Post Archive

› May 11, 2004

And the audience falls quiet as the curtains are drawn back

  • Reported by liorean

And the Opera starts. Opera 7.50, that is. Opera 7.50 Final is out now, on all desktop platforms. Go take it for a test ride - it's slimmer, faster, more usable, less cluttered, and more standards compliant than ever before. It's Mac version is in the process of getting that distinct Macintosh feeling while the Windows version should make every Windows XP user feel at home. With Google textual ads instead of those oh-so-large graphical ads the UI is close to as clean as it's opponents. Even if you're dead set on using Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, OmniWeb, Konqueror or Mozilla; take Opera on a testride before you close the door and lock behind you - you might take a liking for it.

A few resources that might be of service to you:

Comments

1. May 12, 2004 12:46 PM

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pedanto Posted…

That's "take a liking TO it", not "for it."

2. May 12, 2004 01:10 PM

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Nate Posted…

For several of our authors, English is not their native language, so let's give 'em a break - you obviously knew what he meant.

3. May 12, 2004 02:13 PM

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patrick h. lauke Posted…

and here i was hoping it would be the version with voiceXML support...ah well, that's probably something for version 8.0 i guess...

4. May 12, 2004 04:35 PM

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Andrew Dunning Posted…

Nate, you may want to make sure that all posts are edited before published. Errors like that really don’t reflect well on Web sites, regardless of the circumstances.

Anyway, Opera 7.5 is certainly an improvement — although it's still not nearly as fast as Safari or Mozilla, and still has a rather cluttered interface. Most annoyingly, I've noticed that it’ll show the page before the style sheet loads!

5. May 12, 2004 05:02 PM

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liorean Posted…

I would say that error is clearly a bagatelle, and that far worse errors have slipped here without comments.

Well, back to Opera. As for the speed, I'm surprised you find Safari and Mozilla faster. From my timing, Opera is the fastest browser when it comes to most kinds of scripting, closely followed by Mozilla with Safari, Internet Explorer and MSN clearly behind. As for page rendering Mozilla is slightly faster but Safari and Internet Explorer are both slower. As for Application loading Safari is a jump or two faster, but Firefox is multiple times slower. And finally for page loading (note the difference between page loading and page rendering) Opera is fastest of them all.

6. May 12, 2004 06:20 PM

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patrick h. lauke Posted…

you may want to make sure that all posts are edited before published

shouldn't that be "before being published"? ;)

7. May 13, 2004 02:28 AM

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Andreas Posted…

Opera 7.5 looks good and improved a lot compared to previous versions. Some font issues (that, if I am correct, appeared first in Opera 7) remain, though. …, ’, “, ”, ‡, ›, Japanese characters,... are all aliased, full-width (normal for Japanese, not for other characters) and positioned too high. (on a WinXP SP1 Japanese using the English version of Opera 7.5)

8. May 13, 2004 05:50 AM

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Michael Heilemann Posted…

You'd think he worked for them, as enthuciastic as he comes off ;)

9. May 13, 2004 10:48 AM

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obnoxious blog bug Posted…

Surely, you meant enthusiastic.

10. May 13, 2004 05:19 PM

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Michael Heilemann Posted…

Surely you meant to take into account my being Danish and thus having English as my second language?