Post Archive
› December 4, 2004
Netscape DevEdge and Opera update
Well, it seems like Netscape DevEdge is back. Thanks for that, AOL. Also, with a certain recent browser release out of the way, Mitchell will return to working on getting the DevEdge material and rights moved over to Mozilla Foundation.
In other news, Opera released the fourth preview release of Opera 7.60 yesterday. Mac is still missing, but both Linux and Windows versions are available. The browser is really shaping up, and I wouldn't be surprised if the final release for those platforms turns up shortly. Mac, on the other hand, seems to be quite another story. To quote Opera developer Eirik Stavem: ... and the showstopper list for Mac release is just growing.
On Windows, this newest release uses a new installer that they are having some trouble with. Read more on that on the Opera Beta Testing forum.
Comments
1. December 6, 2004 06:58 AM
2. December 6, 2004 09:31 AM
Jon Berg Posted…
Opera is all about the money. So until they see a big market for Mac they are not going to bother, anyway it is the handheld and cellphone market they really want to conquer.
3. December 6, 2004 03:39 PM
liorean Posted…
Serge: Yes, it certainly seems so. I really wish to see them moving the rights for that content over to the Mozilla Foundation. Then it'll at least be in the hands of people that care.
Jon: That's not the way it seems to me. They care quite a lot about Mac, and want to really get it right. The main problem I see with the 7.60 builds for Mac that they hand out to testers is a number of crashers and system inconsistencies, but except for that it's a fast, small and really capable browser. It doesn't have too much trouble at competing with any of the other Mac browsers at anything else than those issues: HIG compliance, de facto standards that are not in the HIG, and reliability/stability. To give you an example, every other browser on the Mac that supports tabbed browsing has new tabs on CMD+T and new windows on CMD+N. In Opera, CMD+N is a new tab or new window depending on user settings, and CMD+T is add to bookmarks, something the rest has on CMD+D. This makes it easy to migrate from Opera/Windows or Opera/Linux to Opera/Mac, but the larger number of Opera users on the Mac will probably be people that are migrating from other Mac browsers to Opera, not people that are migrating from Windows or Linux to Mac and retaining their browser.
As for the phone bias, have you noticed that the only phones or fringe desktop platforms that support Opera 7 are the Windows Mobile driven ones? The others all have to use the larger, older and inferior Opera 6 or Opera 5 versions. The Windows Mobile platform probably only support Opera 7 as a benefit of being Windows, anyway. No, the fact that Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and Mac all are synchronised with Windows is something I would rather interpret as a strong will from Opera to support all plausible Desktop platforms equally, independent of their size. Mac is suffering from other problems - mainly that the platform defines it's own conventions and doesn't just follow the Windows ones, which means that it needs a well crafted home tuned UI, and good UI has never been easy.
Serge K. Keller Posted…
Alas! It looks like DevEdge is offline again...