth using] when they will watch free ad-supported television all day long. and tv adverts are really loud, obtrusive, obnoxious and insulting to the intelligence.

they will spend money to buy a movie on DVD, watch it every once in a while and sooner or later lose interest, but they will be damned if they will spend money on something that gives them the best window to the world that they can have and will use every day of their lives.

end rant

me? emotional? hell, no :)
.

[infoxicated]

.[particularly when it's the only browser truly worth using]

In your humble opinion, of course... if we all used the same browser then what would be the point in Mozilla or Opera in the first place. Enjoy the diversity of personal preference, folks - Opera, seeing as it's on version seven point something, isn't *that* far ahead of firefox, for my money... or absence of it, as the case may be.

[Lance]

.
i am always humble about my own worth, but occasionally forget to be humble about my opinions. this is one case where my lack of humility about this opinion was justified by actual performance of the browsers. i was using firefox 0.8 just while ago to check on the latest news of firefox development and new extensions and themes, and wished to change image display settings. sheesh. what a pain. and when i did it, the browser on deciding that it must reload the page i was looking at, on texturizer.net, even though the change would not in any way affect what was already being shown, erased the page from view. after 30 seconds of blank, i returned to the previous page. the moz/firefox thing has been in development for more than two years and there is still no way to browse with images off and to selectively load an image. somehow when the first preview of netscape 6.0, the first Gecko rendering engine incarnation, became available, it no longer had netscape 4.08's ability to control images. it still doesn't. merely one example of several such shortcomings even compared to its much but often unjustly maligned predecessor. talk about arrogant pricks in charge of development. they are blind to anything outside the view inside the small sphere of their minds, while all the Gecko [mozilla] products stagger drunkenly at the edge of the highway unable to move ahead or to navigate with any sort of expertise. after four years of using Opera, i have become accustomed to, not spoiled by, excellence. no amount of humility on my part will make FireFox perform better. i could make excuses about human frailty forever and it would still not add one option to FireFox nor make it one whit closer to excellence. the reality is that it is a noble effort that goes wrong every day through the lack of vision and direction. there must be a goal beyond simply being open source. beyond css conformance. it should actually perform well.

i had high hopes for the FirebirdPhoenixFireFox project. my first view of it showed potential for excellence, for real usefulness. that potential has not been realised, i have used it on occasion for more than a year and a half, and followed its development, and watched it fall farther and farther behind Opera. the project shows no sign that it shall ever advance beyond its current level. the newest version even appears to regress. they're making it really hard for me to be humble about my opinion of it when every time i use it, it frustrates me by several obstructions due to lack of control features, and ancient bugs that are never addressed and corrected. it feels like Internet Explorer 5.0 did when i first used it in 1999. FireFox is fresher looking, prettier if that is the word, but it still feels antique, clumsy, primitive, and it just does not navigate the net with any sort of coordination and ease of control. it baulks me at every turn. what a terribly frustrating experience this whole Mozilla project has been. as i said, i've become used to excellence. not perfection, which does not exist, but excellence

my apologies for ranting, because it iS a rant, but i believe that everything i say in it is true
.

[infoxicated]

I'm sorry, Lance, but the last time I tried Opera it was version 7.02 and it was far - quite far, from "excellence".

It failed at fundemental levels to adhere to certain standards, and only served to make me wonder why it behaved the way it did rather than stagger back in awe at any other qualities the browser may or may not have.

I'll download the latest version right now and see if it's still dazed and confused over CSS values it should inherit... or still adding that annoying 3px of padding by default to block level elements if the value is un-initialised in the style sheet... maybe if it can finally get that right I can forget about every other browser on the planet... :-?

The suspense is killing me! ;)

EDIT-A-Mundo (as the Fonz would say): Wow.. what do you know, the inherit bug seems to be fixed, but the frickin' padding issue is still there... let me see.. do I tinker with every stylesheet on every site I've made to be spoiled with excellence, or do I just stick with Firefox, a browser currently tainted by the sucktacularly glacial progress of Mozilla development... :-?

It's a toughie, you know... and I don't even mind paying for Opera...

[Lance]

.
i'm sure it is. :D

i await the results with 'bated breath ;)

as i recall, padding in CSS was discussed in the beta forums and its behaviour modified, but i don't know whether or not recent modifications address your specific concern. really, one would think that Opera would be in the forefront of CSS development since their tech chief, Hakon Wium Lie, is one of the inventors and standards creators of CSS. but who knows what else goes on in the minds of these guys? maybe he wants a different standard, one that in his own mind is 'better', or perhaps non-conformance of the number of pixels was an oversight.

you're looking at it from the point of view of a web author while i am looking at it from the point of view of a web user. this alone can account for our different opinions. to me, data presented is what's important, style can be a beautiful extra, but it is an extra, and the amount of padding seems of little concern. if the exact response to a CSS padding instruction interferes with readability, i just change to one of the default user style sheets and i can read the information easily. when i designed my own websites, i was of course more concerned with presentation, but those sites were about art and artistic visual support of hopefully artistically interesting words, so i understand your point of view and how CSS interpretation affects both your professional work and your avocation as well. i felt i had to design so that the site looked exactly the same in three very different established browsers plus a fourth new one with a new rendering base. i'm not sure i would any longer feel the need for such exactness, but your profession requires you to have it.

it sure would be a lot easier for website designers if there were a true standard, but as long as even one powerful company desires to make itself the standard against the desires of others, there won't be one. possibly it is best that nothing should ever be totally agreed upon. even probably best. i don't think i could take the lack of variability. in any case, new ideas for what could and should be done come along so fast that even the W3C standard changes with enough frequency that sites would have to be rewritten for updates.

7.02. damn, that was a long time ago. probably early to mid 2003. holy sh_t, my sense of time has changed since i got on the net. it feels like a year is compressed into a week. anything from a year ago seems decades in the past.
i've probably tested 40 or more builds of Opera since then. there were 13 betas of version 7.20 alone, and a total of 7 technical previews, betas and crash test dummies before the final of 7.5 plus a security addition known as 7.51, the current public release. [not to mention them individually, but also all variations of .03, .10, .11, .21, .22, and .23, the finals of which all had official public releases]

Herakleitos, a philosopher and scientist of nature [natural scientist] in the Greek archaic period, is one of the first people to state the doctrine that nothing about life is stable, that change is the only 'constant'. while that has always been true, it has probably never changed as fast as it changes now. the internet is the most volatile and fastest changing of all of life's human creations. i don't think there will ever be a standard. we will always have to work our posteriors off to get something to work the same way in more than one application. the code can never be simple and pure. dammit.

man, these posts get longer, more prolix, and generalised every time. thank you for reading. if this is the only part you read, i understand. :)
.

[infoxicated]

I read every word you post - when there is so much triviality online, it's a privelage to have a discussion with someone who both cares and is objective. :)

Anyhow... as far as I can tell, the padding issue is one of assumptions. It's the same for margins, too - if you assume that the margins and padding is zero if the value has not been specified, then Opera will catch you out.

Opera seems to decide that... "ah - there has been no value specified for this parameter.. therefor I award it a few px!" :lol:

Maximum bastardo if you tend to keep your stylesheets short and sweet like I do. If I want to specify a value, I do so... otherwise I make the assumption that the value is un-altered from default. Perhaps it is my programming background.. uninitialised is false or zero, not a few px for the fun of it.

It means you get to specify a few things in a stylesheet... like


#header &#123;
font-family&#58; helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size&#58; 1em;
color&#58; #933;
&#125;


And then you would forget about it... you would have a font with no serif's and at the default browser size in a lovely red-y-browny color/our.

But with Opera it makes the following assumptions:


#header &#123;
font-family&#58; helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size&#58; 1em;
color&#58; #933;
&#91;b&#93;margin&#58; 5px;&#91;/b&#93;
&#91;b&#93;padding&#58; 5px;&#91;/b&#93;
&#125;


unless i had previously specified that both Margin and Padding were to be zero.

Pain in the ass, although in some small way I can actually see the point - in a lot of websites it would be desirable for there to be a slight margin / padding between the edges of the screen and the content. But for certain sites (infoxicated (http://www.infoxicated.com) and Wipeoutzone (http://www.wipeoutzone.com/) it has quite an effect if the margins and padding have not been specified.

This is a weird one... and it's actually one I'm prepared to live with, since to assume makes an ass out of me and u... or something... (this post has been sponsored by Ernest and Julio Gallo, and their mighty fine Columbard. Paul Masson played a bit part, I admit, but by then Ernest and Julio had worked their magic... but I digress...)

Anyhow, I wouldn't want to use the free version, and I wouldn't want to pay for software that's at *.5, mainly because you're going to end up paying again when the extra 0.5 comes along in the next version. So I guess I'm going to be stuck for the time being with the growing pains of the pubescent Firefox... :)

[Lance]

.
ah. the trick is to pay at .0 ;)
even so, i think it's going to be a considerable time before version 8.0 comes along. though it is true that they skipped 7.3 and 7.4, apparently because the code for panels and toolbar customisations and the default firstrun setup and the default skin were all changed. going from 6.0 to 7.0 required a completely new rendering engine to get the version number change. no telling how much it will take to get them to make an 8.0

since Opera ASA is a company that charges money for registration of each new whole integer upgrade, you'd think they'd be more greedy and would change basic version numbers faster. but not so far. x [fingers crossed]

i like columbard. been too long. but for real happy happy, i find that a mix of caffeine and alcohol is required, hence my liking for bourbon and coca-cola or rum and likewise. ten year old bourbon such as Old Forester in the standard grade. reserve the 20 year-old stuff for drinking it neat
.

[G'Kyl]

Infox: I hardly understand anything when it comes to html, but I remember having heard Opera simply interprets the code differently than other browsers, and that the only "standard" in interpreting html is how IE does it - due to its popoluarity - which in turn takes the guilt for strangly presented pages away from Opera. Can you comment on this argument?

Ben

[faB]

SLIGHTLY OUT OF TOPIC WARNING (tm)

By the way the code tags on this forum do not use a fixed font width.. could be useful for posting times.

[xEik]

Opera uses padding for the default gap between the start of the body and the actual content, while IE and Firefox use margin.

AFAIK such default gap appears in no spec and browsers initially put it there so that an unstyled document doesn't have text stuck to the window borders.

Why Opera chose to define that gap with a padding instead of a margin? I don't really know. Probable response is that they think this is closer to the spec of padding: that is if I say the body background-color is green, I expect the gap to be green, not the default html color (what a margin is supposed to do).

BTW, users who purchased licenses a few months before a major upgrade have usually been granted free upgrades. I know it happened for Windows and Mac for people moving from 6 to 7. I don't remember the time range they fixed to be entitled for a free upgrade, though. If you buy a license for a beta version you can even get a discount license that is also valid when the final version is released. Other discounts exist, like student ones etc.

[infoxicated]

Sweet - I'm going to pretend I'm a student. :D

Actually, that's a lie... if I can get used to it over the next few days then I'll buy it.

The fact that Phoenity is available for it means I have no excuse...

I've been Lancinated! :D :o

[xEik]

No comments on the body margin VS body padding thing?

I expected some discussion with an actual webdesigner. :lol:

My advice would be: if you are going to purchase a license and have some patience, wait for the next beta period and get the discount.

If you had a webdesign company, you could even get it for free
http://distribute.opera.com/donations/


I've been Lancinated! :D :o
You are not the only one. :roll:

[infoxicated]

No comments on the body margin VS body padding thing?
No.. no comment... other than the whole "invent a value for un-initialised variables" thing has been the sole reason I have never warmed to Opera.

From what I can remember it has always done it... it's a quick fix, but it's also just so out of whack with how you'd expect something to behave that it makes me wary of the product. The bahaviour of Firefox and IE seems so much more logical by comparison. Still, for all it's other merits, I guess this is a small-ish price to pay for "excellence". :)

[xEik]

The bahaviour of Firefox and IE seems so much more logical by comparison.

Are you talking about using margin instead of padding for the default body gap? According to spec the margin has the properties of the parent element, <html> in this case.
I repeat what I said before, if the gap is to have the body properties, it makes more sense to define the gap as a padding.

I do know, though, that IE behaviour has unfortunately become some kind of de facto standard. So...
/refrains from talking about broken box model de facto standard/

[Lance]

.
Rob, in some respects, there will be little to get used to in order to do basic surfing, but what is great about Opera may take longer than a few days before the sheer depth of what it can do for you begins to sink in. especially keyboard shortcuts. there are a ton of them. z and x are your friends. [back and forward in page history] 1 and 2 are, too. [back and forward between windows] that can also be done by holding the alternate mouse button and scrolling the wheel, in which case a list of all windows [not pages] pops up on screen so you can select the one you want with the wheel and display by letting go of the mouse button. + and - keys zoom the entire page, pictures, too. 6 puts zoom size back to 100 percent. there are dozens of things like that, and many ways to do several of the functions so that you can choose whichever way is most convenient and fastest at the time.
oops, and before i forget, the G key [graphics] which cycles between show images, do not show images, and show only already loaded images. it starts with whatever display state is current; the first time always being what you have set as default mode in the preferences.

the latest version actually makes customisation of toolbars a bit more complex than it used to be, but more unified. many [most] of the participants in Opera beta testing prefer this new method. i prefer it simpler and in context, but for me that has become a non-issue since i no longer use toolbars at all. nor panels, either. i have nothing showing on screen but the page and the outer Windows app frame for Opera. i do everything with the mouse, pop-up windows, and keyboard shortcuts. gives smoother faster flow of operations and does it within the context of the page instead of allowing myself to be distracted by all the needless visuals and searching for buttons to click that aren't in the webpage. only Opera would allow me to do this.

if you want to customise for your own working preferences, you can do pretty much anything with Opera. most things can be done with preferences settings within Opera while it's running. even modifying ini files for keyboard and mouse customising to make them do your own things if they're not already available in the default lists. but i like to go into the ini files directly to strip out, by 'commenting' with semi-colons, everything i don't use, and to re-arrange all menu items so the most frequently used [by me] are closest to the mouse cursor when the menu pops up.

you can go into preferences and use the controls to duplicate menu, toolbar, keyboard, and mouse ini files so as to leave the defaults alone, then customise the copies and select them as active in preferences. at any time, you can revert to default by reselecting the originals.

but i'm going way too deep into this. i just wanted to give a small peek into how far you can personalise this browser, far beyond anything that can be done with any other
.

[faB]

Getting caught up in those 0's and 1's are we ?

Breathing in . . . breathing out . . . :D

PS: I've long given up 'fandom' after seeing there's still a whopping 95% of clueless Internet Explorer users. Why bother? I guess IE works too. Works well enough for average joe. I'm an average joe, with some special tastes. I use FireBird. But if FireBird didnt exist, I'd use something else...

[Lance]

.
why bother? IE ''works'' for ''95 percent'' of everybody?
i don't want to believe that those who are ignorant of better things actually choose to be ignorant of them. i like to believe that once shown there is something better, that they will begin on their own to seek higher things rather than to let themselves be defeated and immobilised by the ordinary or the actively incompetent.

-----------

for those ''five percent'' who are truly alive instead of merely going through the motions, who explore instead of ignore, Opera promotes and makes possible greater throughput for time spent. for people who spend a lot of time online, it is either a way to do things faster so they can get more time off the computer or a way to just do more on the computer. whichever goal they have, it helps to achieve that. it is also an intellectual and hence emotional pleasure to use something good. i'm an unashamed fanboy for Opera and Irfanview, the two best pieces of software that i've ever seen. Noworyta is pretty cool, too. starkly efficient. and while i'm at it, the SciTE text editor, WinAmp 2.xx lite, WinMX, Proxomitron, AdAware, and TinyPersonalFirewall
.

[G'Kyl]

I don`t believe those 95 percent never got the chance to lay their hands on better programs. In fact, I often make the experience that when I try to convince some friend of mine of the advantages of something like Opera, they actually seem rather scared about having to learn all that new stuff which may seem promising but also requires to adopt to something new on a field they aren't exactely experts in. Simply put: For them IE is a working program - of a sort - so why make life difficult for themselves.

Ben

[infoxicated]

A lot of the blame for the IE situation lies at the door of wannabe web designers.

It was oh so easy for them to be lazy and just code for the browser used by the majority - it's the legacy of "Looks best in IE 5.0 at 800 by 600" that's still poisoning a lot of the web.

Fortunately things are changing, and more commercial sites are becoming standards compliant. However, the situation is very much like suggesting the way we drive cars could be slightly more efficient by using hybrid engines and slightly different controls: People are afraid of change at a very deep level, and it's harder for them to try something new unless it is forced on them.

This will happen with the next evolution of Windows, and that's when Opera and Firefox will need to bring their A game - the fact that users are going to have to change anyway will mean it's easier to offer them a choice.

I think to victimise IE 6 for the situation is wrong, though - the browser was very standards compliant when it was released a couple of years back. It's not the fault of IE6 that things have moved on while MS abandoned development of the product.

The box model problem that xEik mentioned has been well documented and discussed. However, the actual wording of the standards is horrendous in this situation - and I actually prefer Microsoft's solution to that of the W3C - when you state the size of a box, you're usually measuring border to border. If you're the W3C then you're stating the size of the content within the box, rather than the size of the box. Which asshole at the W3C thought that PoS up, I wonder? It's frickin' meaningless, and border to border is the way it should always have been if they didn't have their heads so far up their asses.

This is another reason that standards based design has taken so long to be supported and make its way into the mainstream - many of the standards were conjured up without any thought as to how they would work in the real world.

[AmishRobot]

Well Lance, with your recent evangelizing, I decided to give Opera another go recently. I used to be a hardcore Opera fan, but eventually (then) Phoenix won me over.

I spent a few days on v.7.50 & 7.51, and it was significantly faster than Firebird. I must say that I'm pretty impressed with how it's coming along. I only have a couple real complaints with it now. One is that the user interface has gotten to be absolutely horrific since 6. All the options are nice, but they really need to work on streamlining the default for intial impressions, and allowing features to be turned on later. Just looking at the screen that first came up gave me a headache, and it took me several minutes to make it useable. I also had a few popups slip by - which has yet to happen with firefox - but nothing major. My biggest issue was that it doesn't seem to support antialiased fonts in linux, and as a result text on most pages looks horrible. There may be a fix for this; I haven't really started looking yet.

Firefox 0.9 got released today though, and it's awesome. It's much faster than before, and with a few minor tweaks to the config file, it screams. Even faster than Opera. Moving from page to page on my dsl connection is now near-instantaneous. It's a beautiful thing. :) It also renders beautifully, with tiny fonts that remain perfectly legible on my 1600x1200 15" display. It is odd that you can't turn off images or change to different stylesheets on the fly, but that's what dsl and adblock are for. ;) Opera almost won me back over, but for now it remains my second backup behind firefox and konqueror.

[Lance]

.
i'm using today's .9 final of FF to post this. it is much improved over .8, but still falls far short of Opera's feature set. it is very basic, without the keyboard shortcuts and quick image control [ and as you say, the stylesheet changes on the fly], nor real mouse gestures. FF's easygesture extension is pretty lame compared to the real thing. but i am sure many people do not have the objection to these weaknesses that i do. i suppose it's partly that i've gotten so practiced at never using toolbar buttons to do anything; it's so much faster to use keyboard shortcuts, and to combine them with mouse clicks, gestures, the popping up of context menus. i stopped even displaying any toolbars or panels whatsoever. all i see is the webpage and the Windows frame. have i mentioned this before? ;) :D

finally, after an entire year, the FF devs fixed the customise box's formatting and control problem. yay

i agree with you about the O7.5x's default gui selection of things to display, as do many of the beta testers on the Opera forums. Opera has so many features that it is a problem to let newbies see and have direct visual access to them without scaring the poor little fellas. what do you leave visible, and what do you let them find in 'preferences'. they need a guided tour, perhaps, but as it's been noted, most people go exploring on their own and only look for help when they run into trouble. how many ever read the instructions before starting usage? i vote for a really simple set, and let them discover on their own, but i'm sure Opera wants people to know very clearly that their browser is different and more powerful. i don't see any optimum solution to that.

for me, FF 0.9 is still far inferior in actual throughput of work to Opera, though it is getting to be a nice basic surfer without the features that really give one POWER. ;)
i like the fresh look, though, and i installed several updated themes today with no problem. so far the browser is doing what functions they provided for without any breakdowns. i'll see what happens with more extensive testing. i wish FF devs and fans good luck. hope they add a lot more features and convenient controls. the lack of easy control access is the thing that really kills it for me.
btw, i've not seen a pop-up ever slip by Opera, but i'm on Windows instead of Linux, so there may be a different set of code at work.

[infoxicated]

One weird thing I'm noticing in opera is the default font size can vary wildly for different sites.

At www.fark.com the listings appear in very small font, unless I go into th config and tweak it to force it to a bigger size. I don't get this at all - it's just as weird as the page margins and paddings quirk.

Is there a smooth-scrolling extension for Opera too?

i've become quite accustomed to the gentle movement of the text in my firefox install, and the pages jerking up and down like crazy is quite harsh on the eyes in Opera.

So far, I'm not finding any reason for me to switch and pay - I don't know if I'll spend enough of my time using the added features, or at least, I don't think I'm enough of a Power User to warrant the change.

[xEik]

Is there a smooth-scrolling extension for Opera too?
Opera has no extensions.

You can still go to "Preferences" (Alt+P) then "Windows" and tick the "Smoooth scrolling" option. ;)

[Lance]

.
just what i was about to say, xEik. ;)
Rob, as a quick fix, hit the + key on the number pad; it will zoom the whole page bigger so you can see the small font. to go smaller again, hit the minus key. default zoom increments are 10 percent. to go instantly back to 100 percent, hit 6

btw, in FireFox 0.9, the WipeoutZone forums text is very tiny, and if images are turned off, the alt text is huge. no matter what i tell FF to do with the text sizes when forcing it to use my fonts and colours, it continues to use the author fonts.

fark's text is a bit smallish in FF 0.9 also
.

[infoxicated]

I'm not especially keen on the whole zooming thing - I prefer to see the page in context without all the headers and images ballooning up at the same time. This isn't an Opera issue, as such, it's just a personal preference. It's one of the things about PDF's that annoy me the most - Adobe insist on blowing up documents to nearly 200% by default most of the time, and it irks me muchly. :)

xEik - thanks for the tip - see you in approximately four hours when I've managed to get the menus / options set up at work in a similar way as I've managed at home and I'll tell you if it did the trick! :lol:

Bootnote : as an english speaking and writing person, is it responsible for me to misuse the language with words like "muchly"? I remember an old colleague calling a french lady in Toulouse who was the point of contact for a site we were working on. His first two lines consisted of the phrases "barking up the wrong tree" and "beside myself" - although this is hardly misuse of the language, the french lady had no idea what he meant and it took the rest of the conversation for him to explain himself! :)

[xEik]

Everyone giving Opera a try should at least skim throught his site.
http://tntluoma.com/opera/lover/7/
Although it's slightly biased in Opera's favour, it's also a quick and insightful read into some of its most useful features.

[G'Kyl]

Bootnote : as an english speaking and writing person, is it responsible for me to misuse the language with words like "muchly"? I remember an old colleague calling a french lady in Toulouse who was the point of contact for a site we were working on. His first two lines consisted of the phrases "barking up the wrong tree" and "beside myself" - although this is hardly misuse of the language, the french lady had no idea what he meant and it took the rest of the conversation for him to explain himself! :)

On the contrary, your concern about language misuse already states your ability of self-reflection on your linguistic heritage and is thus superior to most people's common behavior towards their mothertongue. In short: Don't worry. ;-) However sloppily phrased though, there's truth in that.

Ben

[Lance]

.
what i've always found zoom great for is examining pics in detail. often pics are shown too bloody small by people who use 800 x 600 on their own computers. my searching often takes me to sites that are made by hobbyists/enthusiasts who are not web professionals and who don't even have a high interest in the workings of the web or computers, and hence spend their money on their hobby, not on high resolution monitors, and spend their time on their hobby, too, instead of on learning about web design. so their sites can be difficult. every tool i can get my hands on for gleaning info and images from these sites is a welcome thing. the more tools the better
.

[infoxicated]

http://tntluoma.com/opera/lover/7/
Well, it took me until day 14 to find something that actually impressed me - the rest of the time the author seemed to be making a big song and dance about very little. Linked windows started me on a bit of a roll, though, so I stuck with it... or rather, I skimmed through the gushing fanboy parts and read the factual parts where he didn't come across like Billy Graham on the day of the second coming. :roll:

I managed to be unfazed by the e-mail facility (I want a browser for web browsing, not for e-mailing) and the wand thing that has already managed to annoy me, plus a few other odds and ends that fell squarely into the BFD category for me.

But there, at the foot of page 31, I was actually sold on this whole Opera idea... it was the small screen rendering that made me smile at its cleverness. (A smile for the first time since page 14, I might add.)

The only thing that concerns me about switching to Opera now is whether I'd turn into the kind of smug, grade A assclown that writes gushing fanboy **** like that guide! There's nothing that shouts elitist more than the way this guy comes across, so you'll have to forgive me if I just want the facts from now on, rather than 31 pages of almost complete spin.

Soon as I figure out how to import my bookmarks from firefox I'll have my credit card out... :)

[xEik]

I warned you that the guy is biased ;) but it's an easier read than an arid manual with every bit explained.

...and the wand thing that has already managed to annoy me, plus a few other odds and ends that fell squarely into the BFD category for me.
I don't use it either. One of the first things I do after a clean install Alt+P "Security" uncheck "Enable Wand"

Soon as I figure out how to import my bookmarks from firefox I'll have my credit card out... :)
My best bet would be using the File->Import->Netscape Bookmarks. It will allow you to use an html file. I'd guess Firefox uses the same system.

Last advice would be: don't be so fast with your credit card. Just take your time and make sure Opera is the browser for you. ;)

[infoxicated]

I'm rich - doesn't matter - all these Negcons I'm selling for a vast profit are keeping my bank balance very healthy!! ;)

It was a bit messy importing them, actually - managed to bundle a whole lot of folders under one sub folder. Sorted it out, though - things are looking good :)

I'll give it until the end of the week to see how I feel about it, I think, but be careful who you send that article link to - when I first read it the other night when Lance sent it to me it did nothing but put me right off. Propaganda like that just makes me feel smothered to the point where I want to be as far away from the subject in question as possible. :-?

[G'Kyl]

Now there's something I don't understand... ;)
The most bestest new feature, in terms of usability, I have ever seen in any browser during the last couple of years is that WAND thing. I love it as it makes browsing password protected pages so much easier! I admit, though, that I see the security risk it bears along.

Ben

[xEik]

...be careful who you send that article link to...
You might prefer Nontroppo's wiki. He isn't as much a fanboy as Tim Luoma (but you still might find him biased ;) ).
http://nontroppo.org/wiki/WhyOpera
Besides, if you are missing Mozilla's WebDevToolbar you can find one for Opera that is based in the original for Mozilla. It is really handy. Specially the context menu setup.
http://nontroppo.org/wiki/WebDevToolbar

[Lance]

.
i don't allow anything but me to remember passwords, so the wand gets turned off first thing.

i second the use of non-troppo's wiki. it isn't a unified guide the way 30days is, but it has a lot of tune-up and customise ideas that actually work.

i've found quite a few gushing fanboys in the Mozilla camp.

i was amused when i read the FF 0.9 helpfile on keyboard shortcuts at the blank spaces they left for Opera where Opera actually has shortcuts. some of which were copied by FF. tsk.
they should copy more of them, especially the ones for which FF has none. but my fanboyness is surfacing again. even though what i say about FF is true. ;)
.

[infoxicated]

xEik is probably going to rush in and tell me there's a check box buried in the menus somewhere, but does Opera have Find As You Type?

That's one thing from Firebird I really like - makes navigating while eating a sandwich really simple! :D

[Lance]

.
yes, it does. as i mentioned further up in this thread in response to G'Kyl, it's been in Opera at least since version 7.20 beta 1. it's active by default, so no preferences alteration is needed.
to activate, while cursor is on webpage, press . or /

a little box will pop up in the lower left corner of the screen to indicate that find as you type is active. if it finds nothing after a few seconds [you can set the delay in preferences], then the box drops off the screen, otherwise your target is highlighted.

it's a very cool feature; i first saw it in the CanonCat dedicated word processor back in the 80s. nifty little machine, that
.

[AmishRobot]

I tried to check out that site you linked to xEik, but I just couldn't take it. Not the gushing fanboy-ness, but the layout. No index, navigation was one page after the other until page 15, where the link went to page 30. I finally found out that page 14 linked to page 15-30, where a partial index finally showed up. I never did find what infox was talking about. What a mess.

Strange though, that a few pages in, I found myslef thinking, "man, I wish firefox had opera's fast forward feature so I could sift through this easier." :lol:

Lance: I have since switched from firefox's easy gestures to All-In-One gestures. It's set up very similar (if not identical) to opera's, as far as what gestures do what, and it's also got rocker gestures and wheel gestures. It's also got a neat little tracer you can turn on, which traces your path as you make the gesture. It's a nice bit of feedback without getting in the way. The only thing I'm missing now is getting back the option for wheel-clicking a link to open the new tab in the background instead of the foreground. I'm finding that to be very annoying.

[Lance]

.
i'm trying to get the damn' thing to open them in the foreground and it won't let me. didn't have that prob on 0.8

i'll try allinone ;) and see how it works
.

edit:
''The only thing I'm missing now is getting back the option for wheel-clicking a link to open the new tab in the background instead of the foreground''

doesn't that option near the bottom of advanced preferences for all-in-one work? or is it for something else? i just installed the extension, but have not really used it yet. just checking out
the options

'nother edit:
much more responsive and less picky about precise pointer placement than EasyGestures. i like the tracer. it tells me if i did what i thought i did, thus explaining why the gesture did or didn't work as i expected.
i will likely never use a high percentage of the gestures, but it has quite a good set
.

[AmishRobot]

.doesn't that option near the bottom of advanced preferences for all-in-one work? or is it for something else? i just installed the extension, but have not really used it yet. just checking out
the options
That's what I expected it to do, but it hasn't worked for me. If it's suppose to do something else, then I don't have a clue. What I ended up doing was setting down to open new tabs in the background, moving the new window command to up because it's a more difficult motion, and removing any gesture for new tabs in foreground. I'll never use that.

Still, I'd like to set it to the middle button (scroll wheel), as it the easiest command for the gesture I use the most.

[xEik]

Does Opera have Find As You Type?
Well, in fact it has two flavours of Find As You Type. One for any kind of text in the page (.) and one restricted for links (,).

You can see them by pressing Ctrl+b (it opens the keyboard help in the current page) and scrolling down until Text Keys->Find section.

[AmishRobot]

As for the inability to turn graphics on and off on the fly in firefox, I came across this suggestion in the mozillazine forums. I haven't tried it yet myself, so no guarantees.

The Show Image (http://showimage.mozdev.org/) extention allows you to force a reload of broken images. If you turn off all images by default, this extension should let you load individual images on demand. Not exactly the perfect solution, but could be a decent workaround. I agree that this functionality is a big deal for modem users. Next to mouse gestures, it was my favorite Opera feature when I first moved from IE.

I have no idea why that extention doesn't show up on firefox's extentions page.

[Lance]

.
it's probably an old one that hasn't been updated for 0.9
i'll look out for it and see what can be done

FF 1.1 must definitely include a user mode with a one-key toggle. so much easier to read stuff like online fiction. had to switch to Opera for that while ago. that incessant white glare that most websites insist on may work in fluorescent offices, but not in a dark living room

James, do you know of a way to use a mouse gesture or keyboard shortcut to pop up the context version of the FireFox main menu bar?

edit:
i notice that even though i previously had no trouble switching themes in FF 0.9, after i installed allinone and pasteandgo, no themes work properly any more except the one that was active at the time of the installation of the new extensions, and even it works only with opening the customise box to get the icons to actually show correctly
.

update:
after restoring default button arrangement and closing and restarting FF twice, it again allows correct theme switching.
.

[AmishRobot]

Looks like Microsoft is feeling the heat (http://news.com.com/Microsoft+appoints+a+new+IE+evangelist/2100-1032_3-5243583.html).

Lance: I'm not sure what you mean by the context version of the main menu bar. Could you be more specific?

[Lance]

.
oops. i do believe i left out a word. sorry about that. i mean the context menu version of the menu that is normally seen as the menu toolbar. on Opera, i disappear the menu bar, but replace the function of it by customising the mousegesture ini file and also the keyboard ini file so i can make the menu appear as a pop-up context menu by using either a custom mouse gesture or by pressing F10
.

[infoxicated]

Okay, I tried. I really tried - I've used nothing but Opera for the last week. I even used the mail features for that seemless internet experience.

I persevered, even when I found out ctrl+enter didn't give me the www. and .com either side of the word I'd typed in the address bar - something I've been making use of for five years in both IE and Firefox. I visited the community site to find a way of replicating the behaviour, and encountered some highly elitist points of view on the subject. The gist of it was that everything related to IE was rubbish and you shouldn't want to emulate it in Opera, especially since that particular keyboard shortcut was devoted to their beloved Wand. I did eventually find some isntructions for modifying the keyboard input shortcuts in an attempt to give me the behaviour, except it didn't work. Still, I was willing to keep forging ahead and learn to love Opera.

The space bar behaviour was the next thing that started to irk me. When I hold down space I want to scroll to the very bottom of the page and stay there, not have the browser figure out what the next page is going to be and take me there automatically. I decided that I could live with this too - I could just learn to have ninja style reflexes and let go of the space bar as the foot of the page appeared.

Then a mail disappeared from my inbox for no apparent reason. Some bizarre error made the e-mail (from xEik, no less) evaporate into thin air the moment I clicked to open it. It wasn't in the spam tray, or anywhere else. Luckily it was still on the server and I managed to fetch and reply to it with Outlook Express (I know, I know - I've been waiting for Thunderbird to reach maturity). Well, that put me right off the Opera mail feature. Up until that point I had been digging the fancy concept for mail handling, but I'm never going to dig my mail just disappearing. This is why browsers should be browsers - do one thing well and stay the hell away from word processing, site designing and mail handling. Didn't work for Netscape Navigator seven years ago and it doesn't work now.

By Tuesday this week I was six days into my Opera experience and... sadly, I was becoming more disgruntled by the day. I was having to re-train myself to do things I'd been doing with Firefox for less than a year, yet they'd become so intuitive. I felt that after all the effort of getting the toolbars and favourites set up the way I wanted, I should stick with it. Yes, that's how frustrating it had been to get my toolbars set up my way!

It's apparent that I'm obviously not on the same mental wavelength as whoever came up with the options and preferences system in Opera, as I found there were lots of small things that still bugged me, but I figured it was a matter of re-training the way I think rather than being the fault of the product. I don't like the fact that I couldn't delete a bookmark or edit its properties without going into the bookmark manager, but I could learn to do it the way the Opera boffins wanted me to eventually, I supposed. Still, every time I would right click to delete or change the properties and it opened the page I would find myself rolling my eyes and thinking "****! not again!".

However, on Wednesday it dawned on me that I was putting myself through a whole lot of hassle for very little gain. I was never going to use Mouse Gestures - I have buttons on my mouse for going backwards and forwards. Since I'd only really been impressed by two other features from that evangelism site, I decided I could live without them, and Opera. The only thing I'm actually going to miss is the beautiful Phoenity Redux theme - so soothing and so perfect, but so little reason to use a browser.

Lance and xEik, thanks for your time and pointers - it's much appreciated and I'll maybe be willing to give it another try when version 8 rolls around.

[Lance]

.
if it's incompatible with you, then it just is. when the new version [ 7.5x ] came out, i despised the new toolbar customisation method. i still do. i bypassed it by ceasing to use toolbars at all. i know the browser so damn well that i just use keyboard shortcuts and a mouse gesture or two to perform the functions. it's actually faster and more convenient than using toolbars. but i digress. when i complained about the extra work the new system required, it became evident that they were committed philosophically to the new unified code approach with a centralised all in one box so as not to confuse the newbies mechanism. i think it confuses the newbies anyway and makes it harder for the vets as well. but oddly enough, a lot of the other beta testers loved it. go figure. some of the people in the larger Opera community have elected to stay with the previous official release, 7.23, because they like the way it works better. it's still available from Opera themselves in the archive accessible from the down load page. most of the time i use it or 7.11b, the last release in the 7.1x series. but right now i'm at a friend's house using a Gateway notebook with 7.51 ad-supported but fullscreen so i don't see anything but the webpage, and all toolbars switched off even though i customised them anyway. also partly customised the menus. i'm finding that i'm actually very happy with 7.51 this way, so it seems i can use the latest version after all.

as a side note, when i dled AdAware and checked his computer for him, i found 72 items of spyware as new or modified registry keys and new files the spyware created to track his downloads and visited sites. all of these spyware goodies are connected to IE, just the perils of having one piece of software dominate the browser market too thoroughly. since i was using something else, my usage was not being tracked. more than half of those 72 items were files. it's healthier to have many applications as options for a type of work.

anyway, Rob, thanks for giving it a real tryout. most people who try something new drop it too soon to learn anything about it. sometimes, though, even when you do give something a longer trial, it only takes one or two things to turn you away from it. i find that this is true for me with FireFox, but more because of a couple of major [to me] feature lacks than irritation at how a feature works.

btw, Rob, thanks for reminding me about the spacebar being used as fast forward; it's even more convenient than using shift + x. great for going through google search results pages, among other things
.

[xEik]

I persevered, even when I found out ctrl+enter didn't give me the www. and .com either side of the word I'd typed in the address bar - something I've been making use of for five years in both IE and Firefox.
You have a valid point. Not because I feel the same (I never used the feature in IE or FF) but because if so many people ask for it, it would do no harm to give the option (as it eventually happened with middle-click for opening in the background).

I visited the community site to find a way of replicating the behaviour, and encountered some highly elitist points of view on the subject.
I think every "alternative" browser community is elitist. Many of their members fell they have to support their browser not to let it disappear in its fight against IE monopoly. :-?

The space bar behaviour was the next thing that started to irk me. When I hold down space I want to scroll to the very bottom of the page and stay there, not have the browser figure out what the next page is going to be and take me there automatically. I decided that I could live with this too - I could just learn to have ninja style reflexes and let go of the space bar as the foot of the page appeared.
This one was easy to fix. Preferences->Mouse and Keyboard->Edit...(for keyboard setup)->type space in quick find->delete "space" entry in "Application". :D
The usual conversion process goes through a period of "This is bugging me" questions.

Then a mail disappeared from my inbox for no apparent reason. Some bizarre error made the e-mail (from xEik, no less) evaporate into thin air the moment I clicked to open it. It wasn't in the spam tray, or anywhere else. Luckily it was still on the server and I managed to fetch and reply to it with Outlook Express (I know, I know - I've been waiting for Thunderbird to reach maturity). Well, that put me right off the Opera mail feature. Up until that point I had been digging the fancy concept for mail handling, but I'm never going to dig my mail just disappearing. This is why browsers should be browsers - do one thing well and stay the hell away from word processing, site designing and mail handling. Didn't work for Netscape Navigator seven years ago and it doesn't work now.
The mail client is tricky. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who still doesn't have Opera as his browser of choice. I gave up on it once since I didn't feel comfortable with it. My second try (after some nasty Outlook Express autoexecution of a script) was more successful but only after I took the time to learn how it works (yes you do have to learn how it works, it's not easy because it's uses not the usual behaviour) and even then I was running Outlook Express and Operamail in parallel for a month just to play with all the options of the later.
Ah, and the import feature is pants and it has been since 7.0.

I don't like the fact that I couldn't delete a bookmark or edit its properties without going into the bookmark manager, but I could learn to do it the way the Opera boffins wanted me to eventually, I supposed. Still, every time I would right click to delete or change the properties and it opened the page I would find myself rolling my eyes and thinking "****! not again!".
You mean from the bookmarks option in the main menu? Still I can't reproduce the right-click and open behaviour anywhere. :-?

Lance and xEik, thanks for your time and pointers - it's much appreciated and I'll maybe be willing to give it another try when version 8 rolls around.
Well, one has some responsibility after recommending a product. I'm always willing to help those who decide to give Opera a try. Because this is not about using Opera, this is about being free to use the browser you choose. I'm too tired of webmasters who just care for IE and Netsacpe (that is Gecko). I want to be able to get the most of the web no matter if I use Lynx or Safari.

On a side note, that's why I told you not to be so fast with your credit card. When I used O6, it was not for me. O7 was. Maybe O8 will be for you. :)

[infoxicated]

:lol:

I e-mailed Disco Stu (I imagine that's not his real name) who modified the Phoenity theme to make it Phoenity Redux, asking him if he'd do a Firefox version and he replied to me at the weekend.

Sadly he has no plans to, since he doesn't use it, but he did suggest ways of modifying the default Phoenity theme to make it look the same, which I think I'll try.

He also asked why I had given up on Opera for the time being - I guess it must be hard for converts to see why anyone would turn back, but with the amount of alarm bells that began ringing for me I wasn't comfortable making the change. Maybe next time. :)

[Wiseman]

Not sure if someone has posted this before, but:

http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3374931

Even more ammunition for us pro Firefox/Opera people. ;)

[Lance]

.
:) yep, the Opera forums have been mildly abuzz about this one for a few days. Opera fans and many other security conscious folk have been b*******g about active-x for years. nice to see the u.s. gov noticed now. the thing of it is that active-x was designed intentionally to give outsiders control over your own computer. not really intended for private hackers, of course, but for corporate ones, commercial interests, all for good ol' mercantilism.

in addition to changing appropriate IE settings and using a different browser, i would also recommend renaming the IE execute file. this prevents the merchants from delivering 'enhanced user content' to all us lucky users.

and don't forget to search the registry for the CLSID numbers for all those lovely little toolbars. overkill, perhaps, but.... no, definitely not overkill. total extermination is best
.

[faB]

No problem, infoxicated, Firefox 0.9 features, among other things :



A new browser migration tool, allowing you to easily switch to Firefox from IE or Opera


ROFL

edit: BTW, one thing I hate in Firefox 0.8-0.9 is that there is apparently NO way to disable the download manager :(

[infoxicated]

I'm not using 0.9 yet - I'll upgrade when Phoenity is upgraded... and when 0.9 isn't so dodgy.

Incidentally, Fab - you have post on the way.... :)

[faB]

Yessssssssssss :P

0.9 dodgy? hmm, I have 0.9.1 mind. Only used it for a day.

[Lance]

.
0.9.1 is said to be more dodgy than the nightlies. i've stayed away from it, and will probably wait for 1.0
.

[Lance]

.
about that Internet Explorer security problem....
well i happened to have a little 2 gig harddrive lying about, sooooo..... i put 98SE on it and used 98lite to make it smaller. this included removing both IE and Outlook Express, the two primary sources of internet insecurity. i am writing to you while using that little IE-free 2 gig drive right now. i still have 1.53 gigabytes free even though i have the operating system, four browsers, Compuserve 7, a music and videoplayer [winamp, not WMP], two spyware detection and removal programs, an image viewer, a firewall program, a file sharing program, a registry cleaner, Adobe Acrobat reader, a third party text/html editor, and a zipper-unzipper program.

plenty of room left for other applications, toys, and pics, saved webpages, etc. i would want more than two gigs for my main center of web activity, but it's surprising how much can be done on a drive that's only a twentieth the size of my usual one. it's a pretty nifty feeling to be operating so efficiently [by our current standards].

everything is operating very crisply and quickly with no snags except that when i start up Compuserve it says that it couldn't load a component it uses. this would presumably be Internet Explorer or a chunk thereof since when you browse from within Compuserve it uses IE as the browser. i always minimise Compuserve and fire up Opera. so far over the course of the last several hours, the lack of IE has not limited Compuserve's functions for me, nor caused any problem whatsoever in internet access or internal operating system functioning. maybe i should do this on my main harddrive as well
.

[yuusen]

—
ahem (http://slashdot.org/articles/04/07/02/1441242.shtml?tid=103&tid=113&tid=126&tid=172&tid=95&tid=99)
—
¥

[faB]

Well, Lance, I had the Workbench and many applications running on a 20 MB harddrive on my Amiga back then, hehe.

[Lance]

.
hehe

ahem, ''[by our current standards].''
20 megs was sooo 1984. :)
[the Amiga's most extreme colour performance was 4096 on screen AT ONE TIME. gasp!!!
what a weird method they used to get them, too.
i seem to recall that Amiga was the first multi-tasking operating system on a home computer. well, on any desktop, actually, whether office, home, or whatever. if you wanted to get maximum resolution on the desktop [640 x 480], you had to settle for 16 colours. oh, how i desperately wanted one of those magnificent machines.
and they were magnificent.]

things were of necessity more efficient back then. i'd like to see a bit more efficiency now. i've removed more than three quarters of the original installation of windows and bundled uselessware that my original Hewlett-Packard disc put on here. about 600 megs was the Windows 98SE OS with drivers, and the other 400 megs was unnecessary 'added value' add-ons that i never used.

[Bob Todd]

Got a Firefox question. When I have the bookmarks sidebar open, some of the standard file icons are replaced by nifty little site-specific ones. I presume these are specified by the webmasters? If so, how is that done?

[infoxicated]

It's called a favicon - Vinny explains further here:

http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=550

[xEik]

It's already been a year since the Mozilla Foundation was created...
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2004/07/time_flies_when_1.html

A big thumbs up to them. :D

[Bob Todd]

I really like Firefox, but it doesn't support custom scrollbars (part of style tags). I'm working on a website with an online friend and it looks fine in IE, but in Firefox it displays scrollbars in the Windows default colours instead of the nice ones we put in to fit the site's design, so it looks like arse. Is there a way to change this?

[infoxicated]

Changing the colour of scrollbars is a big usability/accessibility minefield, and it's not part of the W3C recommendations or any current standards. It's only an IE hack that allows you to do it, and isn't supported in any other browser.

Of course, there's a way to change your own browser's scrollbars via the userChrome.css file in Firefox, but that will only affect you.

I'm not claiming to be an expert on the subject or anything, but any design that goes as far as changing your browser's default colour scheme has outstepped the boundaries of being a website design. It's like a tv show that changes the colour of your tv and your living room, for example - I'm sure they'd do it if they could get away with it, but would you really want them to do it?

[Bob Todd]

Yes, I would want them to do that! That would be bastard-cool. The different-coloured scrollbar is only there when one is on the site; any other windows will have normal scrollbars. And the default ones really do look like arse; they don't fit the site's design at all. The scrollbar at the side of the screen isn't important; nobody looks at that anyway. But the site has a small window in which the content appears when the links are clicked, and it's these scrollbars which are affected. The default ones are too conspicuous. I may just change the site's design, but I'm a little reluctant to after I spent ages pissing around with framesets trying to make it look nice.

[Lance]

.
actually, IE is not the only one to support 'styled' scrollbars. Opera gives you a choice to allow it or not via a checkbox in the preferences menus.

_____

speaking of Opera, the new version 7.53 became available on their servers yesterday, although there was no announcement nor release notes at the time. i've not been to their forums yet today [just woke up], but it may be official by now
.

[faB]

Yes they (colored scrollbars) don't work in Firefox and while I was working on a website I also was buggered by it. But... I do agree that it's best to avoid it altogether.

As for 'favicons' FireFox does show em in the bookmarks, BUT it never remembers them :(

I thought that favicons were IE spefici, and not a W3C standard, and yet FireFox displays them so I'm puzzled.

But that's also what made me switch to FireFox vs Mozilla. Where Mozilla is 100% standard compliant, FireFox is compliant and at the same time seems more compatible with the way websites show in Internet Exploder. :)

[Lance]

.
Opera stores the favicons in a folder in its own directory. and does not lose them. i wonder if there's any browser that dOesn't show favicons
.

[xEik]

Ladies and gentlemen, Firefox 1.0 has been officially released!

Start your downloads!

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

[Lance]

.
yeah, i tried it out yesterday, but there is virtually no significant difference between it and 0.9; it's been mostly bugfixes since then, and there have been several complaints in the firstresponse thread at Mozillazine that there are a number of bugs that have still not been cured even including at least one that has been there for a year.

this release is considered to be a major victory by the opensource fans, and i applaud Mozilla's success in getting a complex piece of software off the ground. i wish they had been able to continue the relatively fast pace of innovative development it had in its early stages when it was known as Phoenix. i think it could have been released as 1.0 at least as early as the version called 0.8, maybe even 0.7, but at last they've made it official.

i won't criticise the final product at the moment, but suffice it to say that i'm using Opera. [currently splitting my time between the most recent official release, 7.54, and testing 7.6 technical preview 2.]
.

[xEik]

However, I'm sure that more people will decide to give it a try now that it is out of beta phase. No matter if the program is almost equal to 0.8, 0.9 or 1.0PR

[Lance]

.
yes, many people would wait for the ''final'' before trying it. Mozilla has been so very afraid of going final with something not sufficiently debugged that they went to the absurd release of zero point ten after two one point zero release candidates, then followed zero point ten with yet another release candidate. but finally it's here. let the real test begin
.

[AmishRobot]

Lance, thought you might be interested in the Firefox extention "Image-Show-Hide". It allows you to toggle images via a button on the toolbar or using shift-B. It's the extension you've been waiting for! ;)

I've just now tried the 1.0 version. It does seem remarkably similar, though I'll say the installation process is infintely better. BTW, the FoxyTunes extension also rocks quite a bit.

It's about time I checked out the latest version of Opera. I use it for a few sites (mostly popcap.com), but unless they've fixed the font aliasing for linux, I can't use it much. Even wipeoutzone is painful to read.

[Lance]

.
wait a bit on that Opera download. the latest version 7.6p3 came out today, but this time for windows only. the Linux version will probably appear soon. and p3 is much better than p2. the rendering engine has been tweaked, the customise dialog has been simplified, new keyboard shortcuts for full preferences and customise have been added, a customisable modified startbar that automatically drops down from the address field is actually truly useful. and it can be switched off if you don't like it. wonder of wonders, i've left it on, even though i normally operate without any toolbars.

i've no idea of Linux-specific issues, however. sorry i can't inform

shift-b? yikes, yet another two-keystroke shortcut. what do the FireFox developers and fans have against single-stroke shortcuts? so i have to choose between that and another spacetaking button? oh, well. at this point in FireFox development, i'm sticking with Opera for my everyday browsing. for some reason, even though FireFox was innovative when it started as Phoenix, the browser design has become progressively less progressive since its lead developer went to Apple and created Safari.

thanks for the info about the extension, i'll get it, assuming it works with the 1.0 release, and experiment
.
edit: five minutes has passed; i got the image show extension [not the one you mentioned cos i didn't find it yet] and FF1.0 would not allow the installation to complete. said the extension was incompatible with FF1.0 even though on the extensions page it was described as being compatible with 0.9.3 and 1.0

this the second time that's happened when i tried installing an extension on 1.0 final. and so far i've only tried three. paste-and-go also did not work, but all-in-one mouse gestures did.

'nother edit: have you filed a bug report with Opera about the anti-aliasing problem? or at least mentioned it in the forums in the Linux platform section?

[Gonaka]

this is cool. im covering css et al in my course atm so all this talk (indeed this thread) about browsers css etc is really useful!! :D

[Lance]

.
the Linux preview 3 of Opera 7.6 is now available here:
http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/7.60-Preview-3/
do a fresh separate install rather than upgrade over a previous version since this is a tech preview/alpha
''

[kallemax]

Uhm...I haven't read through the whole topic, but I'm currently using Opera 7.54 registered edition and IE6 (only for checking my Gmail). Sometimes when I'm feeling nostalgic, I use Lynx a little.

[Lance]

.
hi, kallemax, welcome to the forums :)
i've never used Lynx yet because i couldn't find a binary that allowed me to do nothing more than install. i would have had to 'build' my own installation. that just wasn't going to happen. i can switch off images in Opera to get speed, and there are just too many sites that require Javascript now, which wasn't the case back in Lynx's heyday

give the new 7.6p3 version of Opera a try; it's a notable improvement in rendering speed and general usability over 7.54

i don't use IE for anything at all; i even renamed the exe file so that no other sneaky programs can find it and use it against me
.

[Lance]

.
James, i've tried two image control extensions from FF. my report on the latest versions:

the 'Image show-hide' extension was updated today, so i installed and tested. it does work, but requires that the page be manually reloaded after the button is toggled. in addition, it either loads all or none and gives no control over the loading of individual images, so although it does help some [much better than having to find image switching inside the webchoices submenu inside the tools menu], it doesn't do what i want, to be able to have images switched off in general and load only the ones that look like they might be worthwhile. so i tried another extension:

the 'Show Image' extension was updated on 18 Nov. it will now automatically install correctly in FF 1.0

i've tested it. as the extension author states, it will only work if the 'broken extension' icon is visible where the image is supposed to be. this might not be too bad, although several image positions do not show the icon, but there is a further problem; when 'show image' is selected from the page pop-up menu, nothing happens. if 'view image' is clicked, then the image is opened in its own new page within the tab, but when you go back to the webpage itself, the now loaded image will still not be shown in the webpage. as long as images are switched off, none can be shown IN the webpage at all, even after being loaded by the extension. this is a result of the FireFox and Mozilla method of handling images, which has been a feature of both of them since their earliest versions. it has always made them unusable for me. i've no idea why this choice of method was made by the Moz developers [who used to work for Netscape], since even the ancient Netscape 4.08 gave total control over images, but the Moz/FF way seems counterproductive to me. perhaps the developer[s] of the method always browse with broadband connections and with images switched on and thus do not have to live with the problems caused by the method. i don't have to live with it either as long as i don't use FireFox or Moz suite. back to Opera for me.

thanks for the suggestion, James; i wish the extensions had worked out and given me the functionality i want, but no go so far. maybe next time
.

edit: i changed ''broken extension'' to read ''broken image''. sorry about the original error.

[kallemax]

give the new 7.6p3 version of Opera a try; it's a notable improvement in rendering speed and general usability over 7.54

7.54 is the latest version in Norwegian, and I don't have any problems with it, so I'll stick to that for a while. When did you start using Opera, Lance? I started with it at version 2. :D

[Lance]

.
i started with 4.0b2, although i have 2.00 [in Norwegian, of course, the only version available]. i also have 2.12, 3.62, 4.02, and 21 other versions currently installed. most versions, including finals, tech previews, betas, language variations and such are merely currently stored on CDs, though all were installed at one time or another
.

[RamZes]

HM...Opera 8.01 nobody used? I advise, cool. Opera 8.01 works on win32 (there are versions, specially for win).

[Lance]

.
where did you get this ''Opera'' 8.01 for Windows?
according to Opera ASA, there is no such thing. if there were such a thing the first 'public' release file would be named ''o8.0tp1''. an internal alpha version of a prospective 8.0, would only be given to their official testers, the ''Elektrans''. so far there is no release through the Opera beta forums of anything beyond 7.6 technical preview 3. but the final has not been released yet, and that would happen before there was ever even a test version of 8.0 released.

the official Opera forums.currently contain a user wishlist thread of things the users would like to see in Opera 8 when it is created. possibly there is an internal build of a proposed 8.0, but nothing has even been rumoured on the forums, though i have seen a couple of people announce one as a joke.
.

[RamZes]

Oh...Excuse. I have mixed.

[Lance]

.
no problem.
and anyway, even though it may not be Opera, it may be something we should know about. :)
where can we get this 8.01 to try it?
.

[RamZes]

It was opera 6.01. I have mixed it with 8,01. just 6.01 works under win32.

[Lance]

.
ah, yes, Opera 6.01 was and is a very good browser. i used to use it a lot, and i still have it installed on my original harddrive, and still have its younger brother, 6.06 on this one. in a couple of ways, i like the 6.x series better than the 7.x series, but it's so easy to re-write the 7.x series ini files to get the pop-up menus, keyboard shortcuts, and mouse gestures exactly the way i want them. makes operations flow even faster than they already do with the standard arrangements.
.

[RamZes]

Lancer, you study or work?

[Lance]

.
nope. now you know why my post count is so absurdly high! :D
.

[RamZes]

I know you're moderator, it's all. Could you write more?

[Lance]

.
do you mean like more about me? well, the short version is that i'm 61 years old; i like videogames and am moderately good at one or two of them, i'm interested in mechanical engineering design, especially transport devices such as cars, ships, sailboats, motorcycles, aircraft, airships,etc. i am interested in visual art, music [like everybody else on the planet], archaeology, history, architecture, japanese and chinese culture and philosophy, blah blah blah, and i spend much of my day at my computer searching for data on these subjects and more. i work on very rare occasions for a few hours at a time, am financially poor as a result, but also as a result no longer suffer stress 'attacks' [otherwise known as ''the shakes'']. i am gay, single and likely to remain so. and i sure hope the people who love to put spyware and adware on people's computers are not reading all this free data about me!

there, that should do as an introduction
.

[RamZes]

arghhh... wow. Thanks. You are pretty good man.

[Lance]

.
both Opera and FireFox have new releases available. FireFox 1.01 is a security and bugfix release, several fixes in both categories. i didn't dl since i only use FF to check on FF news. i'm waiting instead for 1.1 final, supposedly at the end of March. Opera 8.0 beta 2 has several alterations in the GUI from beta 1 [and is very different from the last of the 7.xx series, including a revamped rendering engine, and voice control, and yet more changes in GUI aimed at simplifying the initial layout.] a couple of new site security indicators, some changes in keyboard shortcuts, some further speedup of the rendering engine beyond even the revamp in an earlier preview release, automatically implemented custom ID spoofing (for sites that browser sniff and feed different [and often inferior] code to non-IE browsers) while leaving your ID normal for all other sites. there are also a few more new features that don't affect me, so i don't remember what they are at the moment. sorry about that. i've installed and customised this newest version and am using it as my default browser, no problems so far.
.

[Asayyeah]

arghhh... wow. Thanks. You are pretty good man.
True at 1000% RamZes.
Lance you are like my 'Wipeout father of blood', it's always a great pleasure to read you and to learn more through that way.
You are our fount of knowledge, your best quality is your high respect for others and i love that .
Cheers Pal

[Lance]

.
yikes. how do i respond to such compliments? it's an honour to be respected by others. thanks to both of you for the kind remarks.

it's hard to know how to respond to praise; i usually feel embarassed by the attention and try to pretend that it isn't happening so i don't have to react at all. but that is perhaps uncivilised. my apologies to our Russian friend, RamZes for not acknowledging his earlier comment.
.

[G'Kyl]

I downloaded the Opera beta and am quite impressed so far. The program even seems to be a good bit faster than version 7. What I need to know is whether there is any chance I can transfer wand passwords to another Opera installation. I find it tiring adding all my logins and passwords just again.

Ben

[Lance]

.
i've never used any password tools, so i don't know if the Wand has a transfer method; it probably does, but i don't know it. i suppose you could always add the passwords as you visit each site, just the way you originally did. piece-by-piece like that is easy.

8.0 is much faster than 7.xx since the rendering engine was rewritten four test releases ago
.

[G'Kyl]

It's still amazing, since usually a "faster" engine means faster in comparison to what's possible with current high-end hardware. So I am always a bit sceptical about "faster programs". :)

Piece-by-piece insertion of passwords is what I wanted to avoid, but I knew you didn't use this feature. Thought it was worth a try anyway. :)

Ben

[Lance]

.
my small amount of program-writing experience taught me that optimisation of code can make radical improvements in speed of operation on any given machine. i was able in some cases to double or quadruple execution speed by improving or replacing standard sorting algorithms i had copied from published sources, and i was just an amateur; the Opera developers are real pros.
.

[xEik]

Opera released yesterday a beta of the coming Opera8 with complete native support for the SVG Tiny 1.1 profile

More info here http://svg.org/story/2005/3/16/152318/005

I bet it won't take long the Mozilla guys to finish their implementation to keep up with the Norwegians. :)

/me goes to download the latest version of Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/)

[Lance]

.
xEik, xEik. tsk, you're slipping; it was already available on the ftp two days ago. ;) i've been using it as my default browser since tuesday.
[end of bs oneupmanship] :D

i dislike the new preferences dialogue; it looks simpler initially, but is in fact more convoluted and inefficient to use, especially for the more experienced users, meaning anyone who's used the browser for more than one day. also, in its current developing state, some of the necessary settings options are no longer available. i customised my copy to have the old dialogue available. will probably go even further and make the previous version default instead of just available
.

[infoxicated]

How far away is 8?

[Lance]

.
possibly as early as the end of this month. there are two threads of development, one which may be held for 8.01 because they're developing a new imap section [current test version of that is 8preview5.1], and the other, definitely in the 8.0 release line, is in beta3, currently available for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris, but not yet for Mac, i think. there has been a bugfix in CSS, but i don't know if it addresses your objection to margin handling.

anyway, it looks to be coming soon. SVG rendering and voice activation and the new faster rendering engine will all be part of it. keyboard shortcuts have been partially changed, and the ''fit-to-width' option for pages, already available in previous test versions as a menu option, has been given the key combo Ctrl + F11, as well as changes to image display toggling keys.
.

[Axel]

hmmmm so what would you say guys, FF or Opera at the moment? I'm using FF, it's fantastic, but some sites don't work with it.

[Lance]

.
for me, Opera 7.11, 7.23, 7.6b3, or 8.0p5.1
for my purposes, FF1.0 is a clumsy slug for any purpose. i am on dial-up, and this affects my preferences to a high degree, but even if i had broadband i would be using a customised Opera almost exclusively
.

[infoxicated]

Interesting.

As I'm sure you will, pop a reminder on here when 8 flies, will you? :)

I'd be willing to take the Lance Opera Challenge again... it has been quite a while since I last gave it a go. I'd forgotten about the default margin stuff... must make sure all the sites I've done recently have 0 for default margins, just in case.

You'll be pleased to know that the reason I'm willing to give it another shot is that I've suffered two corrupted Firefox profiles in the space of a week. I cant think of any other programs where the developers suggest you back up all your profile and preference information because their software is prone to losing them. :roll:

It's starting to get on my tits, to be honest, and after reading a very disturbing article on the way the development of Firefox has gone recently, I don't see it sustaining the growth or the userbase it has come to enjoy over the last six months unless they start taking the problem more seriously.

[Axel]

yeah FF has become more prone to pop ups lately. TBH it should have been expected with the large popularity of the browser.

[Lance]

.
ah, profiles. i've always hated the way FF stores profiles in the Windows folder in 'application data' instead of storing the version profile independently in it's own directory. every time one installs a new version of the browser, it is all too likely that your extensions and skins will not work, and will have to be reinstalled or reactivated. PITA.

Axel brings up a recent weakness in the pop-up blocking. there also seem to be a few new security concerns.

to add to the dissatisfaction, the big Mozilla internet suite is being discontinued by MozDev at beta 1just before a final of 1.8 was to be released and when its version of Gecko and that of FF had been made identical. the Moz suite is now somewhat superior in a few respects to FF, though this will probably change with the hand-off of Moz to a just formed ad hoc committee with no resources. FF should therefore take the lead again over the suite. a good deal of noise has been made about this decision; i hope that the suite is continued by MozDev till 1.8 final. beta 2 just showed up in the last day or two even though beta 1 was supposed to be the last, so perhaps there is hope for this.
.

[infoxicated]

Never really cared for the Moz suite, to be honest, it was always very bloated in my experience. Firefox I like because it's small and, for some reason, I find it to be very fast indeed. The profile thing wouldn't suck if it worked reliably, actually - I save my profiles in a seperate directory from default, on a different partition of my hard drive.

Fliss and I both use Thunderbird with different profiles, mine catching the mail from infoxicated.com and wipeoutzone.com, and fliss' one catches her mail from flisscity.com quite reliably. We've had one instance of a corrupt profiles, but I managed to get them fixed. Still, it's quite obviously a similar system in place, and with each time that Firefox manages to forget all my trivial preferences, I'm concerned that one day Thunderbird will lose all my mail.

[Rapier Racer]

Corrupt profiles, is that when you try to launch the browser and all of a sudden you get the create default profile dialog box? I have to use IE until next restart when that happens

[Axel]

I'm happy to say, I have not encountered that problem. I looked into Opera and realised it had to types. A free version I think and a paid upgrade version. What do you get when you pay for it? The site is kinda confusing, thanks.

[G'Kyl]

Tststs, what you get with a license is right on top of the main page (www.opera.com). :-)

Ben

[xEik]

It must be said that the release of Opera 8 is not a tactic to make users pay for a new license.
Those who purchased O7 get an O8 license free of charge although upgrading between versions usally costed 15$.

Just to dispel version numbering suspicions. ;)

[Lance]

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Axel, Opera has only one version. if you pay, it shows no ad, if you don't, it does. apart from that, it is the same browser. all features are enabled whether free or paid
.

[infoxicated]

Do you know if any changes have been made to the Opera Bookmark Importing?

I've been trying to import my bookmarks from Firefox to 7.54 and it's not getting it right at all. :?

It's either missing out directories, or grouping links into the wrong folders, for some reason.

[Lance]

.
hm... i do know that the issue of importing bookmarks other than Opera bookmarks [which import instantly and perfectly] has been brought up recently as still problematic about 2 test releases ago for some people, but i don't know if the latest builds correct this. next time i go to the forum, i'll try to find out more about it
.

[Lance]

.
i've not found anything on the Opera forums about this yet, but here is what happens when i import bookmarks from FF 1.0:
i go to Opera's bookmark manager, click 'file', click 'netscape bookmarks'. when the Windows Explorer window pops up, i go to C drive [my main harddrive]>Windows folder>'Application data' folder>Mozilla folder>FireFox folder. there at the bottom of the list is the html file for the netscape formatted bookmarks. when i click on it, Opera 8.0b3 imports the whole lot into a 'Netscape' folder at the bottom of the Opera bookmark manager window. within that folder, the entire structure of the FF bookmarks is reproduced, now in Opera's adr format. if i want to integrate them with already established Opera bookmark folders then i'd have to edit them in the usual way that all Opera bookmarks are edited. i don't do this myself because i use FF so little that i tend to acquire almost all bookmarks while using Opera
..

[infoxicated]

I go through the same process, but for me I find that several directories are missing, plus each of the directories after the first one are placed in the first directory instead of at the same level.

Maybe I could try it with the 8 beta - couldn't find an obvious place to download it, though.

edit: scratch that, I found the link on the home page. :)

[Lance]

.
the following address is the page; select appropriate buttons from there:
http://www.opera.com/download/?ver=8.0b3
.

edit: i got here too soon or too late, depending on how one looks at it. :)

[infoxicated]

Ooh - that's much nicer.

Still borked my bookmarks, but at least it got all of them this time... it just kind of placed them in the second folder instead of the first. I've dragged them all out now, though, and customised the toolbars quite swiftly. I wonder if it's due to an improvement in that department or whether I just fluked out this time copared to my last attempt. :?

Oh no! I just realised that my Phoenity Redux theme is for version 7... turin shroud! (been wanting to use that one of yours for ages;) )

/ponders

/clicks

ooh... it seems to work with V8 anyway. Sweet. :D

...what? you mean I cant customise the search engines... hmmm... amish...

Ah well, I'll give it a whirl. :)

[Lance]

.
yes, you can customise the search engines, but i find that the easiest way to do it is to use an external program called opsed [OPera Search Editor], although the first time you do it, it costs more effort because you have to download the program cos you don't have it yet. ;)

most of the skins have not been updated yet to add the icons for all the new functions of 8.0, so for those new functions they will use the icons from the standard skin. that's why they're still labeled as being for 7
.

[infoxicated]

Cool - I'll need to get that, as I don't use Google, and I really cant lose my other quick search favourites like dictionary.com, imdb.com, amazon.co.uk and php.net. :)

Already I've noticed an imrovement on things with O8 - it's markedly faster than FF1.01 - smoother than a shaved seal, too. Either that or my broadband has accidentally been upgraded to a 1gb line when it went down briefly tonight. ;)

[Lance]

.
just imagine what a difference the rendering speed makes to me on dial-up connection!

btw, Amazon is already one of the default searches; just type the letter z and a space in the address field and then whatever you're searching for
.

[infoxicated]

Of course, but not Amazon.co.uk - the north american site isn't much use to me. :)

Well, it is, but only for checking out if it has a synopsis or a track listing when the UK site is bereft of them. Other than that it's easier for me just to use the one for this country. :)

[Lance]

.
shipping costs might conceivably be less for a.uk ;)
.

[infoxicated]

That's me all O'd up now.

Got everything transfered over - bookmarks, theme, preferences (so far - couple of niggly ones to get at), and I've paid for the browser, too, so no advertising for me.

I have high expectations, so hopefully I wont be let down. Not that I have any other browser to turn to, should that be the case! ;)

[xEik]

If something about the way the browser behaves is nagging you just ask in this thread. :)
People are usually surprised at how many different things can be configured to fit one's needs.
Besides, Lance and I are always eager to get more converts. ;)

[infoxicated]

So far it's all good - I got that Osed program and got all my search engines sorted out, so I'm digging it this time around. :)

[Rapier Racer]

Don't worry foxy if it does fail to meet your expectations you can always get IE 7 this summer :wink:

[infoxicated]

Over my festering corpse. :twisted:

[Lance]

.
YEEhah! i hope you'll be happy with it this time. if so, xEik and i will have saved you from the Swamp of Stinky Browsing.
and i second the offer of help. if there's anything you want to do with the browser that you can't find the optional switch or method for, just ask
.

[xEik]

Not that I have any other browser to turn to, should that be the case! ;)
You could become a Macsturbator and use Safari. :lol:
:P
No offence intended for Safari or Mac users. It's just that Foxy loves them so much. ;)

[Lance]

.
not official till tomorrow, but Opera 8.0 final was made available early today on multiple FTP sites. changelog will probably not show until tomorrow about the same time the official announcement occurs on the Opera homepage.

so far, i see no practical difference between the final and beta 3, except for a couple of options that have been restored to the new preferences menu. i still have to do customisation to restore my preferred keyboard shortcuts for image control and main menu bar hide/show.
.

[infoxicated]

I'll need to get that today - the beta has been freezing on me recently. Thanks for the heads up. :)

Update: Okay, got it... but is there a quick and easy way of getting all my prefs/wand data from 8 Beta into 8 without a lot of hassle?

[G'Kyl]

Last time I asked that question, no one knew how. And I haven't found a way to import my settings and passwords yet. :| I should probably write Opera a mail and ask. This is the the only thing that makes the Opera experience a little less exciting for me.

Ben

[Lance]

.
generally you just install the final over the previous version. make a backup of the folder just in case; but that's what the Opera forum regulars usually do when a final arrives. i never do, but i have time to individually customise everything. that way your preferences, emails, etc. will all be used by the updated program. you probably have to make sure that your custom toolbar, menu, mouse gesture, and keyboard set-ups are active by checking to see that they are highlighted in preferences dialog

edit: i was going to go to the Opera forums to get the addy of the changelog so you guys could check it out, but this is the unprecedented message they are showing on the forums [ http://my.opera.com/forums/ ]:

Thank you for the overwhelming response to download Opera 8!

Due to severe strain on our servers we have limited the content on this page to free up more bandwidth while we are working overtime to deal with all the requests.

You can download Opera 8 from one of these links:
Download Opera 8 for Windows (English version)
Download Opera 8 for Windows (other languages)
Download Opera 8 for Linux
Download Opera 8 for FreeBSD
Download Opera 8 for Solaris
Download Opera 8b for Mac

Thank you for keeping us busy! :-)

The Opera Team

Go to other content on opera.com »

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the ''Downloads'' do not show as links 'cos i just copied the text, but anyone who doesn't already have it can check the Opera front page for links. yesterday there were a lot of mirror sites listed in the beta testing forum, but right now that can't be accessed.

here's one that most people don't know about:
for Windows:
http://www.panix.com/opera/files/win/

you want the one that says: 800/

for a general list for many operating systems:
http://www.panix.com/opera/files/

.


.

[Lance]

.
an update: now that the download counter has stopped spinning so fast [reported by an Opera developer as 100 - 200 downloads per second before the crash. [dunno how many addys that's for], i could access the changelogs.

for 8.0 final relative to 8.0beta3:
http://www.opera.com/windows/changelogs/800/sincebeta.dml

for 8.0 relative to 7.54u2:
http://www.opera.com/windows/changelogs/800/
.

EDIT: WOAHHH!
the final version downloads forum avatars, buttons, and smilies about 3 or 4 times as fast as beta3 and all past versions of Opera or any other browser. what the hell did they do to this thing? i like it!
people on broadband may not notice this much, but i see a huge difference on both the WZ forums and the Opera forums. don't know if this is some kind of fluke occurrence, but it's been consistent over the last 24 hours.

[Axel]

Someone should sort out Lance for pimping Opera, we need someone to pimp firefox! I would love info on firefox since it's free :D

[Lance]

.
Opera is also free and can be customised so that you never see an advert.

btw, news from Mozillazine about a new development in FireFox:
''Windows and Linux builds of Firefox with spatial navigation are available from Doug's site. Spatial navigation may become a default accessibility feature in future releases of Firefox. Opera already has a spatial navigation feature.''

[yes, i am evil :) ]

[btw, this is the first time that i have seen anyone from the Mozilla/Firefox camp give credit to Opera for a feature that has been copied from them by the FF devs. i just wish they would copy even more of those features and implement them as well as Opera does. FF continues to improve, but isn't quick enough in several functions for me to use it for my normal browsing. nor is the GUI customisable enough. i like it better than i did several months ago, and still have hopes that the open source product will eventually equal Opera. but IMcurrentO it could take years, if ever, simply because Opera ASA is pretty much top of the heap amongst software companies in quality of development personnel and admins. MozDev would have no trouble at all beating MS even if MS were totally active in browser development, if for no other reason than that FF is developed for the user instead of for Bill Gates' profit; this makes a big difference in the nature of the product. Opera works for profit, too, but they are an underdog instead of an overdog, which requires a different strategy.]
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